This article establishes the research foundation for those discussions. It examines the breakdown of the PLG motion at enterprise scale, identifies the resulting capability gap, and outlines the requirements for a redesigned Solutions Architect organization.

Product-led growth represents a significant go-to-market innovation in enterprise software. Companies such as Atlassian, Zoom, Slack, HubSpot, Snowflake, Stripe, and Zendesk have established category leadership with notable speed and capital efficiency.

For example, Atlassian allocated approximately 19% of its revenue to sales and marketing at the time of its IPO, significantly lower than typical enterprise SaaS peers, while operating primarily through a product-led motion.

Bessemer’s analysis of PLG companies, including HashiCorp, reveals a consistent pattern: bottom-up PLG is critical for initial traction, but most organizations ultimately require a top-down enterprise sales approach to achieve $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and beyond. Many PLG companies surpass $100 million ARR by incorporating enterprise sales after reaching approximately $25 million ARR.

This pattern is intentional rather than coincidental. According to a 2022 Bain survey, approximately 61% of PLG companies establish formal enterprise sales teams as they near $50 million ARR, recognizing that the initial motion is insufficient for further scaling without redesign. Predictable warning signs include declining enterprise conversion rates, limited wallet share, a user base concentrated among individual contributors rather than economic buyers, and stagnant revenue growth within existing accounts.

The core issue is not product-led growth itself, but rather the assumption that a Solutions Architect organization designed for PLG can succeed in the enterprise context without significant redesign.

A Note on Terminology

Several terms used throughout this article are specific to the Architecting Presales framework and are not standard industry labels.

Fido SA is optimized for responsiveness and technical feature depth, but typically lacks deal control and business acumen needed for enterprise evaluations. In contrast, Challenger SA leads evaluations, defines success criteria, and bridges technical architecture with business outcomes. These SA archetypes, as defined in the Architecting Presales SA Archetype Assessment, exist on a spectrum rather than as binary categories.

SA Plus refers to the elevated enterprise SA motion defined by Architecting Presales, in which the SA and Account Executive operate as a pod with joint accountability for the full buying committee. It is not a title or a separate role. It is a standard of engagement.

Pod is used interchangeably with terms like “two-in-a-box,” “AE-SA team,” or “key account team,” depending on your organization’s language. The concept is the same: the AE and SA are co-owners of the deal, not a seller and a support function.

What Changes at Enterprise Scale

Many organizations misinterpret the PLG-to-enterprise transition failure as a product issue. By the time growth plateaus, the product is typically validated within target accounts. The primary constraint is the go-to-market motion, particularly within presales.

Three structural changes occur when enterprise buyers become involved, for which the PLG-era Solutions Architect organization is typically unprepared.

The buying committee expands in scope and complexity

In a PLG motion, the champion who found and adopted the product often has enough authority to expand its use within their team. Individual contributors, team leads, and department managers can make decisions within their own area.

At enterprise scale, that changes fast. The purchase becomes a company risk, not just a team decision. The buying group expands to include procurement, finance, legal, InfoSec, and multiple business leaders. Gartner estimates the average B2B buying committee at around 11 stakeholders, and large enterprise technology deals often involve more. TrustRadius research confirms that CFO approval is now standard for enterprise technology purchases. More than half of buying groups include VP-level or higher decision-makers.

These stakeholders typically have not used the product and possess distinct questions, risk thresholds, and definitions of success. The PLG-era Solutions Architect, accustomed to serving technical champions, is now required to engage a broader audience for which they were not originally prepared.

The focus of the conversation shifts from product capability to architecture and risk

The PLG SA motion is optimized around one question: can the product do what the customer needs? They run demos, answer technical questions, and ensure the experience meets the champion’s expectations.

In an enterprise evaluation, that question is table stakes. Decision-makers are asking something bigger. They want to know whether the vendor understands their business well enough to be trusted with a multi-year commitment involving architecture, operations, security, and financial risk.

Gartner reports that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience for basic research, but they still want human seller input when decisions are complex or require consensus. What they want is not more product features. They want contextual guidance on how the product fits into their specific architecture and business model.

A Solutions Architect who cannot credibly address business architecture, strategic outcomes, and the implications of suboptimal decisions is not perceived as a trusted advisor, but rather as a product demonstrator lacking influence over the decision-making process.

Multi-threading becomes essential for success at enterprise scale

In a PLG motion, one SA often manages one relationship, usually the technical champion. In an enterprise, that becomes a weakness.

Enterprise deals require the SA to build and manage multiple technical relationships across engineering, security, data architecture, operations, and sometimes finance, while the AE works the executive layer. Data from Gong and others shows that multithreaded deals close faster and have significantly higher win rates than single-threaded deals.

If the Solutions Architect is unable to map the buying committee, identify internal dynamics, and tailor messaging to each stakeholder, the organization lacks a true enterprise motion and is instead applying a PLG approach in an unsuitable context.

The Capability Gap

The transition from PLG to enterprise reveals a distinct capability gap within the Solutions Architect organization. This issue is primarily systemic rather than motivational, as the organization has selected, trained, and rewarded personnel for a different operational model.

Solutions Architect capability can be conceptualized across four key dimensions.

1. Technical depth. This is the area where most PLG SAs are strongest. It includes product mastery, API fluency, architectural credibility, integration patterns, and the ability to hold technical conversations with engineers and architects.

2. Deal control. This is the ability to run discovery, define success criteria before the customer does, manage scope, and understand what a technical win actually requires in a complex buying process. PLG motions often do not require this. The product sets the terms. The customer adopts or does not.

