Sharpen Your Edge: 5 Key Moves for Sales Engineers in 2025

When an elite athlete wants to improve their game, they break down every aspect of their performance—analyzing weaknesses, studying competitors’ game tape, and exploring new ways to train smarter. They don’t just rely on talent; they push harder, refine their strategy, and leverage the latest innovations to gain an edge.

Sales Engineering is no different. To stay at the top of your game, you need to evaluate where you can improve, learn from the best, and embrace new tools that make you faster, sharper, and more effective than your competition (even if your main competitor is your past performance). With a new year in full swing, now is the time to build your game plan for career development.

In B2B, as in sports, you have to evolve with the game or get left behind. The SE role is transforming faster than ever. Buyer expectations are shifting, technical sellers are taking on more responsibility, and AI is fundamentally changing how we work and what we sell. To stay ahead, we have to be proactive—experiment, adapt, and push the boundaries.

The 2025 State of Sales Engineering Report reveals how top SEs can embrace change and find new ways to drive impact. Based on those insights, here’s my five-part game plan to sharpen your skills and take your career to the next level.

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1. Make AI Your Teammate, Not Your Competition

Most SE teams are early adopters of AI but 89% haven’t seen a significant impact on efficiency or productivity yet. Part of this is due to being equipped with tools that lack domain expertise and knowledge of their products and sales process.

Don’t be discouraged. The SEs who succeed in 2025 will continue to experiment and innovate with AI, and the market will see more tools specifically built for technical sellers. 

Ways to use AI to your advantage:

• Use your company’s licensed AI tools where you can to track/analyze your performance data, identify themes across deals, and reduce administrative burdens where possible. 
• Be creative with the tools you have and look for innovative use cases.
• Use time saved with AI to prioritize professional development. 

As with all technology, the best SEs will use AI as a force multiplier, not a crutch. We will find new ways to enhance our knowledge and scale our efforts to create better outcomes for customers. 

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2. Train Your Sales Skills 

Especially with AI tools gaining technical expertise and proficiency, SEs will need to focus more on skills like storytelling, consulting, and negotiating to maximize the impact of customer-facing interactions. The State of Sales Engineering reveals most teams are strapped for time and resources for enablement, but these are a few resources I’ve found helpful to keep my skills sharp:

• Find community and make time to connect with others in the profession. I am passionate about WISE (Women in Solutions Excellence), a community dedicated to supporting and elevating women in technical sales. WISE provides mentorship, networking opportunities, and a platform for women to share their experiences and insights.
• Study your calls. Many teams have CI tools for call recording - you can use what you have to review your performance, with the help of tools like ChatGPT to identify patterns or areas of improvement. 

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3. Track Your Stats, Own Your Impact

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. The most successful SEs aren’t just running demos and answering technical questions—they’re using data to drive career progression. 

Unfortunately, the State of Sales Engineering reveals many teams lack insight into how SE efforts drive business outcomes. But, the good news is that there are metrics you can track as an individual to improve your performance and socialize your impact. 

These are the key metrics I’ve tracked to further my career:

• Technical win rate on deals where you’re attached 
• Average days to close
• Total revenue impacted
• Hours on cross-functional support (marketing, post-sales, etc) 

Track things like your technical win rate and total revenue impact will showcase your wins across the organization. Also, take time to note your average days to close and the hours you spend on cross-functional support. Those stats will change when you introduce AI agents to your GTM team, take note of the impact.

The SEs who track their performance don’t just feel valued—they can prove their value.

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4. Get Off the Sidelines of Sales Strategy

According to the report, SEs identify far more deal risk than AEs, but fewer than 30% of teams act on this by providing a technical forecast. Even if your org doesn’t roll a technical forecast up to the CRO, you can bring this mindset into your relationship with your AEs:

• Across your deals, keep track of the number one risk, whether technical or political, and review this with AEs on a regular basis. 
• Collaborate with sellers on protective next steps for at-risk deals and brainstorm how to backfill pipeline. 
• Develop playbooks to address product gaps or competitive threats. 

Don't wait for your AE to come to you - take initiative in strategy and planning so that you both hit quota. I haven’t worked with an AE yet who hasn’t valued these insights. 

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Final Thoughts: Take Control of Your Growth

Navigating career development as an SE is overwhelming. There’s no set playbook, no strict rules, for how you grow. And although that can feel intimidating, it’s equally empowering. 

The art and science of Sales Engineering is the universal athleticism of the tech industry. Being an expert SE makes you a swiss army knife across B2B disciplines. By embracing AI, sharpening your sales skills, focusing on measurable impact, and taking the initiative in your career, you’ll set yourself apart as a high-impact technical seller. 

The opportunities are there—are you ready to seize them?

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