SE's - Sales or Services?

In software companies, should sales engineers report to the services organization or the sales organization? 

It can be a challenge to keep SE’s in-sync technically with the services teams.  Your services organization is what makes your company bloom from a political entity (pulling strings, making promises) into an industry leader.  They build the last-mile connections between what your company is offering and what the customer needs.  Ultimately, it is the services team that ensures that your customer enjoys a successful implementation, and that your company enjoys a referenceable customer.  The alignment between the SE and services organizations needs to be solid, trusting and synergistic.

If alignment with the services organization is essential, then alignment with the sales organization is critical.  SE’s should be part of the sales organization.  Period.  While a company has time to adjust priorities and fix problems in the post-sales world, these are luxuries you simply don’t have in pre-sales.  Your pre-sales mechanism has to be perfect.

If you’re sending product management folks out on sales calls, see my next post on sales engineering and product management.

If your technical support department is reporting to services, then look for a future post on why tech support should report to engineering.

If your IS department is reporting to your administration organization, then look for a future post on why IS should report to engineering.

Event planning – reports to marketing, right?  Wrong.  Marketing ‘admin’ people are the most inefficient position within an organization.  When marketing decides they want to do an event – send the budget and details to admin & let them handle the logistics so that marcom can focus on creating a kicking show…  More on this (maybe) in another post. 

Here’s my view on how organizations are best aligned within a software company:

Engineering
Development
QA
  Release Engineering
  Technical Documentation
Technical Support
Information Systems
Marketing
Product Management
Marketing Communications
Sales
Sales
Sales Engineering
Services
Administration
Finance
HR
Office Management
Event Planning
Facilities
  Shipping / Receiving
  Building Management