This discussion explores what it really takes to grow as a sales engineer in today’s competitive, AI-shaped environment. In a candid conversation moderated by Saleo’s Jason Pierce, Brandi Anderson of eightfold.ai and Logan Rusconi of Outreach share how top SEs are sharpening the fundamentals that still matter most: asking better questions, simplifying demos, tying technical capabilities to business outcomes, and using AI to speed-up prep, streamline workflows, and strengthen delivery. They also unpack how the role is evolving and why business acumen, feedback, practice, and point of view are becoming increasingly important for modern presales professionals.
It is a practical session packed with real-world advice for SEs looking to improve their craft and keep leveling up.
Read the full discussion:
Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone.
Since this is a shorter session, we’re going to go ahead and jump right in.
I’m Laura Cotton, and I want to thank you today for joining us as we’re discussing how SEs are leveling up in the age of AI. I am pleased to be joined today by Brandi Anderson, senior solutions consultant at Eightfold AI, and Logan Rusconi, team lead of global solutions consulting at Outreach.
Jason Pierce, principal sales engineer here at Saleo, will be moderating for us. Before we jump in, two quick reminders.
We’re going to have time for Q&A at the end. Please feel free to submit your questions at any time during the webinar through that Q&A window. We will be saving time at the end for those.
Also, today’s webinar will be recorded and made available to all attendees after the call.
And with that, I’m handing things over to Jason to get us started.
Thank you, Laura. Welcome all.
I’m Jason Pierce, the principal sales engineer here at Saleo, and I’m excited to be moderating what I think should be an insightful and productive conversation. Wanna introduce our two panelists.
We got Brandi Anderson, who is the senior solutions consultant at Eightfold, and Logan Rusconi, the team lead of global solution consulting at Outreach. Between the two of them, they bring experience across some of the most dynamic corners of the SE world, agentic talent intelligence and revenue orchestration.
And I’m genuinely looking forward to what they have to say. Why I think this session matters is the sales engineering role is evolving faster right now than probably ever before.
AI is reshaping how we prep, how we demo, how we communicate value. Buyers are more informed, deals are more complex, and the bar for what great looks like is continuously getting higher.
But through all of it, the fundamentals still matter, possibly more than ever. Curiosity, preparation, the ability to connect technical depth with business outcomes.
What we want to explore today is how top SEs are living those fundamentals in a world that looks very different than it did even just two or three years ago. Whether you’re just starting in your career or you’re a seasoned SE looking to stay sharp, our goal today is that you leave here with something you can put into practice.
So let’s get into it. We will start out with a question around tactical improvements.
And, Brandi, I’m going to throw this one to you first. What is one thing that you do in demos today that you didn’t do earlier in your career?
Oh, good question. Yeah.
You know, early in my career, I really felt strongly that we had to have a great discovery call beforehand, and if they weren’t happening, demos can’t happen and all these things. Right? I think I’ve learned, over time, that discovery happens along the way, every single time we’re having a conversation with a customer.
So the big thing that I do today that I didn’t do really early on in my career was ask more questions. A lot of that, I’m getting help from, AI tools to to figure out, like, what to ask, when to ask it, how to pull that data together.
But every conversation is a chance to understand more about the customers and our prospects, and build better rapport and better solutions for them.
So questions. Ask a lot of them. That’s what I do differently.
I like that. Alright, Logan. What you got for us?
Yeah. I think when you’re a first time sales engineer solutions consultant, whatever you want to call it, you get excited and you want to show everything that your platform can do.
And when you think about it, a good demo in my mind really does three things: A – it’s simple, B – it’s relevant, and C – it’s engaging.
You can always show more, but you can never show less. So a couple things that we’re doing now to make demos more simple, relevant, engaging.
On the simple front, we’re breaking our demos into chapters. So, I’m going to walk you through this agent or this workflow. Here are the two or three things that I want to call out. Here’s what it means to your business. Show them and then go to the next chapter.
A lot of that has been spearheaded by Demo to Win. If y’all haven’t heard of Demo to Win, look it up. It’s awesome.
