Demand for presales support can grow for many reasons. Marketing may be spending more and generating more leads. Sales may be hiring without a matching budget increase for presales. You may be moving down-market, where volumes are higher but margins are tighter. Or demo qualification may be slipping, so your team spends more time on demos that were never going to go anywhere. Our 2026 Sales Engineering Compensation & Workload Report found that nearly 37% of demos go to unqualified or under-qualified leads, and a quarter of teams say more than half of their demos do.
Whatever the cause, when demand outgrows your team, you need answers to two questions:
- What's causing the gap?
- How big is the gap between your team's capacity and the incoming demand?
This article gives you a simple way to answer the second question, and some practical ways to close the gap once you know its size.
| Start with your AE:SE ratio |
There are many ways to run a demand gap analysis. One of the simplest is to start with your ratio of account executives to sales engineers: how many AEs each SE supports.
Our 2026 report found that most organizations still operate around a standard ratio of 3:1 to 5:1, used by about 40% of respondents. The right ratio depends on your sales motion: enterprise teams tend toward closer coverage of 1:1 to 2:1, while SMB teams more often stretch SEs across many AEs.
Charts from the 2026 Sales Engineering Compensation and Workload Report showing the approximate AE-to-SE ratio overall and by company size, with 3:1 to 5:1 the most common at 40%
The approximate AE-to-SE ratio, from the 2026 Sales Engineering Compensation & Workload Report. Download the report.
| Work out your demand gap |
Here's how the ratio turns into a gap. Say you have 40 SEs at a 4:1 ratio, supporting 160 AEs, right in the middle of the standard range, and the sales team grows to 230 AEs. To keep the same ratio, you'd need 58 SEs, or 18 new hires.
Maintaining a ratio isn't scaling, though; it's just linear hiring. And even if you wanted to close the gap that way, sales headcount often grows without a matching budget for presales to hire alongside it.
Demand gap analysis worked example: 40 SEs at 4:1 grows to 230 AEs, leaving a 45% gap with no hires and a 26% gap after 6 hires
Walking through the example:
- No new hires. 40 SEs covering demand that needs 58 is 45% more work per SE. On a 50-hour workweek, that's about 22.5 extra hours per SE every week.
- Budget for 6 new SEs. You'd have 46 SEs against the 58 you need, so you're 12 short. That's about 26% more work per SE, or roughly 13 extra hours per SE every week.
- The whole team. Multiply the per-SE gap by your headcount: 46 SEs × 13 hours is about 600 hours a week, or roughly 31,000 hours a year.
The example uses a 50-hour workweek. In the 2026 report, respondents averaged 44.3 hours a week, while many SEs with 10+ years of experience reported 55–60+, so use your own team's real hours when you run the numbers.
To run the numbers for your own team:
| Demand gap per SE = (SEs needed − SEs you have) ÷ SEs you have × hours in your SE workweek Team demand gap = demand gap per SE × number of SEs |
| Close the gap |
Once you know the size of the gap, you have two choices. You can ask everyone to work those extra hours each week and risk burning out your team, or you can free up that time by scaling how presales works.
That burnout risk is real. In the 2026 report, the share of SEs reporting persistent to significant burnout rose from 17% to 37% in a year. Asked what would most improve their work, respondents' top answer was reducing repetitive tasks (28%), ahead of hiring more people to share the workload (22%).
Scaling starts with the work that doesn't need a live SE. Early-stage and overview demos, repeat walkthroughs of the same features, and demos for prospects who aren't yet qualified are all good candidates to record once and send on demand. With Consensus, account executives can send your best SEs' recorded demos without waiting for presales, and engagement data shows which prospects are serious enough to warrant live time. That keeps your SEs focused on the deep, technical conversations only they can have.
For practical ways to put this into action, see Scale Your SE and Presales Rep Enablement and Boost your Presales Power (and measure it).
| Keep Exploring |
Scale Your SE and Presales Rep Enablement · Boost your Presales Power (and measure it) · Where should I put the Lead Gate for my demo?