3. Business acumen. This is the ability to connect technical architecture decisions to executive-level outcomes. It requires understanding how the customer’s business actually works, including their revenue model, cost structure, strategic priorities, and competitive pressures. At senior levels, this becomes vertical and industry knowledge. An SA who understands why a retail bank’s governance needs differ from a digital-native fintech brings a different level of value.

4. Leadership and management capability. This is the dimension that often gets ignored. At the IC level, it shows up as self-direction, judgment, and the ability to influence peers and AEs without authority. At the manager and director level, it becomes about coaching, accountability, deal-review quality, and building a team that repeats strong behaviors rather than relying on a single star performer.

PLG systems mostly select for D1. That is fine for the motion they were built to serve. But enterprise requires D2 and D3 at a minimum, and D4 becomes critical the moment that a person moves into management.

This leads to a secondary failure mode: promoting a PLG Solutions Architect to management without evaluating leadership capability. Such managers often focus on easily quantifiable metrics such as demos, proofs of concept, hours logged, and activity volume, and subsequently build teams that mirror their own skill set. The outcome is an organization dominated by the Fido SA archetype at both individual and managerial levels.

The problem is structural. The system never asked for these skills, so it never built them.

The Commercial Gap

A significant pitfall in PLG-era thinking is the conflation of technical validation with commercial success.

A Solutions Architect may achieve success in proofs of concept and feature validation, yet still fail during procurement, legal, security, or finance reviews. This scenario does not indicate a robust motion, but rather a false positive.

A high technical win rate without a corresponding closed-won rate means the SA is optimizing for validation, not conversion. The enterprise standard is different. D1 success is technical validation. Enterprise success is technical validation plus commercial conversion.

This gap is significant because many PLG companies celebrate technical wins that do not translate into revenue. They possess evidence of product efficacy, but lack proof of effective commercial conversion.

The Security Gap

Security is one of the clearest places where PLG and enterprise motions diverge.

In PLG, security is often treated as a hurdle to clear at the end. In an enterprise, it is part of the architecture conversation from the beginning. The SA who can navigate InfoSec early shortens cycle time and reduces late-stage surprise losses.

This distinction is critical because security is no longer a final procedural step, but rather a competitive differentiator. Enterprise buyers seek assurance that vendors can meet security and compliance requirements without transferring undue risk to the customer.

If the SA does not understand how to work through that conversation, the deal slows down or dies late. That is exactly the kind of failure that looks like “good product, bad motion.”

The Cost of Sales Paradox

PLG is often described as the cheap motion. That is true early on, but it can become expensive in enterprise deals.

A lower-cost Solutions Architect model that allows large deals to stall during procurement, security, and executive review may ultimately incur a higher total acquisition cost than a more strategic enterprise SA approach. Time represents a hidden cost; delays deplete pipeline, burden sales management, and reduce overall throughput.

Multithreaded deals achieve higher win rates, larger deal sizes, and faster sales cycles, resulting in greater efficiency. Paradoxically, increasing the number of capable enterprise Solutions Architects can reduce the actual cost of sales at scale by minimizing slippage.

Lower-cost sales motions do not necessarily equate to greater efficiency.

The NRR Ceiling

The ceiling is not only visible in new-logo conversion. It shows up in expansion, too.

PLG motions frequently stall at the departmental level. While the product may be adopted, it often fails to become integrated into the broader organizational operating model. Without multi-threading and cross-functional architectural engagement, companies remain confined to initial usage and limited wallet share.

This limitation leads to a plateau in Net Revenue Retention. Robust enterprise Solutions Architect motions overcome this barrier by facilitating adoption across security, operations, finance, and adjacent business units. The Solutions Architect’s role extends beyond the initial sale to embedding the product within the customer’s operational processes.

That is the difference between adoption and expansion.

The SA Plus Motion

Structural gaps cannot be resolved through leadership intent alone; the underlying motion must be fundamentally redesigned.

A strong enterprise SA motion has three layers. Together, they form the SA Plus standard, in which the AE and SA operate as a single pod rather than a seller and a service desk.

Discovery-led engagement

The PLG Solutions Architect typically arrives prepared to answer questions, whereas the enterprise Solutions Architect is equipped to pose critical questions and challenge customer assumptions.

Enterprise discovery is not about gathering requirements for a chosen tool. It is about understanding what the customer is trying to become and whether the path they have already committed to will actually get them there.

A strong SA Plus motion does three things: it defines and validates the business problem before the demo; it challenges architectures that will create a consumption or scalability ceiling in 12 to 18 months; and it flags when the champion’s preferred use case will not deliver the outcome the executive expects.

Although these conversations may be uncomfortable, they are essential for establishing trust with enterprise stakeholders.

The art of the possible

This is where the enterprise SA creates value that no other GTM function can provide.

The vision conversation is not a long demo. It is a co-creation exercise. The SA documents the current state honestly, including architecture, data flows, constraints, and organizational realities. Then they help design the target state with the customer’s technical stakeholders. They also identify whitespace where the product can create more value, expand consumption, or unlock adjacent use cases.

The challenge is that customers often already have a vision. That vision may come from a hyperscaler, an analyst firm, a GSI, or an incumbent vendor. The enterprise SA’s job is not just to present a vision. It is to test whether the adopted vision actually serves the customer’s interests and, if not, offer a better one.

At this stage, the responsiveness characteristic of the PLG Solutions Architect is insufficient. The enterprise Solutions Architect must adopt a constructively provocative approach, reframing problems, challenging assumptions, and presenting future states that customers may not have previously considered.

