Everybody’s Talking About the SaaS Crash. Here’s What It Means for Solutions Leaders
GTM orgs are being redrawn. Here's why Solutions leaders who move now will define what comes next.
We surveyed 500+ Solutions Engineers for the State of Demos 2026 Report — and the results may surprise you. 97% say AI Demo Avatars won’t define 2026. Buyers want authenticity. Download the report for data on how AI is actually used in demos, and how top SEs are winning in 2026. Get the report here.
There’s no shortage of takes on the SaaS crash. There are lots of smart people talking about what’s happening in the market, why it happened, where it’s headed and we’re all reading it. Nobody knows exactly how this plays out. The correction is real. The uncertainty is real. And the pressure it’s creating is landing differently depending on where you sit.
Instead of adding to the noise, we wanted to take a view of what this market recalibration means for Solutions leaders. There’s a lot of takes out there, but no one is talking about what it means for someone in your seat.
Here’s what we’re seeing.
What it means inside your org
The internal pressure is where we’re hearing the most acute pain and where the stakes seem the highest.
Board-level scrutiny on GTM efficiency has reached every function and Solutions is no exception. The question being asked isn’t whether Solutions is valuable in the abstract. It’s whether the value is legible and whether it shows up in the numbers in a way that survives a budget conversation. For many Solutions leaders, the honest answer is that it doesn’t yet. Impact is real but anecdotal. Influence is high but unmeasured. That gap is manageable when budgets are growing. It isn’t when they’re not.
“We should be using our data to show that we’re not a support function, but we’re a measurable growth engine for the business. That, as leaders, is our job right now.” - Leah McTiernan, Group VP of Presales at Docusign
At the same time, the remit is expanding without a corresponding expansion in resources. Many Solutions leaders are starting to own post-sale accountability, value engineering groups, forward deployed engineers, and customer outcomes that used to live in the CS or professional services organization. We’re hearing versions of this from leaders across company sizes and stages. The scope of what Solutions is being asked to own is growing quietly, without a formal redefinition of the role or the headcount to support it. Leaders are absorbing the work because the org needs someone to, and Solutions is the function with the closest proximity to the customer and the technical depth to do it credibly.
That’s not inherently a problem. But it becomes one if you’re absorbing the work without building the organizational case around it.
The leaders who are navigating this well are the ones who are able to get ahead of both dynamics. They’ve been able to explain their impact before someone asked them to with metrics like win rates with and without SE involvement, expansion revenue tied to technical engagement, retention on accounts with deep Solutions presence. And they walked into the resourcing conversation with a redefined scope rather than a headcount justification. Not “we need more people,” but “here is what Solutions now owns across the customer lifecycle, and here is what it’s worth to the business.”
If you haven’t had that conversation yet, the window to have it on your terms is narrowing. The org chart is being redrawn across GTM right now. Where Solutions lands in the new version will be determined by the leaders who show up with a defined answer.
What it means for what you have to deliver
The external pressure is more visible but no less significant and it’s changing the nature of the work in ways that compound everything happening internally.
Buyer behavior has shifted structurally. Procurement scrutiny is higher than ever. Buying committees are larger. CFO involvement is now standard, not the exception. And AI has introduced an objection that didn’t exist two years ago: why can’t we just build this ourselves?
As Solutions leaders, you’re on the front lines of that question every day. Answering it requires more proof than we’ve shown before. It requires articulating where real complexity lives, where DIY breaks down at scale, and why your architecture holds up in ways a vibe-coded prototype doesn’t. That’s a harder conversation than a demo. It’s also a more important one.
What buyers want now is proof. And they want it fast and they want it deep. They want to see their problem, solved, in their environment, with their data, in front of them. The tension between speed-to-value and proof-of-value is real, and it’s landing on your team in every significant deal. Buyers are arriving more prepared, more skeptical, and with far less tolerance for motions that don’t feel grounded in their actual reality.