The second thing I’d say is on the simplicity front, we’re really trying to be quicker to listen, slower to respond, and answering a question with a question.
Brandi, I love you calling that out. I call them guided questions for showing something I should have to ask some sort of question that tees up my talk track.
And then the last thing I’d say that I’m doing now that maybe I didn’t do before is, this is kind of ambiguous, but be more human. Less afraid to know every single thing, getting clarifying questions, etcetera, versus answering a blanketed yes or what do you prefer to a potential question.
I like that.
And the two responses align quite nicely. So I guess to your point, Brandi, of questions questions questions, that is how you figure out what to show.
You’re not going to show the entire platform. You don’t have to give them every piece of what you’re offering.
Focus on what you can tell matters, based on what you’ve learned from them. So I think those two go hand in hand quite nicely.
It’s a good start.
Let’s follow-up on that with a question about AI in the future. There’s going to be a lot of AI on this. No one’s going to be surprised by that.
How are you leveraging this one? Actually, Logan, it’s going to be for you.
How are you leveraging AI in your day to day as an SE to prepare and deliver demos within your product, all the above?
Yeah. Hopefully, we’re all using AI to some extent today to prepare for calls.
One way that I’m using it on a day to day basis, less around preparing for calls, someone on my team actually built a custom GPT. So when I’m going and updating 20 or 30 opportunities per week with the technical risk, whether or not we have the technical win, next steps from a technical point of view, etcetera, I can actually talk to that GPT, and it’ll spit out the format that my leader, my VP, appreciates in forecasting conversations.
And candidly, that saves me an hour and a half, two hours a week. So huge.
Maybe something to look into. Other than that, subtle plug to the product that I do sell, we have agents that do research for us based off of conversational intelligence or publicly available data.
So if I’m walking into a call with a fortune one hundred account, I don’t have to hit control f and go through their 10 k. Everything’s summarized for me by a research agent.
So, blessed to be able to leverage that day to day and go sell it.
Amen. Yeah.
Alright. Brandi?
Well, I’m going to echo a lot of what Logan said. Obviously, prep is a great place to use AI to get that information faster.
We do have an agent available internally that looks across everyone’s data, in all honesty, and pulls together. Like, if I didn’t happen to be on a call that an AE was on, all the data I need to understand what’s going on with that call and with that customer, that gets fed to me.
Usually the first place I start is just trying to understand what’s happening with that prospect or that customer, and then I start planning. The piece that I’ll add here is, I was never particularly big on scripting demos.
I’m like, I don’t need it. It takes a lot of effort, and I’m just going to write down what my flow is.
But now, I’ve built Gemini gems that help me, with a format that I like and the demo format that I tend to use. And it just aggregates all this info that I have about the customer that I’m going to be talking to, puts it into the format, gives me ideas of what flow I should go through, and then spits out a script after that.
So I have a whole process that I can go through. And I’m not reading the script word for word or anything like that.
I just use it as a prep method. Like, oh, I was going to talk about that, but I like the way that you mentioned this here.
I will definitely remember to mention this because, maybe it was something the customer said in a conversation that the AI was able to pull out. So, it’s definitely streamlined a lot of my prep, and made that go a lot faster.
Okay. Yeah.
And I’ll chime in here as well. Not that any AE would ever bring an SE onto a call without giving them enough context. That would never happen.
However, on the off chance it did, you can pull in transcripts from previous calls and get a summary, get bullet points, get some really helpful insights, so you’re not going in completely blind.
And maybe it’s the first call, even the AE hasn’t talked to them yet and you’re coming in just to make the first introduction. Being able to just describe what you’re selling, what you’re trying to propose as the value, and I’m talking to this company and this part of this company. AI can give you some really helpful guidance so you’re not going in completely blind. You get some basic ideas to follow so you’re not completely freewheeling it, which, for me personally, has helped tremendously.
So, yeah, I think we all understand how that can be used to really streamline the process and also just get better insight. Alright.
Let’s go to, how are you speaking to AI in 2026, and how do you differentiate? I’m going to start with you, Logan, on this one again. So how do you differentiate, and how are you speaking to AI in 2026?