Multi-threading and the influence map

The influence map is the diagnostic that tells you whether an evaluation is being managed or just being attended to.

At any point in an enterprise cycle, a strong SA Plus team should be able to identify the technical champions and their authority; the economic buyer and what they are accountable for; the InfoSec, legal, procurement, and finance stakeholders and their concerns; and where each stakeholder stands and what they need to see next.

If the Solutions Architect cannot produce an influence map, they are not actively managing the deal but merely reacting to its progression.

That is the operational definition of SA Plus. The AE and SA jointly own the full buying committee, with executives at the top and architecture, operations, and security throughout.

AE and SA as a Pod

Beneath the capability gap lies a cultural issue regarding the organization’s perception of the Account Executive and Solutions Architect relationship.

In a PLG culture, SAs are often treated as a service desk. “Can you jump on and run the demo?”

At enterprise scale, that model breaks. The AE and SA need to operate as a pod. The AE works with the executives and economic buyers. The SA works with the architecture, security, operations, and partner stakeholders. Both own win rate, cycle time, and expansion outcomes.

Two forms of resistance usually show up. The first is SA resistance. Many PLG-era SAs fear that stakeholder mapping and discovery will make them sound salesy and damage their technical credibility. In practice, the opposite is true. The SA who can challenge architecture and tie it to outcomes becomes the most credible voice in the room.

The second is sales leader resistance. Some sales leaders want the SA to stay in a narrow support role. But single-threaded deals are a real risk, and if the AE keeps all the strategy to themselves, the company pays for it in win rate.

Redesigning the sales motion necessitates redefining the AE-SA relationship. The Solutions Architect must become a co-owner of the deal rather than functioning as a support queue.

Talent Migration

A costly error in the PLG-to-enterprise transition is the assumption that every Solutions Architect must become enterprise-capable or risk being considered redundant.

This perspective undermines value for both the organization and the individual. Technically proficient PLG Solutions Architects remain valuable; the issue lies in misaligning their skills with inappropriate motions.

Strong leaders design migration lanes so each SA profile can thrive where they are most effective.

LaneBest-fit SA profileMotion focusNorth starEnterprise / Strategic SAStrong technical depth, coachable deal control and business acumen11+ stakeholder enterprise evaluationsTechnical wins across full committeesCommercial / Hybrid SAStrong technical depth, growing deal control and business acumenMid-market and departmental playsExpansion and new-logo velocityScaled / PLG SAVery strong technical depth, high-volume orientationSelf-serve and assisted motionTime to value and technical conversionPost-sale Technical AdvisorStrong technical depth, growing business acumenAdoption and consumptionMilestones and NRR deltaDeveloper Relations / AdvocacyStrong technical depth and community orientationPLG top of funnel and ecosystemsDeveloper usage and evangelismChannel / Partner SAStrong technical depth and partner fluencyHyperscaler, SI, ISV, VAR motionsPartner success metrics and sourced revenue

The pertinent question is not whether a Solutions Architect can become enterprise-capable, but rather where their capability profile yields the highest return and how to translate that into a viable career trajectory.

Channel and Partner SAs

“Put them in channel” is a common answer for SAs who do not fit the enterprise mold. That treats the channel as a parking lot rather than a design problem.

In reality, channel SA work includes several distinct roles.

Hyperscaler Partner SA. This person works on joint architectures and co-sell motions with AWS, Azure, or GCP. The hyperscaler owns the executive and business-case layer. Your SA provides product depth, reference architectures, and integration patterns. This is a strong fit for technically sharp SAs who are less interested in C-level conversations.

SI and GSI Partner SA. This role supports delivery teams inside systems integrators. The SI owns change management and the transformation narrative. The SA makes sure the product can be delivered reliably and at scale. This is a good fit for SAs who can think in long-lived implementation programs.

Technology and ISV Partner SA. This role designs and supports joint solutions with complementary products. It requires deep knowledge of both products and strong integration skills. It is a technical role that rewards problem-solving and architectural design.

Reseller and VAR Channel SA. This role is more about enablement. It includes training, playbooks, demo environments, and competitive positioning. It works best for SAs who are good at turning technical depth into repeatable partner readiness.

Conflating these distinct roles results in suboptimal staffing decisions. Each position requires a tailored design to align with its unique responsibilities.

The Player-Coach Fallacy

A common misstep for PLG companies is promoting the most technically proficient Solutions Architect into management, assuming that technical excellence will naturally translate into effective leadership.

It usually does not.

An outstanding individual contributor may become an ineffective first-line manager if their expertise is limited to coaching demos rather than discovery, business acumen, or deal control. This dynamic perpetuates a player-coach model that reinforces a service desk culture rather than addressing its shortcomings.

A manager who only knows how to improve demo quality will create a team of better demonstrators, not better enterprise SAs.

Snowflake as the Example

Snowflake is the clearest example of intentional redesign.

Upon Frank Slootman’s appointment as CEO, a primary objective was to restructure the go-to-market organization to achieve enterprise scale. Snowflake had already developed a robust technical product and a strong developer-led motion. The subsequent requirement was the capability to engage effectively at the executive level within large enterprises.

Its enterprise SE program, known internally as the Snowmaker program, did not just train product features. It required people who could translate technical and business information across all levels of a customer organization, from data engineers to CFOs and CIOs.

Snowflake did not merely increase its sales headcount; it fundamentally redesigned the technical sales function to align with enterprise market requirements. Many organizations overlook this distinction, misattributing the gap to the sales organization rather than presales.

