Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show

Your best SE's judgment walks out the door at 6pm. Nate and Ava on capturing it in a reusable skill — and why one bottled brain is fragile but a voting funnel is a moat.

AI turns three bullet points into a thirteen-page document that looks like a costly consultant deliverable — and validates none of it. Why polish isn't proof.

AI makes good work faster-good and bad work faster-bad — and now the bad work looks polished. Before you automate discovery or demo prep, you have to define what good looks like.

You're tracking dozens of opportunities across meetings, emails, and chat threads — and the context never comes back together. Nate and Ava on taming the 'octopus' with AI, without requesting seventeen integrations.

Part 4 of 4. Three interviewers, the same candidate, three completely different evaluations — and the loudest voice won the debrief. Four months later: performance plan. The structured scorecard that fixes it.

Part 3 of 4. The single biggest improvement to Ava's hiring quality came from one change — adding a live scenario round. Three scenarios that surface what behavioral questions never will.

Part 2 of 4. The bluffer who didn't flinch — and what that moment told us about how he'd behave in front of a customer. Two signals that predict an SE's ceiling: coachability and self-awareness.

Part 1 of 4 on hiring the right SE. The perfect-on-paper hire who fell apart in month three — and the reframe that changed how Ava interviews. Filter for thinking and coachability, not experience and storytelling.

Most SE leaders frame the briefing problem as "AEs don't respect our time." The honest reframe: SE teams have to create the demand for the briefing — and build an escalation path for the AEs who never respond.

When the AE says "the prospect just wants to see the product," don't fight it. Take the meeting — and steal the first fifteen minutes for a mini-discovery that changes the demo on the fly.

An SE org found that 31% of customer-facing hours went to deals that died in stage two. The fix wasn't more discipline — it was a written, agreed-upon definition of what "SE-qualified" means.

A former presales leader took a Head of Sales role and discovered the parts of the funnel he never saw before — and the cross-functional changes only an SE-turned-AE-leader can push for.

An SE leader uses AI to score every customer call on two categories — compelling event and technical win — and aggregates the scores per deal and per SE. The result is leading-indicator data SEs can actually act on.

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.