>Author
Tim Brömme
Co-Founder, SE Rockstars
Tim is co-founder of SE Rockstars and the Trusted Advisor Academy. He has worked in enterprise PreSales since 2010 — at Miro, SAP, and Seismic — with 8 figures of closed deals behind him and 350+ solution engineers coached. He writes about demos, discovery, PreSales metrics, and what AI changes for the SE role.
>20 Articles
Do LLMs Give Good Demo Advice? Context Is the Whole Answer
A one-line prompt got a decent demo tip out of Claude — and started a fight in the comments. The real lesson isn't about AI at all: it's about how much you dare to leave out.
9 min read >
PreSales From the Partner Side: What Solution Engineers Can Learn From Life Beyond the Vendor
Most SE playbooks assume you work for the software vendor. Working at an implementation partner flips the incentives — and reveals what being a trusted advisor actually costs and what AI is about to change.
6 min read >
How to Orchestrate a PreSales Team: A Leader's Playbook for Direction, Rhythm, and Coverage
Great SE team management isn't about handing out tasks and running meetings — it's about creating identification, clarity, and a rhythm that turns a group of individuals into a team that wins together.
6 min read >
The Problem With MEDDICC: Why PreSales Is the Missing Piece in Value Selling
MEDDICC isn't broken — but the way most sales organizations roll it out is. Here's how to turn empty CRM fields into real value discovery, and why Solution Engineers are the ones to do it.
6 min read >
How Are Solution Engineering Leaders Actually Using AI?
Everyone has the AI tools — so why don't most SE teams actually get better? Ten enterprise SaaS SE leaders on the real unlocks: solving the context problem, building a bottom-up operating model, and using AI to go deeper, not just faster.
8 min read >
What Skills Will Solution Engineers Need in the Age of AI?
AI is absorbing the technical and domain work solution engineers were hired for. A dozen enterprise SE leaders on the human skills that become the real moat — sharp discovery, business acumen, stakeholder management, value translation, and leading change.
8 min read >
From Measurement to Mastery: Rolling Out a PreSales KPI System
A pragmatic 90-day rollout for a PreSales KPI system: start narrow, sequence Adoption to Behaviour to Impact, and make enablement the engine.
10 min read >
Scaling KPIs Without Scaling Admin
Stop measuring CRM discipline. Instrument the workflow — capture KPI signal as a by-product of real work with conversation intelligence.
10 min read >
KPI Pairing & Integrity: Don't Let One Number Wreck the System
Andy Grove's pairing rule for PreSales: every KPI needs a counter-metric, or the team optimizes the number and hurts the business.
8 min read >
Qualitative Metrics: Making Discovery & Demo Quality Coachable
How to make discovery and demo quality observable and coachable — with rubrics, AE-to-SE NPS, and handoff completeness.
9 min read >
Advanced & Future-State Metrics: Value Realization & Beyond
Future-state PreSales metrics — time to first value, early-stage churn, the value realization gap, and AI signals — that connect SE work to life after signature.
8 min read >
Operational Metrics: Capacity, Coverage & the AE:SE Ratio
Utilization, attach rate, the AE:SE ratio and demo deflection — the operational signals that keep an SE team's capacity healthy.
9 min read >
Leading Indicators: Predicting Wins Before They Happen
The leading indicators — Compelling Event quality, MEDDPICC, multi-threading, POC criteria — that let SE leaders predict the quarter before it's lost.
9 min read >
Lagging Indicators: Proving PreSales Revenue Impact
The lagging indicators that prove PreSales impact and win budget: SE-attached win rate and revenue, deal-size lift, and cycle velocity.
8 min read >
The North Star: SE-Attached & Technical Win Rate
SE-Attached Win Rate and Technical Win Rate are the North Star metrics for PreSales — why you must separate what the SE owns from what they don't.
8 min read >
The Metrics Gap: Why Most PreSales Teams Are Measured Wrong
Most PreSales teams are measured on the wrong things — raw activity or a commercial win rate they don't control. Here's the metrics gap, and the four-lens system that closes it.
8 min read >
The GUI Is Dead. Long Live the API. — A Reality Check on the State of SaaS Innovation
Most SaaS vendors are still shipping like it's 2019 — while a non-coder with Claude Code can spin up a working app in two hours. Tim and Jan unpack what the widening innovation gap means for SEs, which half of the job is about to disappear, and the two buying criteria that should worry every vendor.
10 min read >
Scaling a Sales Engineering Team from 3 to 30: A PreSales Leader's Playbook
Lucanet's Tobias Stölkler scaled PreSales from 3 to 30 SEs in two years — by hiring controllers instead of sales engineers, fighting internally for team leads at 13 direct reports, and building a quality system that doesn't need him in the room. Here's the playbook, plus what he sees differently now that he's running Sales.
12 min read >
Demo Training for Solution Engineers: Who Should You Actually Pay?
Demo2Win!, Great Demo!, Six Habits — and us. Five parameters, four providers, one honest comparison. Including where the competition wins.
7 min read >
When the GUI Disappears: How the Solution Consultant Role Changes in an Agentic AI World
The GUI was always a crutch. Agentic AI is removing it. What happens to the Solution Consultant when there's nothing left to demo?
7 min read >
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