A second major enterprise data company recently pushed the same message at its sales kickoff: engage the business, not just the technology. Their SAs already understand that instinctively. The problem is that the system around them was never redesigned to support that motion.

A Note on Velocity

The most common pushback on this argument is about speed. If every deal requires an influence map and a co-creation exercise, does the company risk adding drag to the very motion that made it successful?

It is a fair question. The answer depends on whether you are applying the enterprise motion selectively or universally.

The migration lane model is specifically designed to preserve sales velocity. The Scaled/PLG Solutions Architect lane is not a fallback option, but rather the appropriate motion for certain deal types, executed by SAs whose skills align with this approach. High-volume, low-touch, product-led expansion remains the primary growth engine, and the SA Plus motion does not interfere with this lane.

Gong’s research on deal dynamics consistently finds that multithreaded deals close faster than single-threaded ones, not slower. The assumption that strategic depth creates drag confuses effort with cycle time. A deal that enters the buying committee in week one moves faster than a deal that discovers the buying committee exists in week ten. Discovery and influence mapping do not add time to a deal. They remove the surprises that do.

The true impediment to velocity is not the strategic Solutions Architect, but rather the misapplication of high-volume PLG motions to inappropriate deals. When a Scaled PLG SA manages a million-dollar enterprise evaluation, activity may increase, but progress stalls in critical stakeholder discussions. This distinction highlights the difference between organizational busyness and genuine speed.

The SA Plus motion is not universally applicable; it is intended for deals where the PLG motion is insufficient for closure. Leadership is responsible for distinguishing between these scenarios. Misapplying sales motions in pursuit of velocity often results in a pipeline filled with stalled enterprise evaluations lacking clear explanations.

Conclusion

Transitioning from PLG to enterprise is not a simple product addition; it requires comprehensive organizational transformation.

This transformation involves redefining Solutions Architect capability across all four dimensions, not solely technical depth. It requires establishing the AE and SA as a cohesive pod, creating migration lanes to retain valuable PLG SAs, treating channel roles as distinct functions, and developing a sales motion focused on discovery, vision, influence mapping, security, and commercial conversion for complex deals involving multiple stakeholders and CFO approval.

The technical depth that enabled the initial $25 million to $50 million in ARR remains necessary, but it is insufficient to achieve the subsequent $500 million in growth.

Organizations that successfully surpass the PLG ceiling are those that prioritize presales redesign as a strategic initiative rather than a remedial task.

The PLG to Enterprise Transition Playbook operationalizes this argument. Coming soon to Architecting Presales subscribers.

What is the signal in your SA org that tells you the PLG motion is no longer sufficient, and are you acting on it before you feel it in the numbers?

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Solutions Architect organizations face a recurring challenge: the emergence of the Fido SA, a solutions engineer who reacts to every customer request without considering what defines success. There are three types: the Labrador, who cannot say no; the Afghan Hound, who performs for the audience rather than focusing on the evaluation; and the Border Collie, who understands the customer well but disregards the sales process. What follows presents the research underpinning this framework, explaining why people-pleasing behavior in the SA role is not merely a personality trait but a measurable, compounding issue affecting the sales pipeline. In addition to analysis, this article previews actionable steps leaders can take to leverage the framework, such as rethinking assessment criteria, coaching practices, and team design to address and correct the Fido SA pattern.

This pattern, often overlooked in standard win and loss analyses, does not present as obvious product deficiencies, pricing issues, or competitive losses. Instead, it manifests subtly through prolonged deal cycles, proof of concepts that extend beyond their initial scope, and technical evaluations that end inconclusively. At the core, people-pleasing behavior within the SA role drives these issues. The resulting pipeline cost is quantifiable, accumulative, and largely preventable.

To better address the challenge, it is important to understand how seller behavior influences deal outcomes in complex B2B environments. Applying these research insights specifically to the presales function reveals unique incentive structures, setting this behavior apart from what is seen in pure sales roles. In complex B2B sales, presales often owns the most technical and credible voice in the room. When that voice defaults to pleasing rather than challenging, the negative performance patterns identified in quota-carrying roles are magnified rather than reduced.

The Research Foundation: Insights into Relationship-Driven Performance

In one of the most rigorous studies of B2B sales performance to date, researchers at CEB (now Gartner) surveyed over 6,000 sales professionals from more than 90 companies to identify factors that distinguish high performers from average and low performers. The data revealed five distinct profiles, with the most common being the Relationship Builder, a representative who aims to satisfy customer demands, resolve conflicts, and maintain harmony.

This finding goes against conventional wisdom. The Relationship Builder profile, though common, was rarely associated with high performance. Only about 7 percent of high performers matched this approach, while approximately 54 percent of top performers identified as Challengers.

Challengers make up nearly 40 percent of all high performers, which makes them more than twice as likely to be top performers compared to any other profile. Relationship Builders rank lowest.

Challenger representatives leverage their understanding of customers’ businesses to provide new insights and influence customer thinking. They introduce ideas such as cost savings or risk mitigation that were not previously considered by the customer. Unlike Relationship Builders, Challengers are effective because they create constructive tension.

The implications for presales leadership are substantial. While the original research focused on quota-carrying sellers, presales teams operate in the same complex, customer-facing environment and exert outsized influence during evaluation and solution design. Behaviors associated with the Relationship Builder profile, including availability, responsiveness, and eagerness to meet every demand, have long been favored in presales. Evidence from complex sales shows that these behaviors are consistently linked with weaker deal outcomes.