This is driving pilots and POVs closer to the line of production than we’ve had to handle before. It’s also driving serious organizational conversation around forward deployed engineers, a model where the SE org collapses the distance between proof and production to near zero, effectively delivering a working solution before the contract is signed. Nobody has this fully figured out. But the design questions are live and the resourcing implications are significant. The demand is coming from the largest enterprise buyers and it’s getting louder.
The Solutions org is the only function in the GTM motion built to answer this moment. It’s a good position to be in, if you’re ready for it.
The talent and leverage question
Underneath both of these pressures is a conversation that’s surfacing more and more in the conversations we’re having: how do you do more with less, without burning out the team or diluting the quality of what you deliver?
The honest answer is that the traditional model of an SE attached to every deal, covering the full cycle from discovery to close, is under pressure in a way it hasn’t been before. Not because the work is less important. Because the volume of demand, combined with the expanding remit, combined with leaner headcount, means the old coverage model doesn’t hold the way it used to.
What we’re hearing from leaders who are ahead of this is a deliberate shift in how they think about leverage. AI is handling a meaningful share of the commodity work, things like RFP responses, demo environment setup, research, qualification support. That’s not a future state for the teams doing it well, it’s already happening. And it’s creating real capacity that, when redirected intentionally, changes what an SE is able to take on in a given quarter.
But automating the commodity work doesn’t just free up capacity. It opens a deeper question about ratios and coverage models, how teams are structured, where SEs are deployed, what a pod or a build team looks like in a leaner org designed for a different kind of demand. That conversation is early. The right answers will look different depending on your company’s stage, your GTM motion, and your customer profile. But the fact that it’s surfacing widely and quickly is itself a signal worth paying attention to.
There’s also a talent mix question underneath the leverage question. The emergence of Forward Deployed Engineers isn’t just an organizational design trend, it represents a different kind of profile entering the motion that impacts the Solutions org. More technical. More comfortable in production environments. Building production-level proof. That profile doesn’t replace the traditional SE. But it sits alongside it in ways that most Solutions orgs haven’t had to think about before.
This isn’t a future state conversation. It’s happening now. At our Virtual Kickoff, Leah McTiernan shared that DocuSign is actively piloting a deployed engineering role in their federal business. Alok Agrawal described moving Rubrik toward deep domain specialists, people embedded by outcome area, not product line because customers now demand expertise, not demos. And we’re hearing leaders from companies of all sizes confirm the same pattern: FDEs living in engineering, in solutions, in pods that span both, with no consensus yet on where they belong. The org design is unsettled. That’s exactly why the leaders who are defining the answer now won’t be waiting for the model to be handed to them.
The question we’d put to every Solutions leader is this: do you have a point of view on what your team looks like in two years? Not a headcount plan. A model. Because the leaders who define that answer will have a very different conversation with their CRO and CFO than the ones who don’t.
The opening
These pressures aren’t separate. The internal case for Solutions gets stronger the more clearly you can demonstrate that your team is the one answering the call for more proof. The leaders who connect those dots, who build the internal narrative around what they’re delivering to customers and why no other function can do it, are the ones who will emerge better on the other side.
The SaaS crash has spurred a lot of noise about the impact AI is having on GTM, but reality is a lot of these trends have been in motion for a while and we’ve been seeing these signals for years. We just needed that first domino to fall.
The profession has spent years making the case for its strategic value. And now the market has become a forcing function.
This is the conversation SolutionExec exists for. We’ll be going deeper on all of these topics (the FDE model, talent mix, how to build the internal business case, what the coverage model looks like in a leaner org) in future newsletters and our upcoming programming. So if these questions are live for you right now, you’re in the right place.
If any of this resonates, here’s where to go next.
Watch the conversations: Our full Virtual Kickoff, including the sessions with Leah McTiernan and Alok Agrawal, is available on the SolutionExec YouTube channel. Worth a watch.
Apply for Off the Record: Our invite-only in-person conference for Solutions executives is happening April 15 in New York City. Spots are limited. If you want in, apply at solutionexec.com/offtherecord.
Join the network: If you’re not already signed up, head to solutionexec.com. Executive content, virtual roundtables, and access to the people having these conversations, all in one place.
These are the questions SolutionExec exists to work through. We’ll keep going deeper.