Ep.21- A Friendly Human in Pre-Sales: The Behaviors That Actually Win Deals with Ron Whitson

Most pre-sales pros are incredible at the demo. But the demo isn't why deals die.

This Tuesday I'm sitting down with Ron Whitson, an author, speaker, and one of the most experienced pre-sales leaders in the game. His book "A Friendly Human in Presales" breaks down the 7 timeless behaviors that separate good SEs from the ones who actually move the needle, and why most technical sellers are leaving influence on the table without realizing it.

We're going live on LinkedIn and covering:

• 
  Why the best SEs struggle to influence upward
• The Forward Deployed Engineer trend and is it helpful or hurtful
• How AI is reshaping the SE role (hint: you won't be replaced, but someone will)
• His 4-pillar leadership framework and how to actually build influence as a pre-sales leader
  
  

If you're an SE trying to grow, a leader building a team, or a founder figuring out your GTM motion, this one is for you.

Elite Talent Recruiting helps B2B SaaS leaders hire high performing Pre Sales and Post Sales talent when speed and quality actually matter. 

We are on a mission to prove Pre Sales and Post Sales teams are just as crucial to revenue as offensive linemen are to quarterbacks. 

They accelerate sales, fuel growth, and help SaaS companies win bigger deals faster. 

We build SaaS GTM teams by headhunting top Pre Sales and Post Sales talent and delivering hires in 35 days or less, including Sales Engineers, Solutions Consultants, Solutions Architects, Customer Success, and Technical Account Managers. 

If your team is stretched thin, specialized roles are sitting open too long, or you are scaling fast and need reliable recruiting support that actually moves the needle, we help you hire the kind of talent that drives growth, innovation, and customer success without wasting months in interview chaos.

Check out our website: https://elitetalentrecruiting.io/

Connect with Arvi directly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvi-carkanji/ 