This connection between the Fido SA phenomenon and outcome data shows that people-pleasing behaviors are not just undesirable. They are linked to measurable and negative impacts on sales pipelines, which emphasizes an urgent need for leaders to reassess criteria for recruitment, coaching, and rewards. As a first step, leaders should conduct an immediate review of their team’s coaching practices and reward structures to ensure these systems prioritize behaviors that are commercially impactful rather than reactive availability or activity volume. For example, implementing deal review sessions focused on how SAs advance commercial outcomes, or introducing recognition programs that reward effective scope control and definition of success criteria, will drive meaningful change.

Three Types of People-Pleasing Behavior

People-pleasing behavior among Fido SAs can be grouped into three distinct profiles. Each profile arises from different root causes and calls for tailored coaching and assessment responses.

The first profile is the accommodator. This SA is unable to decline customer requests because doing so is perceived as conflict, which is equated with failure. Consequently, every scope expansion is accepted, every competitive diversion pursued, and every feature inquiry met with an immediate demonstration. Accommodators often receive high ratings in customer satisfaction surveys because of perceived responsiveness. However, these surveys do not assess whether the deal advanced or whether the evaluation concluded with clear criteria.

The second profile is the performer. This SA impresses the customer by excelling in evaluations, delivering polished demonstrations, and demonstrating strong product expertise, often eliciting positive in-room reactions. However, the performer prioritizes obtaining approval over fulfilling the evaluation’s actual objectives. The issue lies not in technical knowledge but in failing to subordinate performance to the evaluation goals.

The third profile is the technically competent but commercially absent SA. This individual establishes strong technical rapport but lacks mechanisms to convert this into commercial outcomes. They fulfill requests without focusing on shaping evaluations toward success and remain process-blind despite customer sophistication.

Despite differences in origin, all three profiles create comparable pipeline challenges: longer sales cycles, scope creep, and evaluations that lack defined success criteria.

Pipeline Data Analysis

Though measuring individual SA behavior is challenging, the downstream effects of people-pleasing are evident in aggregate deal data.

One large SaaS pipeline analysis found that roughly 22 percent of closed-lost deals failed in the needs assessment and solution design stages, which are the parts of the cycle where SAs typically have the greatest influence. In this context, Challenger SAs reframe customer problems and establish success criteria early, while accommodating SAs defer to customer assumptions and often leave evaluations open-ended.

Similarly, an analysis of over 4.2 million opportunities reported that about 61 percent of lost deals were attributed to buyer indecision rather than direct competitive loss. Buyer indecision is heavily influenced by shortfalls in the sales process such as unclear value, unaddressed risk, or lack of urgency, rather than by buyer intent alone. When customers lack compelling business reasons to choose, indecision stalls progress. Relationship Builder SAs may spend months ensuring satisfaction but rarely create a sense of urgency around a defined problem and outcome. Challenger-style SAs use their technical authority to highlight the cost of inaction and the risks of poor design decisions, turning evaluation time into commercial momentum.

Gartner research shows that sales representatives who challenge customer thinking with commercial insight during the solution exploration stage are significantly more likely to secure high-quality deals. The solution exploration stage is primarily managed by the SA. This finding should be integral to all SA performance evaluations.

The Coaching Case: Outcomes of Challenger Development

People-pleasing behavior in SAs is not an inherent trait but a behavioral disposition influenced by organizational culture, incentives, and management. Research on Challenger development is directly applicable in this context.

In documented Challenger programs, teams that receive structured Challenger-style coaching have reported 16.7 percent higher annual revenue growth and a 28 percent increase in win rates relative to peers. In one large rollout at SAP, nearly 4,300 sellers and 1,400 managers attributed approximately 51 million dollars in closed business and 198.2 million dollars in anticipated business to the methodology, closing 26 percent more deals, generating 27 percent more sales revenue, and reducing sales cycles by more than a month on average compared to untrained teams. These improvements point to a structural shift in revenue generation driven primarily by changes in seller-customer interactions rather than product, pricing, or market conditions.

For presales leaders, the implication is clear. Developing Challenger behaviors among SAs drives improved performance, not only at the individual level but also in maximizing overall win rates across deals. Importantly, Challenger competencies can be developed rather than being innate. SA leaders should tailor coaching, training, and talent development strategies to foster Challenger traits and unlock greater organizational success.

A practical approach leaders can adopt is the Challenger Coaching Cadence. This method integrates structured, recurring deal reviews that focus specifically on uncovering customer business drivers and surfacing where SAs have created or missed opportunities to challenge customer assumptions. Typically, managers meet weekly or bi-weekly with each SA to review active deals, beginning with an analysis of how the customer’s needs were reframed, the definition of clear evaluation success criteria, and whether constructive tension was introduced. Coaching feedback is centered around concrete examples from live opportunities, modeling effective questioning and decision frameworks rather than generic guidance. Over time, additional sessions can focus on role play, objection handling, and sharing Challenger best practices from the team. By institutionalizing these elements into a regular coaching rhythm, leaders provide SAs with ongoing, actionable development that translates theory into changed behavior within real opportunities.

The Fido SA Within a Consumption-Based Revenue Model

This magnification is especially apparent in consumption-based revenue models, where people-pleasing behavior has amplified consequences. In these models, the use case that an SA helps define directly determines the account’s future growth potential.

In a perpetual license model, a Fido SA that closes an inappropriate deal incurs the loss of a single transaction. In a consumption model, the same SA influences the entire Net Annual Recurring Revenue trajectory of an account over multiple years, with the initial use case serving as the baseline for all future expansion. An SA who unconditionally agrees to initial requests establishes the account’s growth ceiling.