Yeah. This is something that I’m relatively passionate about.
I actually posted about it on my LinkedIn last week. But the best presales professionals that I know aren’t demoing AI, but they are doing three things inherently different.
First and foremost, they’re not selling the platform or the change. AI is only valuable if it reshapes behavior for the TAM, right, our customers.
And if you can’t articulate that change, then you’re a product tour guide. Right? We can’t just say click this and this happens.
So we need to be able to sell the change. The other thing is controlling the narrative early and upfront.
In deals, buyers often don’t know what good looks like, what I should do with said agent for a particular use case, or what workflow I should even think about rolling out to solve x y z challenges. And so we need to be very specific in the prescription that we’re trying to offer our customers so that we can control what that good looks like.
I’m huge on having an opinion in these conversations. And then the last thing I’d say that they’re doing is they’re turning demos into a decision.
So as we go through a demo, here’s what this feature does, is now shifting to here’s what it means for your business next quarter. Right? And so there’s a level of business acumen that’s obviously necessary to articulate that.
But that’s sort of what we’re doing. And I don’t think AI is making it necessarily easier to sell like we’re talking about, but it’s highlighting the gaps in who knows business. And who knows their customer and who knows the changes that it’s going to bring to them. So, that’s how I’m articulating it in conversations.
Nice. You are passionate about that. That’s clear? Okay. Brandi, what you got?
You know, I’ve been selling AI for ten years now. Before generative AI tools came out, we had a lot of tools where we were trying to understand a lot of data and give a lot of insight to our customers.
Way back when, before everyone knew what AI was, the conversation was about approving that it did the thing that we said it was doing. Proving that it wasn’t going to add additional risk into the conversation.
Now, apparently, no one cares about that because everyone is like, well, we just have to figure out how to use AI. Right? I agree with Logan 100%.
We are getting to a point with AI where everyone says they have it. Everyone honestly does have it in some way, shape, or form, or another.
And because of that, it’s really important not to sell on features, but to sell on value. This is the classic value selling. A technique that’s been used honestly for ages, it just hasn’t been pointed at AI because before it used to be kind of a unique value add.
Now it’s not. So, I don’t know if I have anything super extra to add to what Logan said because I think I agree with him 100% on that.
I think what I will say is that selling AI, in my opinion, is no different than selling any other tool where you have a lot of market competition. It’s all about getting to value.
And to get to the value, you really need to understand the pain of the customer, and the goal that they have. So they’re sitting here with something that they’re trying to achieve.
There’s some barrier to achieving that. Do you really understand what that is and what the cost of not moving forward is? If you understand those things, then you sell towards that, not towards the individual features.
Yeah. Interesting.
Let’s talk about growth and lessons. And, Brandi, you’re up first on this one.
What has been the most effective way that you’ve grown and improved in your career? Like, coaching, mentorship, final experience, or something else?
Yeah. I tell everyone this, whether you’ve been in the SE world for, I don’t know, a year, six months, twenty years; practice, practice, practice, practice.
This is number one, I think, learning a tool to get better at it, to always be learning, it’s to practice it.
And what I mean by practice, I mean, not necessarily just doing a demo a whole bunch. That’s great. Please go out and do that.
But particularly if you’re new, practice objection handling, practice value selling, practice doing discovery.
If you don’t know how to do those things, go out and read some books because there’s some great books out there that will tell you how to do it. There’s a great book, and I cannot remember who wrote it. I just blanked, called Doing Discovery. That’s amazing, and will totally help you learn that. Take it, read it, then practice it. And you can do that with your peers. You could do that with your grandma, because these are skills that translate.
If you’ve been at this for a really long time and you say, no. I know how to do this. I know how to sell. I know how to do my job. There is always room for growth in my opinion.
Always, a chance to be better at what you do today. For me, practice now looks like, I’m not necessarily learning how to present, but I’m learning new ways to sell new products.
Everybody’s got agents now.
Okay. Great. How do I tell the agent story for my team? I volunteer a lot to head new products and to build out enablement for our team for things like that.
