Explore every episode of the podcast Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ava read the Metrics field on two live deals side by side and couldn't tell which customer was which. She and Nate dig into why qualification frameworks collapse without a published quality standard — and where the reinforcement actually has to live.

Nate noticed that new SE managers introduce themselves to sales by explaining the presales process, and it builds resistance before anything else happens. He and Ava work out what to open with instead, and how to map the counterparts you actually need.

A room full of leaders kept saying 'efficiency' — and none could measure it. Why depth, not efficiency, is the goal AI should serve.

Every AI use case in this series runs on transcripts — so: are you even allowed to record? The consent and compliance reality, from works councils to defense sectors.

Every team splits into AI first-movers, followers, and refusers — and the gap widens daily. Why handing out logins isn't enablement.

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.

Nate noticed one of his managers had cancelled her team's weekly learning slot nine times out of eleven, always for a good reason. He and Ava dig into why a fixed thirty minutes only survives if the leader is willing to have the awkward conversation with sales.

Nate argues that corporate strategy is written so abstractly that most SEs never connect it to their week — and the first-line SE leader is the only person who can translate it. Ava pushes on whether a three-hour kickoff discussion survives when the strategy itself is mush.

The highest-leverage thing one team built all year, for almost nothing: thirty-second customer stories, AI-distilled and memorized. Craft and machine in one move.

A lovely discovery call that produced zero numbers. Customers scatter breadcrumbs — 'slow', 'error-prone' — and the whole skill is following them to a figure.

Your SEs are great at explaining what a feature does and terrible at answering 'so what?' A simple four-word tool that drags a team out of feature-dumping.

Nate once fixed a team's morale with a finance lecture. Why business acumen is the top future skill — and the one we're collectively worst at.

Same product, four industries, and a customer who smells a tourist in one question. Is vertical expertise something you hire, or something AI can now fake?

FDE is on every job posting and triggering half the industry. Nate and Ava separate what's genuinely new about Forward Deployed Engineers from what's repackaged.

Nate saw a one-line prompt produce textbook-generic demo advice, and a comment section full of people saying "it needs more context" without ever building any. He and Ava work out how SE leaders turn that context into a shared enablement asset — and what it does for coaching between 1:1s.