This dynamic often remains undetected in quarterly reviews and emerges 12 to 18 months later when expansion stagnates without a clear explanation. The customer is neither dissatisfied nor churning. Rather, they consume at the level that was initially architected by the SA. This use case was selected because it appeared manageable, familiar, and low-risk during evaluation. Growth remains unowned because no definition of growth was established before the evaluation concluded.

In a consumption model, the accommodating SA represents not only deal risk but also compound revenue risk that escalates with each account closed.

When Fido SAs Are Promoted: The Leadership Multiplication Problem

The most costly manifestation of the Fido SA pattern is not the individual contributor who responds excessively to requests, but the Fido SA who is promoted into leadership and constructs a team that mirrors their own behavioral model.

The presales industry shows a well-recognized tendency to promote top individual contributors into management roles without sufficiently evaluating their leadership capabilities. An all-star SA who excelled in customer engagements, conducted numerous demonstrations, and was favored by the account executive team is often promoted to manager, then director, and eventually vice president. This occurs because organizations conflate technical excellence with leadership potential.

The Fido executive vice president of presales demonstrates a recognizable and costly pattern. Lacking a clear definition of team success, they default to quantifiable metrics such as demonstrations conducted, POCs initiated, and hours logged. When win rates decline, they request additional headcount and rely on increasing the number of SAs performing the same activities as their corrective measure. As a result, the SA to AE ratio inflates, sales costs rise, and win rates remain stagnant.

Ratio data provides valuable insight. Research by the Alexander Group, which analyzed 100 sales forces across industries, found that teams with a 1 to 5 SE to AE ratio averaged 2 million dollars in revenue per representative, while those with a 1 to 1 ratio averaged 3.2 million dollars per representative. This 60 percent increase in revenue productivity per representative is not solely due to the ratio itself. It also reflects how effectively presales capacity is deployed. Smaller SA teams doing deeper, more meaningful technical work on a focused set of deals tend to achieve materially better outcomes than larger teams spread thin across numerous superficial engagements.

The Fido VP fails to recognize this distinction, perceives only a utilization issue, and consequently requests additional headcount. This results in an SA organization that is overstaffed according to ratio metrics but underperforming in outcomes, a costly and largely unrecognized problem attributable primarily to leadership behavior.

Industry observations suggest many SaaS companies underinvest in presales during high-growth phases and then overstaff at maturity, failing to reassess team responsibilities as the go-to-market model evolves. The Fido leader exacerbates both issues by underinvesting in coaching and process during growth, and overstaffing during maturity, relying solely on headcount as a corrective measure. Eventually, the CFO observes increasing sales costs without corresponding improvements in win rates or deal velocity. By this stage, the team has been shaped by the leader’s behavioral model for years.

A detailed discussion of Challenger SA leadership practices, including how to conduct deal reviews, foster an environment where SAs openly surface risks, and recognize when the team ceases to provide candid feedback, is provided in a dedicated post within this series.

The Fido-to-Challenger Spectrum: Distinguishing Coachable and Non-Coachable Behaviors

Not all SAs who exhibit people-pleasing behavior are permanently stuck in that pattern. However, the spectrum from Fido to Challenger is not a linear continuum but consists of distinct behavioral positions. The gap between these positions determines the potential and limits of coaching interventions.

At one end lies the fully coachable middle. These SAs exhibit Fido behaviors because of hiring, management, and reward structures rather than inherent incapacity. When managers identify specific gaps during deal reviews, such as loss of scope control, failure to apply a business value framework, or inappropriate acquiescence, these SAs recognize the issues, articulate alternative approaches, and incorporate feedback in subsequent evaluations. The discrepancy between their current and Challenger behaviors represents a coaching gap rather than a capability gap.

The partially coachable SA occupies the middle of the spectrum. This individual can demonstrate Challenger behaviors in certain contexts but reverts to people-pleasing under pressure, such as during high-stakes deals, competitive scenarios, or customer dissatisfaction. Coaching for this group demands intensive, consistent reinforcement through deal reviews, managerial modeling, and explicit accountability mechanisms. Progress is achievable but tends to be slower, with frequent regression under stress when sustained support is absent.

At the opposite extreme is the uncoachable Fido. This SA rationalizes people-pleasing behavior instead of acknowledging it. During deal reviews, they attribute losses to product deficiencies, pricing, or competitive factors rather than their own approach. They are unable to adopt a business value framework because they do not consider it their responsibility. When questioned about expanding the POC scope beyond evaluation requirements, they justify it solely by customer requests. This gap is not a skill deficiency but a belief issue, which coaching cannot resolve.

A simple and revealing test distinguishes the coachable middle from the uncoachable extreme. In a structured deal review, managers demonstrate precisely where the SA’s behavior deviated from evaluation requirements. SAs who recognize and accept this gap are coachable. Those who fail to see it or defend their behavior are not.

Uncoachable Fidos retain value in roles such as developer relations and technical advocacy, which demand the warmth, availability, and product expertise that characterize the Fido SA but lack the commercial accountability that reveals behavioral gaps. However, in post-sales roles, a people-pleaser who lacks business acumen becomes a product expert focused on training delivery rather than a trusted advisor. Post-sales functions require business knowledge to develop best practices and guide customers through change, not solely product expertise. Assigning an uncoachable Fido to post-sales does not resolve the issue but instead relocates it.

