Under two percent of sales engineers say their team runs deals the same way as each other. Everyone else describes personal variation, individual approaches, or does not know how their colleagues work at all.
Almost nobody measured has said their team runs deals the same way. Fifty eight percent describe mostly personal variation on a loose shared approach. Twenty eight percent say everyone has their own approach entirely. Twelve percent say they do not know how their colleagues work, which is the answer worth sitting with.
Almost every organisation returned a flat zero on this question. Whatever else varies between these teams, this does not.
A team with no shared method cannot raise a doubt that carries weight, because there is no agreed test the deal failed. It cannot hand a deal between engineers without losing context. It cannot tell a new hire what good looks like except by pairing them with whoever is free.
It also cannot improve in a way anyone can see. If every engineer runs deals differently, a good quarter is attributable to people rather than to practice, and nothing survives their departure.
One engineer in eight answered that they have no idea how the person next to them runs a deal. These are people on the same team, selling the same product, who have never seen each other work.
Craft in this profession has historically multiplied by proximity: sitting in on a call, watching a demo, being corrected afterwards. Remote and distributed teams removed the proximity and very few replaced it with anything.
The benchmark is free and it stays free. Six questions, fifteen minutes, answered anonymously inside a meeting your team already has. You get a written read on your own numbers and where they sit against the field. There is nothing to install and nothing to buy.