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 250+ Solution Engineers across companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zscaler, and more. The conversations are scripted by humans, performed by AI.
Produced by SE Rockstars (serockstars.com)
An SE leader scaling from five to twenty SEs stopped hiring from the presales talent pool. His last six hires were former controllers and accountants — and they ramped faster than his traditional SE hires.
When demos commoditize and AI-first competitors look better on paper, what wins deals? Nate makes the case that accountability is now the durable moat — and explains how SE leaders need to retrain teams to sell it.
Ava walks through how she now evaluates every vendor — and why the way she buys software today is exactly how her customers will buy from her tomorrow.
SaaS vendors are still hiding their API behind the Enterprise tier — and your customers are about to start asking for it. Nate breaks down what API maturity now means for SE leaders, both as buyers of software and as builders of their own product story.