The Four Dimensions of SA Assessment

Identifying Fido behavior before it damages the pipeline and distinguishing between coachable and uncoachable manifestations requires a structured assessment framework beyond observation alone. Managers who rely only on deal participation or customer feedback to evaluate SA performance often receive misleading signals and frequently misdiagnose the issue.

To operationalize the four-dimensional framework, leaders should incorporate targeted assessment questions into their evaluations:

For sales acumen and deal ownership: “Can the SA describe a recent evaluation where they set the success criteria with the customer before any demonstration took place? What steps did they use to maintain control of scope throughout the deal?”

For business acumen: “How does the SA connect solution capabilities to the customer’s business objectives? Can they articulate the broader business impact of technical decisions made during an evaluation?”

For leadership and management: “In what ways has the SA influenced peers or account executives to adopt more commercially effective behaviors? What evidence is there of developing team members or challenging ineffective norms?”

Using specific, behavior-based questions like these enables leaders to identify gaps, provide actionable feedback, and ensure each assessment dimension is addressed in practice.

A comprehensive SA assessment evaluates performance across four key dimensions.

Technical capability is the baseline dimension. It includes depth of knowledge, architectural credibility, and understanding of technology beyond the product user interface. Fido SAs typically meet technical capability requirements, which often explains their hiring. However, conflating technical competence with readiness to lead complex evaluations is a fundamental error in most SA organizations.

Sales acumen and deal ownership represent the dimension where the Fido pattern most prominently appears. This dimension assesses whether the SA controls the evaluation, establishes success criteria before the customer, enforces scope discipline, and understands what is required for a technical win. SAs who score low in this area lack sufficient understanding of the buying process to lead it effectively. They respond reactively instead of proactively architecting the evaluation.

Business acumen distinguishes transactional SAs from trusted advisors. This dimension evaluates the SA’s ability to link solution capabilities to business outcomes and, at senior levels, to understand the customer’s business model, competitive landscape, and industry vertical well enough to lead strategic discussions. Business acumen develops with seniority and industry exposure. Although it is coachable over time, its development requires extended timelines and access to deal contexts that build instinct through experience.

Leadership and management capabilities vary across SA organizational levels. At the individual contributor level, this dimension assesses self-direction, sound independent judgment, and the ability to influence peers and account executives without formal authority. At the managerial level, it evaluates the ability to develop others, conduct deal reviews that reveal substantive information rather than status updates, establish accountability structures, and build teams that consistently exhibit Challenger behaviors instead of relying on isolated individual performance. Promoting all-star SAs without evaluating this dimension is the most frequent and costly talent error in presales.

The Fido SA typically meets the first dimension but fails the second and third. The accommodator fails the second dimension. The performer fails the second and often the third. The commercially absent SA fails the third dimension. A Fido manager who reaches vice president level without developing the fourth dimension compromises the entire organization, because the team lacks a leadership model that exemplifies Challenger behavior.

Implications for SA Leadership

The pattern in the data is hard to ignore. Over half of all-star performers in complex sales align with the Challenger profile, while only about 7 percent of high performers adopt the Relationship Builder approach, the lowest-performing profile among the five. Presales organizations that continue to hire, reward, and promote based on availability and responsiveness are cultivating teams that are optimized for suboptimal outcomes in critical environments.

The Challenger SA is not a personality type. They are the product of an intentional system: hiring processes that assess the right dimensions, managers who run deal reviews that surface real information, leadership that defines what a technical win requires, and organizational structures that hold SAs accountable for outcomes rather than activity.

The most perilous manifestation of the Fido problem is not the SA who responds to every request. It is the vice president of presales who lacks alternative competencies and has the authority to build an organization that reflects their own behavioral model.

Building a different system is the work. While the full SA Archetype Assessment will soon be available to Architecting Presales subscribers, leaders can take immediate action by conducting a simple self-assessment using the four key dimensions outlined in this article. Start by selecting a recent deal and, for each dimension, ask: Did the SA demonstrate technical capability beyond the user interface? Did they set clear evaluation success criteria before conducting any demonstration? Did they connect solution features to the customer’s business objectives? Did they influence peers or account executives to adopt more commercially effective behaviors? Taking one deal through these questions will help reveal where Fido behaviors might be surfacing, highlight areas for coaching, and begin moving the team toward Challenger without waiting for a formal tool.

The SA Archetype Assessment scores your team across all four dimensions, identifies where Fido behaviors are coachable, where they are structural, and what it will take to build toward Challenger at every level of the organization. Coming soon to Architecting Presales subscribers.

Which specific behavior within your team most clearly indicates Fido SA thinking, and is it being inadvertently rewarded?

This issue originates from management rather than technology or staffing and is frequently misclassified as a process problem. It persists because companies tend to collect the wrong metrics rather than the appropriate ones.

The core problem is that most Solutions Architect (SA) organizations measure team activities rather than their outputs, which are distinct concepts.

Research Findings

McKinsey found that strong presales capabilities yield win rates of 40 to 50 percent in new business, significantly exceeding industry averages. HubSpot reports that the average B2B SaaS win rate ranges from 15 to 25 percent. This performance gap is attributable to capability and management factors rather than product or pricing differences.

The same McKinsey research demonstrated that presales activities influence revenue two to three times more than lead generation. However, most companies prioritize measuring and optimizing marketing and lead generation instead of the outputs produced by Solutions Architects.

McKinsey also found that a 10 to 20 percent improvement in win rates correlates with 4 to 12 percent topline revenue growth without increasing the number of deals in the pipeline. Although actual impact varies based on pipeline mix, deal size, and sales cycle length, the order of magnitude remains consistent across studies. Most SA leaders fail to fully exploit this leverage point due to excessive focus on tracking inputs.

