Presales’ leadership is changing fast.
Teams are leaner. Buyer expectations are higher. Deals are more complex. And the role itself keeps expanding beyond product expertise into business acumen, storytelling, and strategic execution.
In a recent live session featuring two Saleo customers, Danny Garcia sat down with Brian Cody, VP of Sales Engineering at Clari, and Morgan Ballevre, Director of Solutions Consulting at impact.com, to unpack what effective presales leadership looks like today. What emerged was a clear message: building a great presales team now requires more than technical rigor.
Here are the five biggest takeaways from the conversation.
1. The best presales professionals are defined by more than product expertise
One of the clearest messages from the session was that great presales talent today is multidimensional.
Brian Cody explained that at Clari, they’ve simplified the role into three core competencies: advice, solution, compete. Advice represents an understanding of the market and personas, and the acumen to have conversations around the business problems. Solution is deep technical and product expertise. Compete is fully understanding the competitive landscape and how to effectively differentiate the software.
Morgan Ballevre reinforced the same point from a slightly more human-centered angle. He emphasized the most important qualities are not just technical, they’re deeply interpersonal. “You’ve to be curious about your customers, understanding what’s happening in their world, what’s happening within their tech ecosystem, within their industry, with their company, but also curious about the person that is behind the person company that you’re trying to sell into.” Morgan emphasized, “you cannot be truly a good solution consultant or pre-sales expert if you don’t have empathy towards your client.”
That matters because buyers no longer need someone to simply walk them through features. They need someone who understands their world, centers the right problem, and helps connect the product to business outcomes.
2. Coaching starts with understanding your people
Modern presales leadership is not just operational. It is personal.
Morgan made that point especially well when he said, “Driving professional growth is about understanding people more than anything, where they are in their career, where they are in their personal life.”
That is a powerful reminder for presales leaders. Career growth is rarely linear, and performance rarely exists in a vacuum. What motivates one team member may be completely different from what motivates another. Some are looking for leadership opportunities. Others want deeper specialization. Others may simply be in a season of life where stability matters more than acceleration.
Danny Garcia added, “At the end of the day, we’re humans working with humans and you’ve got to treat them as such. Everyone’s different. So you’ve got to figure out what it is that makes them tick.”
That kind of continuous, people-first leadership is what builds trust and trust is what makes feedback, development, and retention work.
3. Discovery and storytelling have become core skills
If your team wants to improve demos, discovery and storytelling have to move out of the “soft skills” category and into the core operating model.
Brian Cody put it simply: “Good discovery is really a byproduct of two things. It’s natural curiosity, which you should be hiring for. And then there’s confidence. Confidence is generally built by expertise as you get more comfortable in the products.”
He also emphasized that leaders need to lead from the front and make sure they’re modeling storytelling themselves.
Morgan echoed that point. “Buyers are more educated than ever,” he said, which means the job is no longer to separate technical and business discovery into neat buckets. Instead, “this is about you understanding customers so that you can solve their problem”.
This is the shift many presales teams are still adjusting to. Discovery is not just an early-stage checklist. Storytelling is not just a nice-to-have in a demo. Together, they are increasingly what determines whether a team can create urgency, relevance, and confidence in a buying process.
4. Effective feedback requires empathy and clarity
One of the strongest practical takeaways from the session was around feedback.
Brian shared a simple but effective technique his team uses consistently: “We ask for self feedback.” In both hiring and coaching, the question is the same: “What went well. What would you have done differently?”
That approach matters because it creates openness instead of defensiveness. It encourages ownership. It also helps leaders coach the why behind performance, not just the outcome.
Morgan added another important nuance: even strong performers need detailed coaching. “It’s about going from good to great, there is always possibility to improve.”
In other words, feedback should not be reserved only for obvious performance gaps. The best leaders use it to sharpen top performers too.
5. Retention requires creative career paths, not just promotions
When it comes to keeping great presales talent, promotions into management are only one option.
Brian made that point clearly when talking about internal growth. “Pretty much everybody that I’ve hired as a leader has acted like a leader before officially stepping into management.” But he also highlighted other options, like creating alternative roles when management is not the right or available next step.
He described how his team explored “a field CTO role” for a strong technical presales leader, aligned the role across leadership and HR, and built a path that matched both business needs and the employee’s aspirations.
That is the kind of creativity that truly nurtures great presales teams. Growth can look like leadership, but it can also look like specialization, cross-functional influence, or strategic ownership.
Final thoughts
This discussion made one thing clear: the best presales teams are not built through technical excellence alone.
They are built by leaders who know how to define modern excellence, coach the human behind the role, raise the bar on discovery and storytelling, normalize regular feedback, and create meaningful paths for growth.
Or, as Morgan put it, “You need to double down on those human skills, which truly make the difference.”
Watch the full discussion to find out how the best SEs are rising to meet today’s challenges.
