Who SEs Actually Work With
Real survey data on how often SEs collaborate with each function versus how often they think they should — and the gap isn't where instinct says it is.
Module 19 is about leading a deal team you don't manage, one deal at a time. This is the standing version of the same problem — the ongoing relationships with Product, Customer Success, Marketing and Engineering that exist whether or not there's an active deal, and that most SEs report wanting more of than they currently get. A survey of 400+ practising SEs measured both sides: how often the relationship actually happens today, and how often the same person thinks it should.
The data, in full
| Function | State | Rarely | Occasionally | Often | Constantly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales | Current | — | 4% | 16% | 80% |
| Ideal | 2% | 2% | 23% | 73% | |
| Product | Current | 5% | 29% | 48% | 18% |
| Ideal | — | 12% | 47% | 41% | |
| Customer Success | Current | 10% | 30% | 42% | 18% |
| Ideal | 4% | 22% | 50% | 24% | |
| Marketing | Current | 19% | 46% | 29% | 6% |
| Ideal | 9% | 40% | 39% | 12% | |
| Engineering | Current | 32% | 36% | 23% | 9% |
| Ideal | 12% | 48% | 25% | 15% |
Reading it
- Sales is already at its ideal. 96% "often or constantly," current and ideal alike. If you feel like Sales takes up too much of the week, that's a real capacity problem (see Module 15) — it isn't a collaboration‑frequency problem, because the frequency is already exactly where SEs themselves say it should be.
- Product and Marketing carry the largest proportional gaps. Product goes from 66% to 88% "often or constantly" between current and ideal; Marketing from 35% to 51%. Both are real, unmet demand for more field‑to‑function feedback, not manufactured wishlist items.
- Engineering's real gap isn't at the top, it's at the bottom. The desired shift for Engineering isn't mostly toward "constantly" (9% current → 15% ideal is a small move) — it's out of "rarely" (32% current → 12% ideal, the largest single swing in the whole table) and into "occasionally." SEs aren't asking to be in Engineering's daily standup; they're asking to stop being a stranger to it.
What to actually do with this
None of these relationships are yours to mandate — you have no more authority over Product's roadmap process than you do over the AE's commercial terms (Module 01). What you can do is supply the thing each function is actually short of: a structured, recurring feed of field intelligence to Product (a lightweight, dated log of "here's what came up on real calls this month," not a plea for a feature); a technical objection library handed to Marketing so their messaging doesn't fight what buyers actually ask; and, for Engineering specifically, showing up occasionally and predictably — a standing fifteen minutes, not a crisis escalation — so "rarely" stops being the default.