So, practice, I think, is the best learning tool.
Very good.
This next one, I’m curious. I know I’ve learned some lessons, but what’s a mistake from your career that you’ve learned from the most? Brandi, why don’t you start this one for us?
Oh, that’s a good one. Honestly, I’m a big learner, so I’m learning from things all the time.
What I can say, maybe a recent one. I was recently on a call and it’s a big demo.
I happened to be hyper focused on the conversation and on the value selling bit, and this goes back to an earlier comment I made about questions. I didn’t ask enough follow-up questions.
And it’s really stuck with me because, A – we didn’t win that deal. But also because, it just goes to show me no matter how long I’ve done this, no matter how many years I’ve been in the trenches, there’s always space to grow, but there’s always also times when I’m not as good as I think I am.
I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is to be a little humble, but to always be thinking about what that success looks like. I have a little bit of a rubric, a checklist of things that I look at right before a demo that’s kinda like, hey, remember to do these things.
I think that’s important. So we can make sure that, every demo that I do, every POC that I’m involved in, it has success, at the end.
I like that. I mean, I can speak from my experience.
The moment I feel like I’ve got it figured out and, you know, I’m all ready to go is when I learn my toughest lessons.
Pride comes before the fall. So, yeah, you gotta stay humble.
I like that. Okay.
Logan, how about the mistake you’ve learned from?
Mistakes that I’ve learned from. I sort of spoke to it up front a little bit, right, showing everything, answering questions black or white.
I’m a big believer in asking follow-up questions, the four p’s, things like that. But one of the things that I think sets good SCs apart from great ones are just having a point of view.
Everybody’s platform, you go to my website, my competitor’s website, maybe Brandi, you could say the same thing for yourself. Everybody says the number one this or they have AI for that or whatever that may be.
And if you’re getting asked a functional question, sure, the answer is yes, but, what does that mean to the customer? Why are they asking that? What is it solving for? How do they try to solve that in the past, etcetera? So I think asking and trying to uncover not necessarily the symptoms of the question, but really the root cause of said question. Is it something that’s paramount because that then forms the opinion that we can prescribe a solution for. So, that’s a huge learning opportunity for most SCs.
Can I follow-up with that? Just a little.
I just want to say yes. Hallelujah. All that.
I think a thing that I have really learned over the years is that customers tend to come to us with a solution in mind because they’re really, really familiar with the problem. And what we have to do is sort of reverse engineer.
Get back into what the heart of the pain is and what they’re trying to achieve. And, Logan, when you mentioned trying to backtrack and really understand the root of the question, that’s where I got into trouble.
I, for some reason, just at that point in time, was not thinking about, oh, wait. This is likely tied to some pain that I actually don’t know about.
Let’s let’s backtrack that. And so just kudos to you, Logan, for pointing that out.
It’s a big one to remember.
Yeah. For sure.
Okay. For the sake of time, let’s move on to the last planned question, then we can go to the submitted questions.
Logan, you’ll be up first for this one in the closing advice category. If someone here wants to level up in the next three to six months, what’s one thing they can start doing immediately?
I’m huge on feedback.
I think SCs, particularly good SCs, don’t get constructive feedback a ton. It’s like, hey, Brandi. You’re crushing it. That was an awesome demo. Oh, this is the best.
Whatever.
And then Brandi just keeps doing the same thing, and Brandi doesn’t necessarily evolve. Obviously, I’m not saying that about you, but just in general.
So I’m huge on asking for feedback from your sales counterpart, sales leadership, product marketing if it’s about a new feature, maybe someone in product in and of itself. I’m huge on the feedback loop.
I try to have my SCs come and ask for debrief meetings after the fact so that we can actually get better. But the other thing that SCs typically struggle with, especially the good ones is sometimes they have a little bit of an ego.
So it’s like, hey, Logan. Maybe I don’t like that word, or maybe you should start here instead.
So you actually have to be willing to try out the feedback that you’re given, so that you can try something that works or someone has a different opinion on, etcetera. Huge believer in feedback because I think it’s a shame that SCs don’t get more of it.
