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Part 2 of 4. The bluffer who didn't flinch — and what that moment told us about how he'd behave in front of a customer. Two signals that predict an SE's ceiling: coachability and self-awareness.

Part 1 of 4 on hiring the right SE. The perfect-on-paper hire who fell apart in month three — and the reframe that changed how Ava interviews. Filter for thinking and coachability, not experience and storytelling.

Most SE leaders frame the briefing problem as "AEs don't respect our time." The honest reframe: SE teams have to create the demand for the briefing — and build an escalation path for the AEs who never respond.

When the AE says "the prospect just wants to see the product," don't fight it. Take the meeting — and steal the first fifteen minutes for a mini-discovery that changes the demo on the fly.

An SE org found that 31% of customer-facing hours went to deals that died in stage two. The fix wasn't more discipline — it was a written, agreed-upon definition of what "SE-qualified" means.

A former presales leader took a Head of Sales role and discovered the parts of the funnel he never saw before — and the cross-functional changes only an SE-turned-AE-leader can push for.

An SE leader uses AI to score every customer call on two categories — compelling event and technical win — and aggregates the scores per deal and per SE. The result is leading-indicator data SEs can actually act on.

An SE leader running thirty SEs split his enablement into two completely separate tracks — internal product team plus external sales partner — and refused to let one absorb the other.

An SE leader scaled from three to thirteen direct reports in eighteen months before getting team leads approved. By then he wasn't coaching anyone — he was doing triage.

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.