Asked in one or two words what would make them most effective, sales engineers answer discovery more often than anything else. Fewer than one answer in ten names a tool.
This is the only open question in the benchmark. There is no list to choose from and nothing steering the answer. People type one or two words and watch the room’s answers appear together.
What comes back is remarkably narrow. Discovery dominates, in every form: proper discovery, technical discovery, better discovery, lack of discovery, more discovery upfront. Around it sit qualification, consistency, strategy and alignment. Then a second cluster that is about standing rather than process: influence, authority, trust, partnership with the account executive.
What is almost entirely absent is the thing most budget gets spent on.
Fewer than one answer in ten names a tool, a platform or a piece of equipment. The handful that do are specific and mundane rather than strategic: a working laptop, a better demo environment. Nobody asks for a new category of software.
Headcount is rarer still. A few answers ask for time, which reads as capacity, but asking for time and asking for colleagues are different requests and the distinction matters when a leader is building a case.
That combination is worth sitting with. A profession asked, anonymously and with no prompting, what would make it more effective, does not answer with the things that are usually bought on its behalf.
Read this finding next to the entry point data and it stops being a wish list. Fifty nine percent of engineers enter a deal after discovery is already finished. They are asking for the one part of the process they usually arrive too late to influence.
So it is not a request for training in how to run discovery. Most of them know how. It is a request to be present when the questions that decide whether a deal is real are actually being asked.
The second cluster says the same thing in different words. Influence, authority and trust are not skills, they are positions. You cannot teach somebody into them.
Six fixed questions, put to a whole team at once inside a meeting they already hold. Fifteen minutes. Everyone answers at the same time from their phone, anonymously, and the distribution appears in front of the room as it fills.
This one is open text rather than multiple choice, one or two words, rendered as a word cloud so the team sees its own answers cluster in real time. That moment is usually the most useful fifteen seconds of the session.
This is a small number of organisations measured in depth rather than a large survey. It is not a representative sample of the profession and is not presented as one.
Ask the question before the budget cycle, not after. One open question, anonymously, to your own team. If the answers cluster the way they do here, a tooling line item is solving a problem your team did not name.
Then test whether the answer is actionable or structural. If the team asks for discovery, the fix is about when they enter deals, which is a decision somebody can make this week. If the team asks for influence and authority, the fix is about what happens to their judgment once they offer it, which is slower and more political.
Both are cheaper than software. Neither appears on a procurement list, which is probably why they go unaddressed for years.
Discovery, more than any other word. Qualification, influence, authority and consistency follow. Fewer than one answer in ten names a tool, and almost nobody asks for more people.
Rarely. Fewer than one in ten open text answers names a tool, a platform or a piece of equipment, even though the question is open and nothing steers them away from it.
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, including the word your own team types most.