Lead a presales team that wins more, scales faster and gets credit for growth.
Capacity, qualification discipline, the demo and POC motion, career paths for SEs, and your own standing with the CRO. We have built these teams from scratch, scaled them past 150 people, and fixed them when they stopped working.
This page is for you if you lead sales engineers or solution consultants, from your first ten to a global organization.
What is at stake
SE hours spread across unwinnable pipeline. POCs that become unpaid production builds. Demos that tour features instead of telling a story. A team that is busy, respected, and still not credited for growth.
Agents plus people
Agents draft the demo script, the discovery plan and the POC success criteria from the account record. SEs spend their hours on the conversation, the architecture call and the proof. A team of ten starts to cover like a team of fifteen.
How we help
- Presales maturity assessment. Know what you are missing. Annual strategy usually amounts to doing what you already do, a little better, so the changes that matter never get considered. This facilitated, point-by-point assessment compares your org to the best in the business, area by area: a shared vision of the ideal, an honest current state, priorities by IC and leadership level, and a gap analysis that drops straight into your OKRs.
- Presales operating review. Coverage, time allocation, qualification gates, POC design, and where agents take the research, prep and first drafts so each SE covers more.
- Presales as a business. The economics of hiring, retention and winning deals, and the rules of thumb that fall out of them (hint: it is retention). Plus the manager's toolbox: the metrics, conversation templates and cadence that keep a team driving results.
- SE enablement. Own Your Outcome: how SE choices move the Rule of 40 and the stock price. Executive discovery that gets to the economic buyer.
- The Storytelling Demo. Don't demo. Tell a story. A one-day workshop that replaces the feature tour with a first-person story. Half the day is the science: six findings about how buyers' brains handle narrative, emotion and bias, each proven with a game. Half is the craft: Freytag's Pyramid applied to a demo through six exercises, closing on a decision the buyer can make now. The signature exercise is the contrast demo, the same product shown as a feature tour and then as a story.
- Hiring and career tracks. Do you need more technical people or more business people, gearheads or communicators? The Ideal Match profile ties your hiring profile to what your customers need; the Curiosity Screen first interview predicts long-term success better than any resume; behavioral hiring keeps the people you win. Then career ladders for the leadership and IC tracks, with the skills for each level, so your best SEs see a path and stay. One engagement promoted three SEs to director in six months.
- Fractional presales leadership. Great SEs get promoted to lead with no training in how to set up and run a practice, and they learn by making expensive mistakes. When a full-time presales VP is not justified, a fractional leader for a few hours a week sets the ratios, the KPIs and the POC rules, mentors the leader you have, and makes sure decisions are made right the first time.
- Leadership coaching. For first-time and scaling presales leaders.
Resources for you
The SE time-allocation taxonomy as a template, the qualification gate checklist, Own Your Outcome as a free session, the Storytelling Demo intro as a short video with the contrast demo as a clip, and Field notes: a short monthly read on one real problem and how a team solved it.
First release coming soon. Leave your email to get it when it ships.