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Ava asked her CRO for three more SEs and got one question back: prove the twelve you have are on the right deals. She rebuilt the ask as a capacity model — and found one AE eating 38% of her team's hours.

A one-line strategy slide can redirect an entire go-to-market motion, but the retraining, domain language and demo assets all land on the SE leader. Nate argues for naming a second ICP as insurance long before anyone asks for it, and Ava pressure-tests whether a twelve-person team can afford that hedge.

Nate's CRO used the word "PreSales" once in a forty-minute quarterly review — to ask why the team is still called that. He and Ava dig into why the pre/post split is an artefact of an older business model, and what to propose before someone proposes it for you.

Nate gets handed a fifteen percent AI efficiency target with no definition attached, and watches his regions buy eleven tools instead of creating capacity. He and Ava work out how to name the output of reclaimed hours before a single licence gets signed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.