Startups, Scaleups, and Storytelling: The Wild Ride of Building (and Rebuilding) Presales

In this episode of PSC Unscripted, Amin Ibrahim shares his firsthand account of rebuilding a pre-sales organization after a catastrophic downturn at Hootsuite in August 2022. The company laid off approximately 40% of its workforce — around 500 of 1,500 employees — in a single day. Ibrahim's Value and Solutions organization, which had grown to roughly 50 people, was disproportionately hit, leaving only about 8 SCs globally.

Compounding the staffing crisis, leadership decided to merge the pre-sales and customer training functions under a single team, reasoning that both roles required product knowledge and were therefore interchangeable. Ibrahim was left with a team of 12 (8 SCs and 4 trainers) responsible for both pre-sales duties and approximately 5,000 outstanding hours of customer training. Within two weeks, his only remaining North American trainer resigned, leaving the team with no dedicated training staff at all.

Ibrahim describes the human toll of the event — watching talented colleagues leave or be reassigned, and the difficulty of asking SCs to perform unfamiliar roles like on-site customer training. He highlights how team member Tabir Ali flew to Atlanta to deliver on-site training for 100 people with no prior training experience and succeeded. Ibrahim himself stepped in to present at a Department of Defense digital conference after the business value analyst originally assigned was no longer with the company.

A critical leadership decision Ibrahim made was refusing to rebrand his SCs as 'Education Specialists' or rename the team 'Customer Education,' as the business had directed. He kept the team's identity as pre-sales professionals and communicated clearly that the training burden was temporary, providing a sense of direction amid uncertainty. He also fought to retain senior SC Ben Cather, who had closed the most business in the company's history, despite pressure to let him go.

After nine months, new executive leadership — including a new CEO who arrived in February — recognized the flawed strategy. Training was moved back to professional services, and the pre-sales team began hiring and growing again. Ibrahim reflects that his biggest takeaway from the experience is that 'nothing's impossible,' and he expresses immense pride in what his team accomplished under extraordinary pressure.