Tech companies have increasingly moved into enterprise sales, making the market more competitive and raising the bar for successfully closing deals. Enterprise-sized accounts in SaaS differ from engagements with smaller organizations – and often even from midmarket deals – with much more riding on the ability of your go-to-market (GTM) team to collaborate with customer success and technical sales support.
For hiring managers, this trend creates new challenges. You are no longer just filling a Sales Engineer role – you are building a support ecosystem that can handle deals from $250K to $10M+ and the intricacies that come with them. Understanding when and how to recruit for these coordinated teams is key to unlocking the next level of growth for your company. Drawing on insights from our brand new Enterprise Compensation Guide, this blog will dive further into
What is the Technical Support Team in Enterprise Sales?
The technical sales support trend represents a gradual evolution in how tech companies are approaching closing deals in a world that is no longer fully remote, but also still plugged into the flexibility of SaaS. Since the 2020 pandemic, however, most organizations have been much more selective about software investments, including enterprises that ostensibly have more cash to spare. This has created the need for a more multi-pronged approach to tackling both the needs and reservations of prospect stakeholders, involving multiple hands on deck to conceptualize, propose and validate a tailored solution that aligns with the challenges and objectives of each buyer.
This approach requires more than a single technical seller, instead relying on having an ecosystem in place that hits all the points needed to successfully close deals – and retain these accounts into the future. This enterprise sales support team most typically operates across three critical phases:
Pre-Sales Technical Validation:
Sales Engineers (SEs) partner closely with Enterprise Account Executives (EAEs) to provide technical credibility and validation. They conduct detailed product demonstrations, address technical objections, and build relationships with the customer’s technical stakeholders. This phase is crucial for establishing trust and demonstrating that your solution can integrate with the customer’s existing infrastructure.
Implementation and Project Scoping:
Solutions Architects (SAs) take center stage during this phase, designing tailored solutions that meet specific enterprise requirements. They create detailed implementation roadmaps, document project scope to prevent drift, and address technical challenges before they become deal-breakers. This role has become increasingly important as enterprise buyers seek to minimize implementation risk.
Post-Sales Success and Expansion:
Implementation Consultants ensure smooth deployment and onboarding, while Enterprise Customer Success Managers (ECSMs) focus on driving adoption and identifying expansion opportunities. Customer Success Engineers (CSEs) provide ongoing technical optimization, ensuring that the customer continues to derive value from their investment.
What makes this approach powerful is the coordination between these roles. Rather than working in silos, the technical sales and support teams collaborate both during and after the sales cycle, sharing insights and ensuring consistent presentation throughout. They work together to build a seamless experience from discovery to post-implementation, nurturing the relationship developed with stakeholders and points of contact on the user end.
When Do You Need to Hire a Technical Support Team for Enterprise Sales?
Recognizing when to build a technical support team is critical for hiring managers. Several market and internal indicators signal when it is the right time to invest in bringing on the right hires to scale your enterprise sales:
Market Indicators
If you are moving upmarket to enterprise clients with deal sizes exceeding $250,000, technical sales support becomes essential. Enterprise buyers often require detailed technical documentation, proof-of-concepts and comprehensive implementation plans before making purchasing decisions. When your sales cycles begin involving multiple technical validation stages, it is a strong indicator that individual technical roles are no longer sufficient.
Another key market indicator is declining win rates on technically complex deals. If your sales team is losing deals to competitors who can provide superior technical validation, it is time to build your technical sales support capabilities.
Internal Signals
When your Enterprise Account Executives struggle to answer product feature questions during the sales process, they need technical support. If implementation complexity is causing friction in deal closure, or if your customer success teams are overwhelmed by technical support needs, these are clear signs that coordinated technical support is needed.
Pay attention to expansion patterns as well. If you are expanding into new industries with specialized feature requirements, or if your product portfolio is growing to include multi-product solutions requiring integration knowledge, technical support teams become essential.
Competitive Pressures
In highly competitive enterprise deals where features and pricing may be similar across vendors, technical expertise becomes a key differentiator. Enterprise buyers are increasingly comparing not just what products can do, but how well vendors can support their implementation and ongoing success.
The Recruiting Challenge for Building Technical Support Teams
There are several key factors to keep in mind when hiring for the different roles that make up a well-rounded technical sales and customer success ecosystem, each of which often presents its own unique challenge:
- The right combo of skills is not common: Many technical sellers are unicorns because they have the right combination of skills every SaaS company needs today, bringing both product understanding and “soft skills” that are often equally needed to close deals in the current market. It gets even trickier trying to navigate requirements for each role in the typical sales support team, as different levels for either knowledge or skill set is expected of the various positions depending on the exact duties they fulfill for your sales motion.
- There is high competition for technical sales talent: The relative rarity of the skills needed to be a technical sales unicorn means that these candidates are inevitably in high demand across the market. Both early stage startups and established enterprises being publicly traded alike are often sourcing for these same roles. The only room to maneuver will typically be in the exact seller persona you need for your sales motion, though you will still likely have to outpace your closest competitors for this talent.
- You will spend more time looking for ALL team members: The other edge of the sword with building a technical sales and support team is that it is by definition a TEAM – there will always be multiple roles to fill. Even in streamlined organizations, you will still need to divide the selling, technical validation, implementation mapping and execution, and customer retention activities among as many of your team as possible or risk burnout. This will leave you in a challenging position as you source the right candidates in the right time frame.
These three points highlight the escalating challenge that appears when trying to recruit for your technical sales ecosystem when targeting enterprise accounts – you need all of the right people at the right time to scale successfully. Ironically, it can be incredibly difficult to make this a scalable recruitment process, with an uncomfortable amount of luck required to achieve this faster (and at all).
Most companies will turn to multiple methods to shorten the gap between their outreach capabilities and the time it takes to source right-fit candidates. However, these channels are often unreliable on their own and increasingly expensive the more you buy into them. Job boards and ads can be cheap but ineffective, referral programs can be effective but too limited in repeatable success, and outsourced recruiters can be expensive over time.
Scale Your Technical Sales Support with Betts Recruiting
Betts Recruiting combines the best of these different candidate sourcing to provide you with a truly scalable and cost-effective hiring model. Recruitment as a Service (RaaS) gives you access to unlimited hires via our Betts Connect platform, featuring one of the largest networks of pre-vetted GTM talent in the technology sector. RaaS also includes complementary support from our recruiters, who will guide you on best practices for sourcing your unicorn candidates for technical sales and customer success roles.
Most agencies and RPO (recruitment processing outsourcing) firms charge fees for each placement, and even referral networks and job boards can become costly at scale. RaaS lets you source and hire as many candidates as you need as part of your subscription, giving you the flexibility you need to build out your technical sales support team while remaining cost-effective for your budget.
Learn More About Recruitment as a Service with Betts
Whether you need to hire your first Sales Engineer or fill out your Solution Architect, Implementation Consultant and Enterprise Customer Success Manager teams, Betts Recruiting will help you find the right talent at scale. Leveraging Recruitment as a Service and Betts Connect, we will help you track down your technical sales unicorns faster and without breaking your hiring budget.
Contact Betts here to learn more about our RaaS model and see how we can help you scale up your technical sales team to match your enterprise sales motion and propel your revenue growth.