Scaling a Sales Engineering Team from 3 to 30: A PreSales Leader's Playbook

Scaling a sales engineering team from a handful of generalists to thirty specialists across five markets breaks almost everything that worked at the start. The hiring profile breaks. The 1:1 cadence breaks. The "I'll just ride along on the call" model of quality control breaks. This is the playbook one PreSales leader used to scale from 3 to 30 SEs in two years — and the calls he'd make differently if he had to do it again.

Tobias Stölkler joined Lucanet nine years ago as a consultant, moved into a direct-sales role that did everything from prospecting to demos, then built the company's first dedicated PreSales function. Three SEs in 2023. Roughly twenty in late 2025. Almost thirty today, spread across DACH, France, Spain, and Singapore. In April 2026 he stepped out of PreSales entirely to lead new business sales for the DACH region.

Across a candid 90-minute conversation on the PreSales Unleashed podcast, Tobias walked through the inflection points: hiring decisions that surprised his peers, the political fight he had to win before he could install team leads, how he's building a scoring framework on top of Gong, and what changes when a PreSales leader suddenly sits on the other side of the AE/SE handshake. Here's what he shared.

Why classic PreSales profiles weren't the answer

The single biggest hiring decision Tobias made was to stop chasing classic PreSales CVs.

Lucanet sells finance software into the office of the CFO. The buyer is usually a CFO, Head of Group Accounting, or controller. The user is the team underneath them. Selling to that audience credibly means the SE has to hold a real conversation about consolidation, planning cycles, audit pressure, and the day-to-day mechanics of close — not just the workflow inside the product.

Two and a half years ago, when Tobias was still doing both AE and SE work himself, onboarding a new AE took roughly a year of shadowing consultants before that person could lead a CFO conversation without falling on their face. The domain knowledge was the bottleneck, not the sales skill. So when he started building a dedicated PreSales team, he flipped the hiring model:

"The domain expertise is something you usually only get through a degree program. It's a certified minimum level of knowledge. That doesn't exist in sales. So we said — fine, sales is something I can teach."

In practice, that meant hiring ex-controllers, ex-accountants, and people from inside the office of the CFO. Some had never worked in software sales. None of them had ever been called "a Solution Engineer" before. What they did have was the language, the empathy for the customer's day, and the credibility to push back on bad assumptions in a discovery call.

The trade-off was real and Tobias is the first to name it. On the very first wave of hires they tried to teach selling on the job, and onboarding stretched. But once the model settled, the ex-finance hires actually ramped faster into customer-facing calls than career SEs would have, because they didn't have to learn the customer's world on top of learning the product.

"We sometimes got people into customer calls faster, simply because they learn the tool quickly. They already speak the same language as the buyer."

Lucanet still runs a mix — some classic PreSales profiles, some Office-of-the-CFO hires. But the default has flipped. The harder skill to teach goes in the door first. Every new SE — finance background or career SE — gets Chris White's The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers as required reading in the first weeks. Tobias calls it the SE bible.

Takeaway for SE leaders: Look at your buyer. If your buyer speaks a specialist language — finance, legal, clinical, security — your hiring model should be biased toward people who already speak it. You can teach a controller to run a demo. You cannot teach a generalist SE to think like a CFO in six months.

The 13-direct-report tipping point

For a long time, Tobias resisted adding a management layer. He kept the org flat. The team meetings stayed personal. The 1:1s stayed weekly. Then the math caught up with him.

"It broke when I had thirteen direct reports and I just couldn't cope anymore."

Pushing the case internally for three team leads — three roles that would absorb people-management load and free him for strategy — turned into a political fight. Not because the case was weak, but because installing a layer of management between the head of PreSales and the individual SEs is the kind of structural change that triggers questions across the org: career paths, headcount budgets, compensation bands, who reports where.

In hindsight, Tobias is grateful he pushed through it. Today three leads carry the team in healthy pods. Without that change, the next twelve hires wouldn't have stuck.

The lesson is unglamorous: founders and first managers tend to install structure too late, not too early. Thirteen direct reports is well past the point where most leadership books would say you're already broken. If you're a single layer of PreSales leadership above more than eight to ten people, you're either neglecting management work or starving the strategic work that only you can do. Probably both.

