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Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show
Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show episodes
- Feature, Capability, Outcome, Metric [43]A four-word tool that drags a team out of feature-dumping.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss- Feature to Capability to Outcome to Metric, and why the value is all the way right
- Why the metric must come from the customer, never the template
- Leading with the outcome before you click, so the demo becomes a series of payoffs
The moveMake feature-capability-outcome-metric a required step of demo prep — but populate the metric from the customer's own numbers. Discovery first, framework second.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min - If This Were Your Business [42]Business acumen: the top future skill, and the one we're worst at.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss- Why SEs retreat to technology the moment a room turns commercial
- Teaching the 'why': translate the earnings call into what it means for your team
- Hiring for commercial sense before product knowledge
The moveStop assuming your team understands the business. Translate your last earnings call, line by line, into what it means for them — and get every SE asking 'if this were my business.'
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min - The Vertical You Can't Fake [41]Is vertical expertise something you hire, or something AI can now fake?
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?
What Nate and Ava discuss- Knowledge problem vs. distribution problem — diagnose which you have
- How AI raises the prep floor but not the credibility ceiling
- Hire-from-the-industry-and-teach-sales, versus the reverse
The moveDecide per vertical whether your gap is knowledge or distribution. Build the 'get deep fast' muscle in everyone with AI prep — and hire the natives for the deals where the ceiling is what wins.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
6 min - Forward Deployed — Real or Buzzword? [40]Separating what's new about FDEs from what's just repackaged.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss- Outcome-based selling: deliver first, contract after the KPIs hit
- The failure mode — expensive bodies firefighting a walled-off pilot
- Why the org design (inject, extract, hand off) is the actual hard part
The moveIf you're standing up FDEs, get ruthless about the org design before the title: where the role gets injected, how it gets extracted, and who it hands off to.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min - Stop Chasing Efficiency [39]Depth, not efficiency, is the goal AI should serve.
A room full of leaders kept saying 'efficiency' — and none could measure it. Why depth, not efficiency, is the goal AI should serve.
What Nate and Ava discuss- Why 'efficiency' quietly optimizes teams into doing shallow work faster
- Shift-left: AI on the routine tail, human depth on the deals you choose to win
- 'More with the same' as an invitation, versus 'more with less' as a threat
The moveAudit where your team's AI time actually goes. Redirect the savings deliberately — AI on the routine tail, your best human depth on the deals you've chosen to win.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
6 min - Can We Even Record This? [38]The consent and compliance reality underneath every AI use case.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss- The employee side: framing call analysis as development, not surveillance
- The customer side: sectors that are off-limits, and the one-sentence consent ask
- Transcribe-don't-record, default-off, and looping in legal early
The moveMap both sides before you build on transcripts: your one-sentence customer consent ask, and the employee-side framing. Default your tools to off, and bring legal or your works council in early.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
6 min - Leaders, Followers, and the Refusers [37]Your team is splitting into AI speeds. Handing out logins won't fix it.
Every team splits into AI first-movers, followers, and refusers — and the gap widens daily. Why handing out logins isn't enablement.
What Nate and Ava discuss- Distribution vs. enablement — and why peer proof beats mandates
- Letting innovation grow at the edges, then surfacing and spreading it
- Fear vs. defiance — the two very different refuser conversations
The moveStop handing out logins. Build a standing rhythm where people show each other real work — peer proof moves followers far better than any top-down mandate.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
6 min - Bottle Your Best SE [36]Capturing your best SE's judgment before it walks out the door.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss- Turning your top SEs' thinking into day-one onboarding leverage
- Capturing the 'why', not just the output, so it teaches
- The contribution-and-vote funnel that keeps skills fresh at scale
The moveExtract one thing your strongest SEs do brilliantly into a reusable skill — with the reasoning attached. Then build a funnel so the best ideas compound instead of going stale.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
6 min - Thirteen Pages, Nothing Validated [35]AI turns three bullets into a polished document that validates nothing.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss- How hollow AI context poisons the next person downstream
- The inversion: AI does the commodity 80%, the human owns the irreplaceable 20%
- Why customers can smell AI content — and summarize it right back
The moveBefore an AI document goes anywhere, highlight only what you personally validated. That's your real content. Add the three human sentences the machine could never know.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
6 min - Garbage In, Confidence Out [34]Before you automate discovery, define what good actually looks like.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss- Why automating a weak baseline just industrializes the weakness
- Extracting 'what good looks like' from your two or three best SEs
- Keeping a human on the output long enough to catch drift
The moveBefore automating any part of the SE workflow, write down what good looks like — sourced from your strongest people. Then, and only then, let the machine scale it.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
6 min
About Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show
From the publisher's feed
Two voices. Two perspectives. One goal: making you a better PreSales leader.
Leading PreSales is a weekly podcast where Nate Hargrove and Ava Vasquez break down the real challenges of solution engineering leadership — in five minutes or less.
Nate brings 12 years of SE leadership experience from enterprise SaaS. He's the pragmatist who's seen it all, led through reorgs and acquisitions, and knows what actually works at scale.
Ava brings the builder's perspective — five years of leadership in high-growth Scale-Ups, where she built an SE team from zero to twelve and went from Series B to IPO. She challenges conventional thinking with modern frameworks and a coaching-first mindset.
Each episode: one topic, one honest conversation, one practical move you can use the same week.
Topics include 1:1 coaching, discovery skills, demo strategy, pipeline management, hiring, retention, and everything else that keeps SE leaders up at night.
⚠️ Full transparency: The voices and characters in this podcast are fictional. The content, frameworks, and experiences are based on real-life SE leadership — informed by years of working with 350+ Solution Engineers across companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zscaler, and more. The conversations are scripted by humans, performed by AI.
Produced by SE Rockstars (PreSales Unleashed GmbH) — the team behind the Trusted Advisor Academy, founded by Tim Brömme & Jan-Erik Jank. More at https://serockstars.com