Leading PreSales | The Solution Engineering Leadership Show
Jan-Erik Jank & Tim Brömme
Podcast
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
Your AI Policy Is a Competitive Disadvantage [65]
Gestern•6:12
Ava comes back from a GTM leadership dinner where almost nobody knew the new AI labeling rules — and where one leader used AI as a sparring partner while another had ten agents calling prospects. She and Nate argue about blanket transcription bans, who should own AI for the revenue org, and where corporate brakes actually earn their keep.
ROI on Token: Stop Rewarding AI Usage [64]
Vor 3 Tagen•6:15
Ava ran an AI session with her twelve SEs and discovered they'd built plenty — but nobody could say what they did with the time they saved. She and Nate dig into why usage metrics feel like progress, and how to make outcomes the thing you actually measure.
Your First 30 Days of AI: The Activation Playbook [63]
Vor 5 Tagen•6:07
Ava counted nine different AI tools across her twelve SEs — because she never actually decided anything. She and Nate work through the four decisions a PreSales leader can make in the first thirty days: one environment, three data sources, one bootcamp, one recurring forum.
Clash of Titans: Getting Your SE and Sales First-Liners on the Same Side [62]
11.09.2026•5:53
First-line PreSales and first-line Sales sit on the same org level but got there for opposite reasons, so the friction is structural, not personal. Nate shares the tandem model and qualification vote that cooled things down across his regions, and Ava stress-tests both until they hold up.
Spot the Super-IC Before the Numbers Do [61]
09.09.2026•5:49
Nate shares the behavioural signals that expose a first-line SE manager who's really just a super-IC with a title — visible in how they design their forecast call and how they write email under pressure. Ava pushes on whether that's coachable or structural.
Fifty Leaders, One Borrowed Office [60]
07.09.2026•6:00
Nate has paid for enough conferences that were four sponsor pitches and a sad sandwich. Ava walks him through the community's on-site evenings, the 49-euro commitment fee, the new member portal, and the European roadshow that starts in London on 13 October.