An SE got the call request with fifteen minutes' notice: "The prospect just wants to see the product. Don't overthink it." She ran the generic demo. Two weeks later the deal was dead. There's a better move — and it doesn't require winning the discovery-vs-demo argument with your AE.

Next time an AE says "just show them the product," don't argue. Take the meeting. Coach your SE to open with three questions before a single screen gets shared. After the call, send the AE what you learned. Prove the model through results, not philosophy.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

An SE leader pulled his utilization numbers and found 31% of customer-facing hours going to deals that never made it past stage two. The fix wasn't more discipline — it was a written, signed-off definition of what must be true before a deal gets SE time.

Sit with your sales counterpart and define, on paper, what must be true before a deal gets SE time. Four green-light criteria, four red flags. Share it with both teams. And when someone pushes back, point to the page — not the person.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

A presales leader who built a thirty-person SE team just took a job as Head of Sales. In his first month he discovered the parts of the funnel he had never seen as an SE leader — and the parts of his old frustrations that suddenly made sense from the AE chair.

You don't need to switch roles to switch perspectives. This quarter, arrange for one of your SEs — or yourself — to shadow an AE for a full week. And when you come back, don't just share what you learned. Propose one concrete change to how the two teams plan, share information, and own outcomes together.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

An SE leader built a system that scores every customer call on two categories — compelling event and technical win — using conversation intelligence plus a custom rubric. The aggregate scores per deal and per SE replace win-rate post-mortems with real-time coaching.

Pick two categories that matter most for your sales motion. Write down what a one and a five look like — concrete, not aspirational. Start scoring calls and aggregating per deal. When you roll it out, lead with the rubric and do the training yourself. Make it a development tool that happens to produce data, not a surveillance system that happens to coach.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

An SE leader running thirty SEs across multiple markets split his enablement into two completely separate tracks: an internal team for product knowledge and an external partner for sales skills. They never overlap — and that's the point.

Split your enablement into two tracks. Internal team owns product knowledge, demos, technical onboarding. External partner owns sales methodology, discovery, positioning. Protect both calendars equally — the moment a product release eats your sales skills time, you're back to one pillar pretending to be two.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

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

If you have more than six direct reports and your team is still growing, start the team-lead conversation with your leadership today. Build the case around what you could be doing with freed-up capacity — and start identifying the SEs other SEs already go to for advice. Don't wait until you're drowning to ask for a lifeboat.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

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 from his customers' world — and they got into customer meetings independently in three months instead of four.

If you're in a vertical product company struggling to find SE talent, look at your customer's org chart. Rewrite the job description around the domain ("deep understanding of financial close processes") instead of years of presales experience — then redirect the budget you save on product training into structured sales skills development.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

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.

• Why auditors, lawyers, and tax advisors still get paid in an LLM world
• The CFO question that ends most AI-first vendor pitches: "if the model is wrong, who pays?"
• Why accountability can't be demoed — but it can be told
• Where to find the stories that aren't in your sales library yet

This week, pull your team's last ten customer reference stories. Read each one with a single question — "is this about features delivered, or outcomes owned?" The ratio tells you exactly where to invest in training and content this quarter.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

Roadmaps are wishlists. Release notes are receipts. Ava walks through how she now evaluates every vendor when she's buying software for her own team — and why the way she buys today is exactly how her customers will buy from her tomorrow.

• Why a 12-month roadmap is the wrong artifact to evaluate a vendor on
• Cadence relative to peer set: how to compare release velocity without comparing to AI labs
• The pivot: if SE leaders are doing this as buyers, customers will start doing it too
• Why a static one-pager contradicts the velocity message — and how a live release page fixes it

This week, pull your product's last six months of public release notes. Build a live page — a URL that compiles from your release feed and updates every time you ship. Put it in front of every SE on your team.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call

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 and as builders of their own product story.

• Why the GUI is becoming the wrong place for products to be evaluated
• The backwards pricing logic of "free GUI, Enterprise-only API"
• How customer expectations are shifting toward agentic, MCP-aware workflows
• The two-way move: audit your own product's API maturity AND your team's vendor selection process

This week, walk over to product and ask "what's our API surface, and is it gated behind which tier?" Then add API/MCP availability to your team's own vendor evaluation rubric. Don't pick tools your future workflows can't talk to.

🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales

📅 Book a Discovery Call: calendly.com/serockstars-tim/discovery-call