It’s a great point that you can’t just receive feedback. You have to digest the feedback, be actionable on the feedback. So, that’s the key to closing that loop, but that’s great.
I like that. Okay.
Brandi?
Kind of going along the same lines. I’m a huge proponent for SE enablement, and there is not enough of it, particularly internally at the organization.
So what I started to do really, really early on was to go out there and seek enablement from other places. I mentioned a book. Peter Cohn, somebody wrote it in here. Thank you, Jeffrey.
Discovery, demo discovery, is a great book, but there are others out there. I read sales books as well.
Challenger Sale was amazing. Go out there, do some reading, but to Logan’s point, practice.
There’s a lot of things we can learn from, but if we don’t practice what we’re reading, practice the feedback that we get, then it’s all kind of moot. So, go out there and learn more.
Enable yourself, but also, do some practice to make sure that you can get in a way that you understand.
Absolutely. Alright.
We’re going to shift to one of the presubmitted questions. And I think, Logan, we’re going to start with you on this one as well, which is, how do you see the SE role evolving in the next three to five years with AI? And that’s a huge question, but curious about your perspective.
Huge question. Right? There’s demo automation out there.
So the landscape is changing.
I see sales engineering getting more strategic, and I actually see it aligning more closely with sales.
Candidly, when I’m interviewing folks, one of the things I look for is, hey. Can we check the technical nomenclature at the door? And what does your business acumen look like? How do you prescribe solutions to problems, etcetera? I’m big on the heavy statement, when it comes to the future of sales engineering. So brush up on your business acumen, become an expert of the persona that you sell to, network with them, know what keeps them up at night, etcetera.
But there are three things that AI is not replacing, demo automation can’t replace, and it’s that our job, whether you know it or like it or not, is problem framing.
Oftentimes, to your point Brandi, they know the problem, but their customers may not know the root cause of the problem. So being able to articulate that and frame it in a manner that puts your product ahead, AI is never going to be able to do that.
Navigating internal politics. Understanding who’s incentivized, who’s threatened, who actually is the person that signs on the dotted line in this evaluation? AI won’t replace that.
And then the last thing I’d say is driving conviction and champion building. AI is great at sparking curiosity.
You can go to chat GPT. You can go to Claude, ask questions, get some good feedback, but it’s never going to create a champion, and turn that curiosity into confidence.
So those are three things I think AI could never replace.
Okay. Anything to add to that, Brandi?
Yeah. I think I’ll agree and say we’re definitely going to see the SE role move a little bit more up market.
I support named strategic accounts, very large enterprises. I think that’s likely going to stay and we’ll see it maybe disappear, particularly in the presales format, in the lower markets where things like demo automation can handle probably 90% of SMB and mid market.
Because of that though, I also see that it is likely to shift a little bit towards post sales as well. And I’m seeing this with other organizations that I’m talking to just a little bit more of a tie into ensuring the success of customers in that post sales.
So sticking around for longer, versus maybe doing a hand off to customer success. That will be interesting, as the job shifts.
I think I agree though that the essence of the job doesn’t change though, and the things that we provide don’t change. And the strengths that we have, as humans, don’t change either.
Demoing will get easier, we hope, from a tooling perspective. But the need to problem solve, and solution, and connect, and also provide some thought leadership, that’s still going to be the same I think.
I agree, I like that.
I think there are some businesses or people who just think we can automate the entire thing. Just take the SE out of the equation.
I certainly hope there’s always going to be a human element to it. There needs to be. That’s how you purchase something that’s going to give you value, at least in my experience.
So you’re right. It’s not that the job itself is going to change. It’s how we do the job.
I think, to your point, being able to bridge that transition from the sales cycle to the post sale world to delivery, making sure that the folks who are going to be implementing have the context they need from day one. And AI can make that so incredibly easy or so much better, at least.
We just made that change in the past few weeks, internally at Saleo, and the delivery team, they’re eating it up. They can’t get enough of it, so use it.
We’ve all got the access to the tools, so don’t miss it. Alright.
