Sales engineering leadership is a player-coach job. I hire, ramp, and coach the team, and I still carry deals personally: discovery, demos, proofs of concept, and executive workshops. A leader who stops practicing the craft loses the right to coach it.
Practice like a professional
Major League Baseball players warm up by playing catch, the same as Little Leaguers. Professionals never stop practicing fundamentals, and neither do my teams.
Every week the team presents to each other. Every month we run shakedown role plays with assigned personas: a CISO, two engineers, a non-technical VP shepherding the deal. Early career SEs get deliberately baited down technical rat holes, because message discipline is a muscle and the only way to build it is under pressure. I take my turn in the chair like everyone else.
The result is a team that walks into a hostile technical evaluation having already survived a harder one in the practice room.
The chief technologist of the territory
I run a region the way a chief technologist runs a company: owning the regional technical strategy, serving as the escalation point for a team of experts, and pairing one-to-one with sales leadership on the deals that matter. Field learnings do not stay in the field. They become repeatable POV motions and win plays the whole team can run.
Discipline in the deal
My teams run MEDDIC and Challenger, with go-to-market motions built on Gartner best-practice frameworks. Proofs of concept get designed and governed like projects: entry criteria, success criteria, an executive owner, and a decision date. RFP and RFI responses are led, not filled in. Forecasts are commitments, not guesses.
Partners as force multipliers
Some of the best selling I have done was through other people’s badges. At Blue Prism I owned the Deloitte and KPMG alliance relationships for over two years: evangelizing to their consultants and account executives, training their engineers, and working embedded on-site with Deloitte, badge and laptop included. Those relationships followed me to SailPoint. Channel and GSI motions are not a side program to me; they are how enterprise deals scale.