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B2B buyers complete 80% of their journey before engaging with sales—researching vendors, comparing options, and forming opinions entirely outside your control. Yet only 20% of the buyer journey includes technical proof, which doesn't happen until the demo or POC stage. By the time they reach your demo, they've already built expectations that quickly erode if your technical proof doesn't meet them immediately.

This post explains how belief is the actual currency (and output) of presales engineers. Without belief, there is no deal. The rub? Belief only happens in environments.

Sales Engineers (SEs) are the most misunderstood role in technology because they uniquely operate as makers, sellers, and supporters—often simultaneously. Their ability to create belief depends on high-quality demo, POC, and lab environments, which are now demanded earlier and more frequently across the entire buyer journey. This rising internal demand has pushed SEs to the center of the revenue engine, stretching their capacity far beyond traditional AE ratios and team structures.

Misallocation is a common problem within presales engineering. We break down common tasks that SEs frequently contend with and summarize some key research findings that point to how oversubscribed SEs not only lose individual productivity, but also harm the productivity of individual sales counterparts. We finish with a discussion on something that we call "the build trap", which is far costlier than it seems on the surface.