Data on Factors Correlated with Win Rates

Behaviors that distinguish high-performing SA organizations from average ones relate to insight and deliberate engagement rather than mere effort.

According to Ironclad data, companies excelling at providing insights and perspectives have a 55.2 percent win rate, compared to 40.2 percent for less effective companies. Ironclad does not identify the original study underlying this figure, so it should be treated as a benchmark rather than a primary research finding. The directional implication, that insight-oriented engagement correlates with higher win rates, is consistent with patterns observed across the broader literature.

Multi-threading data corroborate this pattern. Research from Ebsta, cited in Salesmotion’s 2025 benchmark analysis, found that deals involving three or more engaged stakeholders close 2.4 times more frequently, increasing to 3.1 times for enterprise deals. Enterprise buying committees may include a dozen or more decision-makers. These figures represent observed correlations in deal outcome data rather than controlled experiments; other variables, including deal complexity and qualification quality, likely contribute to the relationship. Nevertheless, the consistent direction of findings across multiple datasets suggests that stakeholder coverage is a meaningful leading indicator.

A Solutions Architect who spends 40 hours with a single champion fails to manage the evaluation effectively, as other stakeholders form independent opinions while the SA relies on the champion to manage them. Multi-threading constitutes an output behavior. An SA must understand the buying committee, map stakeholders, and build relationships with intent. Timesheets record hours but do not reveal whether the SA identified the economic buyer.

The implication for SA leaders is clear: behaviors associated with technical wins, such as guiding evaluations, shaping success criteria, building stakeholder coverage, and compressing timelines through precision rather than effort, produce outputs rather than hours. If a management system rewards hours, it fails to incentivize the behaviors correlated with success.

Stages Where Losses Occur

A 2025 benchmark study of 847 B2B SaaS companies found that 63 percent of losses occur before the needs assessment phase, rather than during the final presentation or procurement stages.

Therefore, the most impactful improvement for most SA organizations involves enhancing the quality of early-stage technical qualification and discovery instead of increasing the volume of demos or hours logged during evaluations.

An SA team that conducts fewer, more focused discovery engagements and qualifies out earlier reliably outperforms teams that run more engagements with less precision, even though the latter may appear more productive on timesheets. The data implies that the SA who compresses early, qualifies hard, and shapes the evaluation from the first conversation is not working less — they are working on what matters. The timesheet does not capture that distinction. The win rate does.

Characteristics of Output Metrics

Output metrics for an SA organization fall into two categories, and the right metrics depend on your go-to-market model.

In a perpetual licensing model, key output metrics include win rate on technically qualified opportunities, proof-of-concept (POC) conversion rate, deal velocity from technical qualification to technical win, and expansion revenue attributable to SA involvement post-close. These metrics indicate whether the SA is advancing deals and positioning closed accounts for growth.

In consumption or usage-based models, output metrics are more nuanced. Net Annual Recurring Revenue (NARR) influenced by the SA, specifically expansion attributable to use cases designed by the SA rather than organic product growth, is a key metric. Additionally, time to the first meaningful consumption milestone reflects whether the SA effectively prepared the customer for adoption or merely transferred a signed contract. An SA who closes a consumption deal without establishing a path to expansion has not completed their role.

This distinction is important. Many SA organizations operating under consumption models continue to use metrics from the perpetual licensing era. The true NARR opportunity lies within existing accounts, which most organizations overlook because of unclear SA responsibilities after the deal closes.

The Manager Problem Nobody Talks About

Activity metrics persist in organizations not because leaders are lazy, but because measuring outputs requires a manager who genuinely understands the technical motion their SA team runs.

To evaluate an SA on win rate, first identify technically qualified deals. To assess deal velocity, identify blockers and determine whether the SA resolved them. To measure NARR influence, define SA influence in the CRM and use an attribution model to track it.

This process requires judgment, deal knowledge, and a framework with clear success criteria at each sales stage — none of which a timesheet provides. Activity metrics are a proxy for understanding, not a substitute for it.

Gartner’s research indicates that B2B buyers advance significantly in their purchase decisions before their first substantive conversation with a seller. By the time the SA becomes involved, the customer has already formed firm views. If the SA conducts demos without understanding the customer’s buying stage, success criteria, or competitor influences, they merely participate rather than manage the evaluation.

When managers rely on activity metrics for SA performance, it indicates an absence of a framework for what actually drives outcomes. They measure what is easily observable rather than what the business requires. When those same metrics are used to justify promotions, they reinforce a culture that rewards busyness over results. The metrics tracked determine which behaviors get repeated.

Managers who understand their team’s technical motion build SA organizations that scale. Those who substitute activity tracking for deal knowledge build teams that cannot explain pipeline stalls.

Practical Implications

If you are leading an SA organization and your current measurement system relies primarily on activity data, the path forward is not to rip it out overnight. Build a parallel set of output metrics while keeping current measures. Over time, demonstrate that output metrics reflect true team performance. Gradually shift the culture to reward results, not only process compliance.

The right framework metrics depend on business model, stage, and growth phase. A Series A company with ten SAs and no defined PS function uses different metrics than a Series C company running a hybrid motion across segments.

Architecting Presales is building a framework that maps the right output metrics to your SA org stage, covering both perpetual and consumption models, with CRM configuration guidance to ensure the data is actually capturable. This is part of a library of 21 frameworks built from two decades of scaling SA organizations across multiple exits.

If you want early access, subscribe below. The framework library opens to charter members first.