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A leader in our network took on a new SVP role about a year ago. And his first day told him everything he needed to know.
He sat down at lunch with one of the org’s top performing SCs and asked her to walk him through a typical week. She pulled up her activity log. AE sends a request, she does the demo, logs her hours. An hour of prep, two hours to build, and two hours in the demo.
He asked where she documented what happened, the outcome and what moved.
“Oh no, we don’t track that. We just track hours.”
He pushed: last week you did 27 hours of demo build and presentations. How much revenue did that drive?
“We don’t track that. This is utilization.”
He walked out of that lunch and ran into the CFO.
The CFO said: “Welcome. I hear your team likes to take a lot of PTO.”
Huh?
A few weeks later, sitting in his first formal business review, finance pulled up a bar chart of every hour his team had logged that quarter: demos, discovery, internal meetings, training, etc.
The tallest bar on that chart? Vacation.
Time tracking was how this org showed its value to the business. Despite the fact that they were doing demos, running discovery and so much more, what finance saw was PTO.
The system wasn’t broken per se, but it certainly wasn’t measuring the right thing. It had been designed for a professional services org, not a Solutions one. And the metrics were telling a story that was not only wrong, but dangerous.
Finance does not track inputs for any function the business considers a growth engine. They track outcomes. Sales reports closed revenue. Marketing reports pipeline contribution. Customer success reports retention and expansion. Solutions reports demos completed and hours logged. One of these is not like the others.
As long as that asymmetry holds, Solutions will keep being resourced like overhead. Not because the work isn’t valuable. But because when you’re reporting utilization, you’re proving how busy your calendar is, not the outcomes you’re driving for the business.
Read your last quarterly report and ask which of these you are still sending up the chain. Then ask what conclusion a finance team would draw from it without you in the room.
Most Solutions orgs already track some version of attribution whether that’s influenced revenue, attached deals or customer-facing engagements. The problem is not that the data does not exist. The problem is that “attached” is too loose a definition to mean anything to finance.
One leader in our network put it this way: “We’d be on one call and get credit for the deal. Or twenty calls and get the same credit.”
Attached does not mean impactful. Many of us have worked at companies where every specialist SE team puts themselves on a deal to justify their existence, one internal call and the deal is “attached.” If everyone gets credit, no one does. Without a real definition of what counts as material engagement, finance sees Solutions everywhere, which reads like overhead. The fix is not to attach to fewer deals, it is to define what attachment requires.
One framework we have heard for fixing this defines material engagement as three components, all required: documented discovery, a delivered proof point, and a confirmed technical win. Three out of three, the deal counts. Two out of three, partial credit. One, nothing.
Defining this with sales ops takes a real project and a quarter or two before the data is clean, and it is still the highest leverage reporting work most Solutions orgs are not doing.
Once you have a real definition of attachment, the metrics to report write themselves.
ARR attached to SE-covered opportunities, across new business, expansion, and renewal. This is not pipeline, and not technical wins in isolation, but actual closed revenue where Solutions was materially involved in the deal, defined by something like the framework above.
The data likely already exists in your CRM, and once you can report it to your CFO, you are giving her the same kind of number she gets from sales and marketing, which is what changes the conversation.
The technical win is a piece of this, but it’s not the goal on its own. One leader in a recent roundtable said: “Don’t ask me how many demos my team did. Ask me about tech win coverage. The tech win alone is not enough. If we didn’t get the PO, let’s not pat ourselves on the back.”
A technical win that does not convert to revenue is a leading indicator that did not lead anywhere, and reporting it as a success shows finance that Solutions celebrates effort and not outcomes. Tech win coverage matters because it predicts close rate, not because it is the outcome. The CFO does not buy “we won the eval,” she buys the deal that closed because of it. If the gap between technical wins and closed revenue is large and unexplained, that gap is the conversation, not the win rate.
That SVP from the intro? He got a 30% headcount increase the following year. The mechanism was the metrics. He spent six months in business reviews, finance presentations, and board sessions, replacing utilization and demo count with technical win coverage, pipeline quality, and account-based assists. By the seventh board presentation, the CFO was the one presenting them. Finance had stopped questioning the framework and started defending it.
The SVP did not change the case for Solutions. He just changed the language he was using to make it and speaking in a way the business could understand.
One of the questions posed at Off the Record, our in-person conference for Solutions leaders, was: Can you prove my value in the language my CFO speaks? The majority of the room said it was one of their most urgent priorities.
If you are grappling with the same question, you are not alone. Join fellow Solutions leaders working through the same questions at Off the Record this October in Santa Clara. Applications are open at solutionexec.com/offtherecord
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