Quality assurance at scale: from ride-alongs to leading indicators

At three SEs, Tobias could ride along on calls. At thirty SEs across four time zones, he can't — and neither can his team leads in any consistent way. So Lucanet is building a quality system that doesn't depend on a senior person being in the room.

The system has two layers.

Layer one — coverage. For each customer call, did the SE actually hit the dimensions that matter? Lucanet's two top-level categories are Compelling Event and Technical Win. Inside Compelling Event sit Cost of Inaction (quantified), Future State, and Current State. Coverage is a simple yes/no: was it addressed?

Layer two — quality. Coverage alone is a trap. An SE can mention Cost of Inaction in passing without ever quantifying anything real. So every dimension gets a 1-to-5 rating — 1 is poor, 5 is what you'd want a senior SE to do. The scale is still being calibrated, but the direction of travel is clear: stop scoring presence, start scoring depth.

"It's not just about whether we covered something yes or no. What's extremely important is the quality. We score it on a scale from one to five."

Call-level scores roll up to deal level, then average across roughly 100 to 150 mid-market opportunities per period. Tobias can watch the curve at the team, market, or individual level. An SE whose discovery quality moves from 2/5 to 4/5 over two quarters is a story the win-rate report can't tell him for another six months.

The plumbing for this lives in Gong, and Tobias is unambiguous about how easily it can go wrong:

"I compare Gong to a knife. You can use it to make a beautiful sandwich, you can slice an apple — or you can cause real harm. Communication matters. It has to land as development, not as 'Big Brother is watching me.'"

He had to address that pushback inside his team head-on. The reframing that worked: every score is feedback the SE can use to get better, not a report card the manager uses to grade them at year-end.

This is the part of the playbook most teams skip. They buy Gong, run a few "interesting call" reviews, and then quietly let the tool drift into the role of an expensive search engine for sales meetings. The discipline of defining what good looks like — and scoring against it consistently — is what turns conversation intelligence into a coaching system.

The two-pillar enablement model

Tobias spent the first phase of team growth doing enablement himself. Reading. Watching LinkedIn. Running content in team meetings. It worked at three or four SEs. At twelve it didn't. The meetings went quiet. The markets pulled in different directions. He didn't have the capacity to keep designing curriculum and run a growing team and stay close to deals.

The model he landed on splits enablement cleanly into two pillars:

Pillar one — internal: product, function, infrastructure. A small in-house team of ex-SEs sitting inside central Sales Enablement, dedicated to product enablement, demo environments, technical onboarding, and tooling. Critically, Tobias has been deliberate about not asking this team to teach sales skills.

"Everything they would teach is, in principle, just whatever we already think is right. We'd just be reinforcing our own bubble."

Pillar two — external: sales craft. Continuous training in discovery, demo, deal strategy, and POC management — explicitly not Lucanet-exclusive. The reason for paying for that externally is precisely that it isn't internal. The SEs train alongside peers from other companies, see how other teams solve the same problems, and stay current on industry standards (including the fast-moving AI-in-PreSales question).

"What's taught is an industry standard. It stays current. That's how I stop rusting in my own bubble."

This is the part of the playbook that most SE leaders underestimate. Internal enablement and external enablement are not interchangeable. Internal is great at making sure everyone runs the same demo of release 9.4. External is great at making sure your team learns from outside the four walls. Cut either pillar and the model collapses inward.

The choice of which external program matters less than the act of installing the second pillar at all. Tobias's lens for evaluating it: variety of formats so SEs can engage at their own level, leadership presence (more on that below), and a clear link between what's being taught and what gets measured on customer calls.

Leading by example — or you can't ask for it

There's a piece of this story that doesn't show up on the org chart.

When Lucanet rolled out the continuous training program, Tobias didn't sign the contract and walk away. He showed up. He joined the roleplays. He sat through the live sessions. He pushed his three team leads to do the same.

"I find it hard to demand something of a team if I haven't done it myself. If I'm not in the sessions, what discussions am I going to lead in the next team meeting? What do I even ask for?"

This is the leadership move that decides whether a training investment compounds or gathers dust. The forgetting curve is brutal. Two days of workshop is gone in two weeks if no one in the manager's chair reinforces it. The first-line manager — the team lead — is the leverage point. If the lead is in the program, the lead can ask sharp questions in the 1:1, can connect what's being taught to the actual deal in the pipeline, can model the new behaviour.

