Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show

An SE leader running thirty SEs split his enablement into two completely separate tracks — internal product team plus external sales partner — and refused to let one absorb the other.

An SE leader scaled from three to thirteen direct reports in eighteen months before getting team leads approved. By then he wasn't coaching anyone — he was doing triage.

An SE leader scaling from five to twenty SEs stopped hiring from the presales talent pool. His last six hires were former controllers and accountants — and they ramped faster than his traditional SE hires.

When demos commoditize and AI-first competitors look better on paper, what wins deals? Nate makes the case that accountability is now the durable moat — and explains how SE leaders need to retrain teams to sell it.

Ava walks through how she now evaluates every vendor — and why the way she buys software today is exactly how her customers will buy from her tomorrow.

SaaS vendors are still hiding their API behind the Enterprise tier — and your customers are about to start asking for it. Nate breaks down what API maturity now means for SE leaders, both as buyers of software and as builders of their own product story.

Ava sent twelve SEs to a leadership course; six finished. The vendor wasn't the problem — she was. Nate and Ava unpack why training dies without manager reinforcement, and the one move that flips completion from 30% to 80%.

Nate shares an experiment: two SE teams, same AI demo tool, wildly different results. The difference? A fifteen-minute discovery gate that most teams skip.

Ava's team runs on agent orchestration that one of her SEs built on weekends. Nate pushes on the hard leadership questions this raises.

Your SE ran a dry run, sent a strategy reminder, and built a tight agenda. Five minutes into the demo, an AE went off-script and the whole flow collapsed. Nate and Ava break down why prepping the content isn't enough — and what SE leaders should do instead.

Before you can optimize the pre-demo huddle between your AE and SE, you need to make sure it actually happens. Nate and Ava discuss habit-first, quality-second.

What happens when your most experienced SE has been running demos for seven years with zero coaching? Nate and Ava discuss how to start that conversation without breaking trust.

When prospects keep scheduling more demos and bringing new faces, it looks like momentum. But what if the first demo just did not land?

Ava called all twelve of her SEs eight days after a two-day offsite. She asked one question. Only three could answer. This episode is about the Friday after — where enablement actually happens, and what SE leaders should put on the calendar before anyone books the workshop.

In a deal review, Nate asked one of his SE Directors a single question: who's going to be in the room when this gets signed off? She couldn't answer. Four months into the deal, strong champion, and she couldn't name a single other stakeholder. In this episode: why 'arm the champion and trust them' has stopped working, and the concrete tool to replace it.

A six-week-old new hire asked Ava a question she couldn't answer in the moment: if AI does the research, drafts the RFP, handles the standard demo, and now negotiates quotes — what am I actually for? Ava's first answer was good. Nate tells her it's dangerous. Together they land on a better one.

One of Nate's SE Directors just lost a deal she was convinced she was winning. Three-vendor shortlist, great demo, champion fired up. Week two — gone. Nate explains why the deal was probably lost before it ever showed up in her pipeline, and what that means for how SE teams should operate.

Ava pulled her team out of every standard post-demo technical deep-dive. Her team thought she was insane. Win rates went up. In this episode, she tells Nate what triggered it — and Nate pushes back on the 'cancel them all' framing with a sharp point about necessary theater at enterprise scale.

Nate shares the hard lesson that changed how he develops SEs: pick one skill per quarter, go deep, and watch mastery compound.

Nate and Ava explore why the standard "how are you" check-in fails SE leaders — and what to ask instead to surface real signals before you lose your best people.

Ava reveals the single question that exposes whether a deal is real or just activity — and how going deep on one deal beats going shallow on eight.

Most SE leaders run their one-on-ones the same way: open the pipeline, go deal by deal, close the laptop. Ava shares a structure that changed everything for her team.

Before Nate and Ava take over, Tim Brömme introduces Leading PreSales. What the show is about, who the characters are, why the voices are AI-generated, and why the experiences behind them are very real.