How CE Intersects Internal Teams

CEs interact with most every other team at Sourcegraph. This page details those intersections, explaining how we add value to each other and a collaboration overview for each pairing.

Sales

  • How CE adds value to sales: CEs are the right-hand team for Sales by serving as technical experts and ultimately owning the technical win. CEs lead product demos, guide customers through trials, lead production deployments, capture customer technical requirements, closely monitor product usage and adoption, and build and nurture technical champions.
  • How sales adds value to CE: Sales, with their focus on the commercial relationship, introduces CEs to the customer relationship and helps CEs nurture the relationship. Both Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and Account Executives (AEs) share context with CEs prior to introducing them to the customer.
  • Collaboration overview: AEs and CEs are stably paired together on accounts throughout the customer journey. SDRs, during their prospecting efforts, are able to get support from the CE team via the @ce-sdr-collab slack user group. SDRs should post their question and tag this user group in the #ce slack channel. CEs in this user group are individuals on the CE team that are in their first 120 days; this provides great learning opportunities for the CE team to craft answers and confirm their product understanding; it in turn provides more structure and responsibility for responding to Q&As to help the SDR team be successful.

Customer Support (CS)

  • How CE adds value to CS: CE has nuanced context that is valuable to how support works with a customer; CE can also help clarify / remind customers we need information (during regularly scheduled calls) on the more tricky issues.
  • How CS adds value to CE: CS is the go-to technical team for our CEs. CS resolves issues for customers both pre- and post-sales, allowing CEs to do more proactive work by taking on the reactive technical troubleshooting work when customers experience issues.
  • Collaboration overview: CEs (or others – including customers – but primarily CEs) may engage support at any point during the pre-sales and post-sales customer engagement process. When a customer runs into an issue, the CE will allow support do the heads-down troubleshooting work.
    • An account CE often collaborates with application engineers on issues. For example, CE may have a particular understanding or context about the customer or the situation. This is welcomed collaboration in support of customer issues!
  • What should CE do if the customer needs more help: Given the relationship between the CE and the customer, it’s not uncommon for our customers to reach out to CE for an update. In instances like this, the CE should work directly with the Application Engineer. If additional assistance is needed, the CE should reach out to @cs-leadership for additional guidance in the #customer-support channel, sharing context around the situation and the specific request.

Software Engineers (SWEs)

  • How CE adds value to SWEs: CE provides important insights from prospective and current customers which inform and serve as important inputs to Product roadmap.
  • How SWEs adds value to CE: SWEs create a high quality product and when needed, helps educate CEs on how certain features work so that they can educate customers. SWEs also conduct via planned training sessions, periodic pairing, deep-dives on new features/products, etc.
  • Collaboration overview: CEs can pose how-to questions and provide feedback via Slack

Product

  • How CE adds value to product: CEs provide a data-driven view into customer concerns/questions, ad-hoc feedback shared whilst helping customers, and helps update documentation so customers (and we) have a single source of truth.
  • How product adds value to CE: Product educates CE on new features and helps clarify expected behavior questions.
  • Collaboration overview: CEs provide Product with feedback and feature requests; Product seeks inputs from customer through CEs.

Marketing

  • How CE adds value to marketing: CEs help ensure marketing material is relevant and valuable to engineers and engineering leaders.
  • How marketing adds value to CE: Marketing provides self-service avenues for our customers to learn and help each other learn (community, developer education).
  • Collaboration overview: Marketing will seek customer input (surveys, feedback, case studies, etc) via CEs