If the lead isn't in the program, the program is a line item.

The plot twist: PreSales leader becomes Sales leader

Three weeks before this recording, Tobias took over new business sales for DACH at Lucanet. He's still close to PreSales — but he now owns the AE side as well. That transition is producing a useful kind of disorientation.

The first surprise: he caught himself sounding exactly like the AEs he used to complain about. The reflex to ask for a "custom demo" before the qualification was done. The instinct to push for a meeting that wasn't yet ready. As a PreSales leader he'd railed against those moves. Three weeks in, he could feel the gravitational pull.

The second surprise was bigger. From the SE chair he had a clear and slightly impatient view: why isn't sales leadership enforcing value selling more aggressively? From the new chair, the answer is less satisfying and more honest. Value selling matters, and so does top-of-funnel pipeline build, and so does the signature push at the bottom of the funnel, and so does indirect channel, ISM, marketing alignment. Sales leadership isn't choosing not to fix the SE-facing motion — they're choosing where to spend the next unit of attention across ten competing fires.

"There are just a lot of other construction sites and challenges that are also important. I'm not saying they're more important — but they're also important."

His read on it: every PreSales leader benefits from spending time in another bubble. You come back with a sharper sense of what to ask for and a more realistic sense of why your last ask didn't move.

AE/SE collaboration, redefined

The flip side of that disorientation is that Tobias now sees AE/SE collaboration as the biggest unlock in front of him — and as something the industry barely scratches.

Most teams treat AE/SE collaboration as a two-person handshake on a deal. AE qualifies. SE demos. Both show up to the technical win. Job done.

Tobias's view is that this is the floor, not the ceiling. The real model is a multi-stakeholder map of every customer-touching role on a territory: AE, SE, Consultant, Marketing, Partner Sales, ISM, Indirect, Product. Anyone with a customer touchpoint is part of the deal's coverage system. The SE team in particular is a strategic asset to the AE bench because — at Lucanet — many of his SEs bring a level of finance expertise that not every AE has built up.

"Not everyone in direct sales has the finance expertise. Having SEs who do is gold. The collaboration has to go further than what most teams practice today."

This is the perspective shift the role change gave him. From PreSales, you push for SEs to be respected. From Sales leadership, you push for SEs to be deployed — strategically, where they create the most leverage on the funnel.

There's also a clean re-division of measurement that comes out of this. AEs own MEDDIC. SEs own the leading-indicator framework (Compelling Event, Technical Win). Both frameworks scoring high on a deal is a strong signal. Nobody owns "the whole deal" because nobody runs the whole deal alone — but the scores are visible and shared, which is what makes the collaboration concrete instead of motivational.

Where to start tomorrow

If you're an SE leader looking at this playbook and wondering what to do on Monday, Tobias's answer is the unsexy one: start with a maturity assessment.

"Build awareness of where you stand and where you want to go. Do a maturity analysis. Then look at what you actually need to get there. Then look at what's on the market — with that target in mind."

Translated into a working list:

1. Audit the hiring profile. Is your default SE CV the right one for the buyer you actually sell to? If your buyer speaks a specialist language, bias hiring toward that language.
2. Count your direct reports. If you have more than ten and you're not deliberately maintaining that span, you're starving either your team or your strategy.
3. Define what a good call looks like — and score it. Two categories, three or four dimensions each, a 1-to-5 scale you can defend. Coverage isn't the same as quality.
4. Split your enablement. Internal for product. External for craft. Don't try to do both with one team.
5. Show up. Whatever development program your team is in, sit in the sessions. The first-line manager's calendar is the single biggest signal of what matters.

Tobias's two years of scaling were not a clean line. The 13-direct-report fight was overdue. The first wave of finance hires took longer to ramp than expected. The Gong rollout had to be re-communicated when "Big Brother" anxiety surfaced. None of that is in the highlight reel.

But the underlying move is consistent: build the system on purpose, instrument what good looks like, and put your own calendar where your strategy is. Scale follows.

This article draws on a long-form conversation between Tim Brömme and Tobias Stölkler on the PreSales Unleashed podcast. If you're building or scaling a PreSales function, the Trusted Advisor Academy runs the kind of continuous, peer-network enablement Tobias talks about — and the SE Leader Academy is where SE leaders work through exactly the structural calls described above. Book a free discovery call if you want to compare notes.

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