Why most software vendors are broken?

As an enterprise software vendor, upstarts launching in new regions employ a standard go-to-market team structure. Such a team entails sales executives, pre-sales consultants, customer success reps, post sales architect, sales and presales management, support specialist, field marketing team, and sales ops team. Any company launching their product in Asia or any non-US region typically hires a sales director to begin with, at least this is the pattern I’m most familiar with. This MD/GM persona is tasked with setting up the new office, hire the roles to make the organisation a success in the new region and trusted with investment choices. Next up, they hire a few sales executives and sales engineers and eventually an assortment of roles that will help them kick goals and achieve their revenue goals.

These Executives are typically compensated with a 50–50 split, out of which 50% is base and 50 % is commission based salary component. Similarly, sales engineers are compensated with a 70–30 or a 80–20 split. At a successful sales organisation, a presales engineer is almost always under appreciated from a compensation point of view. Simultaneously, at a successful organisation where the field sales team is able to land grab tons of initial deals, both sales executives and engineers have to work extremely hard and round the clock to meet the customer demands and secure enough ACVs that meet the sales quotas. Now let’s look at the other side of the equation, pre-sales engineer deliver more presentations and customer-facing outcomes in comparison with an…