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
Ava keeps meeting PreSales leaders whose sales org rolled out MEDDICC and never invited them. She and Nate work out which letters SEs actually own — and how to claim a seat at that table without turning it into a turf war.
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 reinforcement actually has to live.
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 counterparts you actually need.
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 have the awkward conversation with sales.