When every Sales Engineer runs their own process, even great teams bleed deals they should’ve won.

Ask any Head of Presales how their SEs are doing, and you’ll probably hear something like, “They’re slammed. They’re doing great. They’re figuring it out.” 

That’s the problem and the cost of that chaos is more measurable than most teams realize. Take a look at these few insights:

• According to McKinsey, teams that fail to operationalize best practices across roles lose up to 25% of potential productivity.

• Forrester found that presales inefficiencies are among the top 3 contributors to longer sales cycles in complex B2B deals.

• And in a recent G2 survey, 76% of revenue teams said their CRM data was too incomplete to support technical handoff or accurate forecasting.

When your SEs are left to improvise across tools, guesswork becomes your default operating model. That doesn’t just slow things down, it breaks deals before they ever get to close.

“Figuring it out,” deal by deal, Slack thread by Slack thread, doesn’t scale.But you already knew that. Which is probably why you’re here.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Those well-intentioned status updates and heroic recoveries? They hide real execution risk behind individual effort. 

When every Sales Engineer runs their own version of the POV, even elite teams start to suffer from the same silent killers:

• Zero consistency or visibility into where the deal actually stands

• SEs reinventing workflows that should be standardized, automated, and focused on selling

• Conflicting buyer narratives between AE and SE

• And tribal knowledge that vanishes the second someone goes on vacation, leaves the company, or gets promoted

Sound familiar?

What chaos actually looks like (you’ve seen this movie)

The AE drops a note in Slack to your SE:

“Hey, can you jump on this trial with me? They’re evaluating security and API stuff.”

They dig through your inbox. They hunt for the deck from last quarter’s similar eval.
Someone remembers a Notion doc with success criteria from a different deal.
The call gets scheduled. The SE shows up. And the first question from the buyer is:

“What’s the usual rollout process like here?”

There’s a pause, and oh shit sinking feeling. But your SE does what they always do, they most likely just wing it. The reality is that they’ve had to just be good at winging it. But deep down, you know as much as they do, this is not sustainable. 

There’s probably countless examples just like the familiar one above. The good news? This cycle is easier to break than you think. The same situation doesn’t have to happen again next week with a different buyer, AE and SE. This isn’t an SE talent problem. It’s also not something that SEs can fix without your support.

Key insight: Forrester reports that B2B companies with tightly aligned AE and SE teams achieve 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates.

Skill isn’t the issue. Chaotic execution is.

This isn’t a talent problem. Your SEs are smart. They solve problems. They make buyers feel safe and turn them into internal champions. They close gaps. But when they’re all running different plays, even good work looks chaotic. That all adds up. 

The hard truth is that you can't coach patterns if you can’t see them. And you can’t scale what you haven’t automated and or templatized.

What’s worse, you lose the ability to learn across the team. One SE builds a brilliant workaround for a security objection. Another runs a perfect evaluation with clear success criteria. A third creates a killer deck that unblocks procurement. But none of it compounds. Because none of it is visible, sharable, or repeatable. Insert the lingering chaos. 

When you zoom out, what you have isn’t a team, you have a loose collection of individual workflows that only succeed if the same person is on the next call.

That’s why the gap isn’t in skill. It’s in the absence of a system.

Key insight: According to McKinsey, organizations that institutionalize best practices across teams see up to a 25% improvement in productivity and win consistency.

Yet in most presales orgs, only a small fraction of processes are documented  and even fewer are executed consistently.

What SE leaders need: Deal Playbooks (not another manual processes)

You don’t fix execution chaos by writing a better SOP. You fix it by building infrastructure your team can operate inside of without slowing down. This isn’t about micromanaging your team. It’s about making winning easier to repeat at scale. 

For SE teams, that infrastructure is a deal playbook.

Not a Google Doc no one opens.No, not a 42-slide onboarding deck taking up space in a shared drive somewhere. A real playbook is a living system that captures how your best SEs think and operate and makes that accessible to everyone else on the team, without them needing to ask.

The best SEs in your org already know how to:

• Frame success criteria that actually tie to decision triggers

• Run POVs with clear scope, timeboxed timelines, and aligned stakeholders

• Preempt technical blockers before they show up late in legal or IT

• Equip AEs with the language and confidence to de-risk complexity in the sale

So to be clear, the problem isn’t that your team doesn’t know how to do this. It’s that there’s no repeatable path to get there.