Laura, you’re back.
Yes. I’m going to jump in with a couple of the questions we’ve received from the audience.
One that we received earlier was asking about, as you step back from formal discovery, how are you getting that kind of information? How do you avoid harbor tours and feature dumps?
Yeah. I’ll jump in real quick.
What I say is formal discoveries are still happening. They don’t go away.
It just becomes a yes and sort of situation. We want those formal discoveries to happen as early as we can, and there’s an assumption that we’re going to be doing a lot more discovery in calls over time as well.
How do we avoid harbor tools? Well, harbor tours, we internally utilize a lot of demo automation to offset that. So the very first thing we’re likely doing is sending you a video or a walk through of the platform, and then setting up a deeper dive discovery call.
So the customer has seen the product. They have an idea of what it does.
Now we can really talk about what problem are you trying to solve for, and then how can I show you that in a deeper dive demo?
I’m curious, Logan, if you have anything to add there. I mean, I feel like that’s a really pertinent question.
Being that Saleo is built to run demos, I find myself having to do some form of demo on pretty much every call, first call, you know, five minutes after having met the person, having asked maybe half a question. So avoiding that harbor tour, that feature dump is a challenge.
Yeah. It is.
I’m a big fan of, giving them a little taste, I guess, trying to get them on a hook. So, you know, not opposed to showing them something.
I’m huge on discovery. The SCs that are on my team, they support two AEs each, so they’re not overwhelmed with calls.
I want them on every discovery call, so that they can answer or excuse me, ask the second, third level questions that I talked about earlier. But it doesn’t end, to Brandi’s point.
And sometimes at the end of a discovery call, depending on what they’re struggling with, if you have a few minutes in a call, give them a little sneak peek of the common customized demo.
Awesome. We’re going to sneak in one more question.
I know we’re already a little over. But one question for those who are either brand new SEs or trying to break into the field.
What is the number one skill you would prioritize to be building up into an SE role?
Curiosity and business acumen. If you’ve got those two things, you’ll be okay.
Find a good networking group. Presales Collective is great.
There’s a number of them out there. Surround yourself with folks.
We’ve hired people internally who have been BDRs in the past, who’ve been teachers in the past, etcetera. So you don’t have to come from a technical background.
I used to sell potatoes for crying out loud. I’m happy to talk about my background.
I think it starts with getting really, really curious, and having a really strong business acumen so that you can do the job of value selling.
I’ll also add that some sort of presentation skills would be a really good thing to practice, to get some experience with. You don’t necessarily have to be doing presentations to huge groups of people, but you should be really, really comfortable doing this.
So get out there, have conversations with folks, I don’t know. Build a presentation for a product that you use every day and share it to people.
Explain how it works to people and things like that. That sort of practice, I think, is helpful.
So when you get the opportunity to get in front of someone who might give you an opportunity for a job, you can go, oh, I do have some presentation skills. And, yes, I’ve got some good business acumen skills, and I’m curious.
I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions.
It comes down to having conversations at the end of the day, and you’ve got to be able to do that effectively. So talk to people.
I’ll add just one real quick note. In case somebody’s looking to move from either a sales role or a CSM role in their current company into an SE role, I’ve had several folks in my career approach me about, hey. I’d be curious about what you do. Can we talk about that? What should I be doing? In my experience, you’ve got to know the product. Be an absolute hands down expert. Expose yourself as much as possible to how it’s being used in your customer base.
The sales folks know what they think they experience and the feedback they get. The CSMs know about the accounts that they’re managing.
But just having as broad a possible set of data that you can draw from to help, both internally and customer facing resources. You can never know too much about what you’re selling.
So start there if you already have a leg in that company.
Alright. With that, we are over time.
Thank you so much to everyone who joined us today. We will follow-up with unanswered questions after the webinar.
Brandi, Logan, Jason, thank you so much for sharing your time and your expertise. It was truly a very valuable conversation.
We ask everyone who joined us to please take a moment to complete the exit survey as we value your feedback, and we hope we’ll see you at a later time. Thank you.
