Variable pay for sales engineers: team number, individual deals or neither?

We did go to individual deal credit and your worry is justified. Within two quarters we had engineers lobbying account executives to be put on the big opportunities, and proof-of-concept work on small deals was going unstaffed. We reversed it after a year.

Pods work until the ratio gets thin. At one engineer to three sellers it is fine. We are at one to six in some regions, and the pod number becomes so diluted that it is a regional plan under another name. If you are short of engineers, fix that first.

Does the German works council have a view? Ours treated the move from a team measure to an individual one as a change needing their agreement, and it added about three months. Build that into the timetable whichever design you choose.