Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show

By Jan-Erik Jank & Tim BrömmeBusiness Careers Management

Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show episodes

July 03The Octopus Problem [33]
Taming scattered deal context with AI — without drowning in integrations.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss
Why fragmented context gets worse as you scale — and why more tools isn't the fix
Starting from the decision you need to make, not 'gather everything'
The weekly-curation habit that turns a raw inbox into a searchable memory
The move
Pick one weekly decision that's currently a scramble. Build the smallest possible loop to answer it — one raw inbox, one weekly curation hour, one sharp question — before you request a single integration.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
July 01Hire or Pass — The Scoring Problem [32]
Hiring Series 4/4. Three interviewers, three opinions, no shared rubric — and how to fix it before the loudest voice in the debrief wins.
Series finale (part 4 of 4) on hiring the right SE. Three interviewers, the same candidate, three completely different evaluations — and the most senior person in the room won the debrief. Four months later: performance plan. The structured scorecard that fixes the unstructured-evaluation problem.
What Nate and Ava discuss
Why a 1-to-3 scale forces a decision where 1-to-5 lets everyone cluster at 3
Non-negotiable minimums — categories where a 1 is an automatic pass, no matter how charming the candidate
The halo and horn effects — and why structured scoring protects you from both
Blind scoring before the debrief — and why disagreements are the most valuable part of it
Why the hire-or-pass criteria must be written BEFORE you start interviewing
The move
Build your scorecard before the next interview. Categories down the left, one-to-three scale across the top. Define what a 1 and a 3 look like for each category — write it down so every interviewer is grading the same exam. Score during, not after. Submit blind. And decide based on the pattern, not the peak.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 29Eight People, One Demo — Who Are You Talking To? [31]
Hiring Series 3/4. The behavioral interview is a storytelling contest. Live scenarios show you what candidates will actually do.
Part 3 of 4 on hiring the right SE. The standard behavioral interview is a storytelling contest — every experienced SE has a polished version of every story. Live scenarios show you what candidates will actually do.
What Nate and Ava discuss
The multi-audience demo scenario — and the gap between "start with the overview" and "open with the VP's business problem"
The competitor objection — weak answers trash the competitor; strong ones pivot to discovery
The blocked deal — separates SEs who think the job ends at the demo from SEs who understand the full cycle
Why putting an AE on the SE interview panel catches things SE Managers miss
The move
Add a live scenario round to your SE interview. Pick one — the multi-audience demo, the competitor objection, or the blocked deal. Give a two-sentence setup. Watch how they think, not just what they say. And if you can, put an AE on the panel. The person who'll partner with this SE every day deserves a voice in the hiring decision.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 26I Don't Know — And That's the Right Answer [30]
Hiring Series 2/4. Two interview moments that tell you more than any resume line — bluffing under pressure and how candidates handle real feedback.
Part 2 of 4 on hiring the right SE. A candidate confidently answered a technical question completely wrong, and that moment told the interviewers everything. Two interview signals that predict an SE's ceiling: coachability and self-awareness.
What Nate and Ava discuss
The bluff vs. the "I don't know but here's how I'd find out" — and why reasoning out loud IS the job
"What's the hardest feedback you've ever received?" — and why the emotional honesty matters more than the answer
The over-coachability problem — the candidate who agrees with everything has no spine
Testing whether candidates can distinguish real feedback from noise
The move
Add two moments to your next SE interview. First — ask a question the candidate probably can't answer. Bluff, shutdown, or honest reasoning? Second — give real feedback after a role-play, mixing a valid note with a matter-of-style one. Do they integrate, debate, or deflect? Those two moments tell you more about a person's ceiling than anything on their LinkedIn.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 24Stop Hiring Resumes [29]
Hiring Series 1/4. Why filtering for experience first gives you a shortlist who all look the same — and what to filter for instead.
Part 1 of a four-part series on hiring the right SE. The perfect-on-paper hire who fell apart in month three — and the reframe that changed how Ava interviews. Stop screening for what people have done. Screen for how they think, how they handle pressure, and how they respond when you tell them they got it wrong.
What Nate and Ava discuss
Why experience-first filtering produces a shortlist who all look the same — and why you then pick on demo-of-a-demo skill
The coachability test — a five-minute role-play with real-time feedback, watching whether they integrate, debate, or deflect
Why polished STAR-format answers are often a red flag, and why "that deal was a mess" can be a green one
Confusing confidence with competence — the candidate who commands the room vs. the one who asks you questions
The move
Before your next SE interview, audit your questions. How many test knowledge versus how many test thinking? If more than half are "tell me about a time when" — you're screening for storytelling, not for the skills that matter. Add one role-play. Add one real-time feedback moment. Watch what happens.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 22Your AE Won't Brief You — Now What? [28]
Stop waiting for the briefing. The SE team creates the demand for it — one Slack message at a time.
An SE Manager complained her SEs weren't getting briefed before customer calls. The honest follow-up question: "Did they ASK for a briefing?" They hadn't. They just showed up and hoped. There's a better playbook — light from the SE side, structural from the leadership side.
What Nate and Ava discuss
The six-question pre-call checklist — and why the framing matters more than the form
The lightweight Slack version that works 70% of the time without any process
Leader-to-leader escalation for the chronic non-briefers — and why ground-level confrontation makes it personal
Why the SE's question often becomes the AE's preparation trigger
The move
Give your SEs one pre-call question — even just one. "What's the pain and who's in the room?" Make it casual, make it Slack, make it thirty seconds. Track which AEs go consistently dark. That pattern is the conversation you bring to sales leadership — with data, not complaints.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 19Just Show Them the Product [27]
The five words every SE hates — and the fifteen-minute move that turns a product tour back into a conversation.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss
The mini-discovery — three questions that frame the demo around the customer's actual situation without sounding like an interrogation
Why you tailor the narrative, not the build — same demo, different lens
When the mini-discovery is a rescue play (first call) vs. when it signals something broke upstream (call three)
The debrief move — sending what you learned back to the AE turns a rescue into pipeline intelligence
The move
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.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 17Define SE-Qualified — Or Your Calendar Will [26]
Stop saying yes to every "jump on this call." Write down the bar — and point to the page, not the person.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss
The four green-light criteria — and the explicit red-list of what does NOT qualify
Why aligning the criteria with your sales counterpart removes the politics from SE pushback
How to start when you don't have a peer-level sales relationship — pilot with one AE, then bring the numbers up
The move
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.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 15I Switched Sides [25]
What an SE leader sees in their first month as Head of Sales.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss
The parts of the funnel SE leaders never see — top-of-funnel prospecting and procurement grind
Why "AEs don't qualify properly" looks different when you're carrying their workload
How shadowing without structural change is just a nice bonding exercise
The move
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.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min
June 12Score the Call, Not Just the Quarter [24]
A two-category rubric, AI scoring, and the coaching conversations it unlocks.
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.
What Nate and Ava discuss
Why win rates are lagging indicators and call-level scores are leading ones
How to roll out call scoring without it feeling like surveillance — transparency, shared rubrics, leading by example
Why two SE-specific categories beat trying to score the whole call — and why those categories should sit at the SE/AE handoff
The move
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.
🚀 Join the PreSales Leadership Community: serockstars.com/community
🔗 Resources & Links: paths.to/presales
7 min

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Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show

Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show episodes

About Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show