Your CRO No Longer Wants a PreSales Department [67]

The episode addresses pressure from CROs to dissolve presales departments, exploring the underlying business logic and proposing tactical responses. The core tension is that SaaS revenue growth increasingly comes from renewals, upsells, and cross-sells of the installed base—the domain of account management—while presales remains focused on new logo acquisition, representing only half the revenue opportunity. However, simply expanding presales responsibilities across the entire funnel creates operational strain; the hosts illustrate this with a real example where an SE missed a POC deadline after being asked to support two renewals as a favor.

The discussion rejects broad solutions like renaming the department "Solution Consultants" or calling it "Transformation" as ineffective theater. Instead, the recommended approach is surgical: identify one specific moment in the customer lifecycle where technical credibility drives the most value, then run a narrow 90-day pilot with one clear metric. The hosts share a concrete success story where an SE director assigned two people to support the first 90 days post-go-live for the top 20 accounts in her region, resulting in expansion pipeline roughly doubling compared to the rest of the region—without reorganization or new titles.

A critical insight emerges around compensation: asking SEs to work renewals without adjusting their comp plan amounts to requesting favors, which collapse after about a quarter. Attribution must come before organizational structure changes, and managers should avoid waiting for perfect attribution data—a common trap that delays necessary action. The conversation also touches on the misconception around forward-deployed engineers as a new trend, when hardware vendors in the 1980s built entire careers on this model. The shift toward seat-based consumption models makes technical ownership of adoption essential, yet adoption has traditionally been considered outside presales scope. The episode concludes with tactical advice: proactively raise the question with leadership before someone else does, frame it around where the skill set creates most contribution, run a pilot, and explicitly coach the team away from "we've always done it this way" language—a phrase that signals risk to leadership.