Presales leadership is more demanding than ever.
Leaders are managing leaner teams through more complex deals. Buyers are more informed. AI is reshaping expectations. And the pressure placed on presales continue to rise across technical execution, customer understanding, and business impact.
In a recent session, Brian Cody of Clari and Morgan Ballevre of impact.com laid out a clear picture of what that means for leaders today. The conversation surfaced several management challenges that feel especially relevant right now.
Breaking out of the player-coach trap
One of the most honest moments in the session came when Brian Cody described a pattern he has seen derail too many talented presales leaders: getting promoted because you were the best IC, and then never fully making the transition out of that role.
The challenge is real. Presales leaders are still expected to be the best in the room: setting the bar, modeling the behaviors, showing up in high-stakes executive demos. But if they stay in that mode indefinitely, they never create the space for their team to grow and develop the resilience that comes from owning outcomes themselves.
As Brian put it, the goal is driving agency throughout the organization, putting people in positions where they feel comfortable failing, because that’s what makes them stronger over time. The trap is when leaders keep stepping in instead of stepping back. Knowing when to do which is one of the hardest ongoing judgments in presales leadership.
Unlearning old paradigms fast enough
Both Brian and Morgan emphasized that one of the biggest challenges facing presales leaders today is the speed at which foundational assumptions are being invalidated.
Brian pointed to something as basic as the old rule that discovery has to come before the demo. Buyer expectations have shifted, and leaders who don’t understand that are already behind. Morgan touched on the need to move away from the traditional way of approaching a deal, particularly when it comes to prospect knowledge. With AI, there is no longer any excuse for not knowing your customer deeply before you walk into a room.
The challenge for leaders is not just unlearning these things themselves, but creating a team culture where continuous reassessment is the norm.
Spotting burnout before it shows up in performance
Burnout in presales is particularly hard to manage because the workload is inherently uneven. A single SE can go from carrying four major deals simultaneously to a relatively quiet pipeline reset within weeks. That fluctuation makes it difficult to track capacity through self-reporting alone.
Brian’s approach is to look at observable behavior rather than asking directly about bandwidth. Tracking the historical average of customer-facing meetings per week and cross-referencing that against deal volume gives leaders a cleaner signal than any survey. When the numbers spike, that is the moment to lean in and help with demo prep, framing, or design.
Morgan added a structural solution that has made a meaningful difference: targeting SEs on a team basis rather than individually. When the incentive structure rewards collaboration, people reach out for help more naturally, and no single person ends up carrying a disproportionate load in silence.
Giving feedback that is timely without being careless
Delivering hard feedback well is one of the sharpest dividing lines between good and great presales leaders, and the session surfaced a tension that most managers will recognize: the instinct to wait until the feedback is perfectly formed versus the value of delivering it while it is still fresh.
Brian described this as one of his own early failures as a manager. Waiting for the perfect moment meant waiting too long, and the feedback lost its impact. His current approach is to be upfront about the imperfection, telling someone directly that the feedback may not be perfectly articulated, but that getting it to them now matters more than saying it perfectly.
Morgan added the other side of that equation: some people need feedback immediately after, while others need time to process. Reading which situation you are in and adapting accordingly, is a skill that takes practice to develop. Neither style is universally right, and leaders who default to only one approach will eventually miss someone.
Managing the plateau without a promotion to offer
A particularly difficult challenge in presales leadership today is what to do with a strong performer who has hit a ceiling, especially when the management track is not available or not the right fit.
Brian’s take on this was powerful, “I always have the framing of how do I help this person build their story for the next career move? Whether that’s an internal promotion, whether that’s external.” That mindset shift, from retention at all costs to genuine investment in what is next for that person, is what separates leaders who retain top talent from those who lose it to frustration.
In practice, that might mean creating visibility through analyst calls or speaking engagements for SEs who are strong storytellers. It might mean getting more technical SEs involved in early access programs or internal AI tooling projects. Brian described a case in which he worked across the organization to create a brand new role where the business need and the person’s ambitions aligned, something closer to a field CTO than a traditional SE.
The challenge is that this kind of creativity requires political capital, cross-functional alignment, and a leader willing to advocate strongly for someone whose value may not be immediately visible on a standard org chart.
Final thoughts
The challenges presales leaders face today are not just operational. They are deeply human, navigating transitions, maintaining trust under pressure, making judgment calls in ambiguous situations, and building cultures where people can do their best work without burning out.
As Morgan put it, the leaders who get this right are not the ones with the best frameworks. They are the ones who genuinely invest in understanding the people on their team and who have the courage to act on what they find.
That is what modern presales leadership actually demands.
Watch the full discussion to hear how top presales leaders are developing those skills in their teams.