So what happens? Everyone builds their own version from scratch. One SE over-documents. Another keeps it in their head. A third drops their notes in Slack and hopes someone copies the right part into Salesforce.

That’s not a system. That’s SE roulette.

And it comes at a cost:

• Deals drag longer because discovery didn’t surface technical constraints

• Evaluations stall because no one agreed on what “success” looked like

• Champions lose internal steam because they weren’t equipped to answer tough questions

If you’re leading a presales team and you can’t point to the exact steps your top performing SEs run inside a complex deal, you’re relying on talent instead of leverage.

And talent alone doesn’t scale.

Playbooks aren’t about restricting creativity. They’re about removing decision fatigue on the 80% of the motion that should be consistent, so your SEs can focus their skill on the 20% that’s unique to the deal. It’s the difference between a team that occasionally wins big and a team that consistently wins well. And if your current solution to SE enablement is more docs, more checklists, or more reminders to “update the CRM,” then what you have is not enablement. It is however making your SEs miserable, less effective, and less efficient.

Key insight: Gartner found that high-performing sales teams are 2.3x more likely to use structured sales playbooks tied to customer journey stages.

And no, your CRM is not where this should live.

We already wrote an article about this, if you want to read it’s here. But, let’s be honest. You’re not building deal momentum inside Salesforce. Your SEs not documenting POV rollouts in a pipeline stage comment, if you are… oof. 

CRMs are designed for forecast hygiene, not presales (or post-sales) execution.

They’re built to answer:

• “What’s the deal stage?”

• “When might it close?”

• “Who’s the buyer?”

SEs aren’t just forecasting outcomes. They’re building the actual path to get there.

That means tracking technical blockers, aligning on milestones, validating success criteria, managing stakeholder dynamics, and documenting what needs to happen after the sale to ensure the customer doesn’t churn. 

None of that lives naturally in a CRM.

Even when teams try to force it, custom fields, long-form notes, Salesforce comments,  it breaks. Because it’s not made for how SEs work. It’s not connected to the prep doc, the discovery call, the demo summary, or the POV kickoff. It doesn’t tell you the leader of your SE org how effective your team was in execution to get the technical-win to closed-won.

So what happens then?

• The most critical deal context gets scattered across Slack, Notion, and someone’s desktop

• Buyer updates go out late or not at all

• Post-sales gets handed a Google Drive folder and asked to figure it out

Eventually, when the renewal falters or the reference call goes sideways, no one can tell you what happened in the POV. Because the truth never made it into a unified system of record like Opine.

Don’t get us wrong, CRMs are a necessary reporting layer. But they’re just not a collaboration layer that presales and post-sales teams need. They weren’t designed to run deals and they weren’t built for the people doing the actual work.

That’s why the SE workspace needs to live outside the CRM. Not to replace it. But to support it with the operational context that actually drives deal velocity and post-sale outcomes. 

Why we built Opine to solve this

Opine is what happens when you deploy a real, unified workspace for AEs, SEs, and your post-sales team, not just another flimsy, half-baked workaround. Because that’s what most teams are working with right now. Patchwork systems that ask SEs to manage technical evaluations in Slack threads, Notion docs, outdated spreadsheets, and long-lost email chains. All while trying to build trust with the buyer, align internal teams, and hand off a clean plan to post-sales.

It doesn’t work. Not at scale. Not with real enterprise complexity.

We didn’t build Opine because the market needed more software. We built it because revenue teams needed actual infrastructure, something purpose-built for how complex B2B deals actually get done today.

Opine replaces the duct tape with a unified source of truth.For technical evaluations. For stakeholder alignment. For converting trust into closed-won revenue and making sure post-sale doesn’t drop the ball ensuring renewals are easier.

If your SE org is still running trials out of spreadsheets or siloed and broken systems, it’s not a process. It’s a risk. We built Opine so teams can finally operationalize what great looks like and run every deal like their best deal. Less chaos. More winning.

Case Study: 

Recently, JupiterOne switched from Homerun Presales to Opine. Within months of implementing Opine they started seeing unprecedented results. 

• 33% reduction in average sales cycles

• 20% increase in technical-win to closed-won deals

• 73% reduction in SEs required for meetings on closed-won renewals 

Read the whole case study, here. 

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