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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
Unknown Host hosts Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show.
Nate's managers spent forty minutes arguing focused entry deals versus full bundles — and nobody could say what one won deal costs in SE effort. He and Ava build the cost model live, then Ava pokes the hole in it: land-a
Ava argues that value isn't a separate framework: it hides inside Identify Pain and Metrics. She and Nate break down the exact escalation from customer symptom to a euro figure — and why that number decides whether you s
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 reinf
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
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
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
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.
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.
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Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show is hosted by Unknown Host. The show is categorised under Business (careers) and has published 0 episodes.
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