All other resources: https://linktr.ee/elitetalentrecruiting

Transcript

0:01

Hello, hello. Welcome back, everybody. This is Arve. I'm the founder of Ellie Talent. Welcome back to my podcast, Presales Unplug, the Leadership Playbook. As you all know by now, I work with SaaS companies to hire top-tier pre-sales and post-sales talent, but today it's not about me. Today, this show really is about the leaders behind those pre-sales teams, those go-to-market teams. And they are the ones that actually implement the strategies that work in today's market. So I'm super excited to dive in into another episode with a very, very awesome guest. If this is your first time joining us, one quick note before we jump in. These conversations are live and intentionally unedited. So what you hear here today is exactly how it happened. We stream it live, but also you can catch a replay on our podcast across Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or whatever it is that you listen. And my only ask is if you do get value from the conversation, please make sure to follow, subscribe, and leave a review. I personally read every single one of them. And if you do have questions for our guest after the fact, just make sure to comment. I'll make sure to tag them if I can answer it directly so that you can get your answers. But with that being said, today I'm super excited to be joined by Ron Whitson. He is a honestly an expert, I would say, in pre-sales by now. And I'm I'm excited to dive into questions, you know, and just ask him a bunch of things. But he is the senior director of social consulting as well as the published author of the friendly human of friendly human in pre-sales, has a very strong record in the space. And I'm very excited to be here, hear your story, and just dive into our topic today. Thanks for joining me, Ron. No, Arby, thanks for the invitation. Uh, it's so nice to get a chance to be on your your famous show. And oh, my famous show. Love that. And share with people. Um, expert, I don't know. There's still things that I'm learning, which is really exciting for me, but what is the the thing about it takes 10,000 hours to be really good at a topic? And I think I've got that a few times over now. So yeah, I think I know a couple things about pre-sales, and I just absolutely love everything about it. So again, thank you for the invitation. It's wonderful to be here with you. No, I love that you just triggered like a quote in my head. It's um the quote I I kind of live by is like it takes 10 plus years to become an overnight success, right? So everybody sees like the end of it, but they don't see the years behind it. So they don't see all the hard work. I think that's true in tree sales too, right? That's one of the reasons why uh when I hear the word demo, I cringe a bit. I say demo is a four-letter word because people talk about that, and that's the most visible thing, but they don't see all the preparation, all the hard work. It's kind of the same thing, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, before we dive into all the technical terms, Ron, I I'd love to hear just a little bit more about you. Take us back to the beginning. How did you even end up in this wonderful world of pre-sales? Oh, yeah, that's a good story. And I don't think we can go all the way back to the beginning because it was a while ago. But um, no, I was uh I was a nerd tech guy back before there was a lot of tech to play with, and um was a programmer and developer, database administrator. Again, the most nerdy stuff. And um, I was working at a consulting firm, and uh my dear friend who was actually working for me at the time, Shane Phillips, he got hired by this company called Main Control. They had brought a product over to the US to do what was known as IT asset management tracking. This is back before the days of Y2K when we thought airplanes were going to fall out of the sky and things are just gonna stop working when the clock ticked over. Anyway, Shane calls me up one day after he got hired over there. He says, Hey, there's this thing called a sales engineer. He says, I think you'd like it and I think you'd be good at it. So that was actually in October of 1998. I went and took that job and I've been enjoying the profession and working on my craft ever since. Wow, love that. And isn't it crazy? I mean, I've even noticed a change in the last like three years alone, but I can't even imagine how big the change has been in like the pre-sales as a whole from back then to now. What what was it so different? If I I don't know if you remember back then, but like what what was it back then to now? How has it changed? It's it's changed so much. That's a really uh great point that you bring up. I mean, back in the day, uh sales engineer was basically the least objectionable person you could find that you could put in front of a customer. That's this guy. And and what we were doing was was was we were training, we were training people on the software, right? We're explaining to them how it works. And I think that is a good um first iteration of what demos were. And and fortunately, now we've moved much, much more forward where the idea is really all around outcomes and the value it drives and the solution it gives our customers. I tell my team all the time, we don't do demos, we deliver solution presentations. That's what's really important to your audience. They could care less about how your software works. They want to know if it fixes the problem that they have, right? And I think as we move forward and in this age of AI, the skills that make someone really good in pre-sales really become that of uh that of a facilitator, right? So you're going into this meeting and you're asking questions, you're doing really good discovery to try to understand the real pain that a company is having, and you're solutioning, you're helping them come up with a way to address that pain. So I think that's the curve that we've seen. Um, the other thing that I'm very happy that we've seen over time is a lot more uh recognition of the value that the sales engineers and the solution consultants provide to the organization. Um I think it's been really cool to see the different software tools that have been created specifically for the pre-sales space. So no, it's been it's been fun to have a front seat in this uh show as everything has expanded and developed and grown over time. Yeah. I mean, honestly, one thing I learned personally in the last few years is pre-sales is like a big world, but at the same time, it's pretty like a small community and tight knit too. So a lot of people are relationship driven, you know, within the pre-sales world. And it's like, you know, you know somebody that knows somebody, and it it's it's big, but it's still pretty small, right? It's one of those like the world is big, but I can't believe how small it is. And I I've definitely enjoyed seeing it grow the last few years as well, of a lot more people, you know, joining the space and the community overall. And it's it's been fun, and I'm sure you get joy out of that too. I do indeed. Uh, I remember when I first started um becoming associated with the pre-sales collective. It wasn't that long ago. Yeah, yeah, I knew there were other pre-sales people out there, but you know, what a joy to connect with them and to do some of it. We've got a very strong pre-sales community here in Dallas Fort Worth, and myself and uh Rashida and Alice, and we get everybody together on a pretty regular basis, and it's fantastic. So uh no, it very much is a community. And I think also people who typically enjoy pre-sales and are good at pre-sales are are friendly people. We've got a little bit of people pleasing in us, so that certainly helps with some of the uh relationships that we create. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Ron, I want to jump a little bit into your leadership journey. You've really moved from obviously throughout your career in different companies, different stages, different types of teams. Have you noticed any sort of like way that you manage like a team within a bigger company versus a small one or any mindset shifts or anything of that sort? Wow, that's pretty interesting. Um, let me start by saying I see leadership and management as two very different things, right? And and companies need both. Companies need both. I mean, the management aspect of it, I think that's all the HR, you know, dotting the I's, crossing the T's, those types of things, and making sure uh all the metrics are captured correctly and those types of things. Um, I don't want to be managed, I want to be led. And so I like to think that people on my team would like to be led as well. So that involves setting a vision and being able to coach and help people achieve that vision and achieve other things in their professional life as well. If we think about applying those principles to small company, big company, smallest company I was at was 80 people, largest company was 340,000 people. Um, the leadership piece of it to me wasn't that different, right? The management piece of it was very different. As a startup, there's less controls, there's less regulations, there's uh less HR left than in a 340,000-person company. As a as a good pre-sales leader overall, you've got to be able to navigate that. You can't just say, I'm not gonna mess with that piece of the job. You've got to be able to handle that aspect of it too. And those are important aspects to manage. Um, in the startups, sometimes those are more fun because you've got a lot wider purview on the things you can do, and you can typically see the impact of your actions much faster than in the larger companies. I think one of the things that I've been able to bring to my organizations is some of that nimbleness, some of that agility that I learned with small companies. You can actually make the big companies do it. It's a bit more challenging sometimes. Yeah. But you can get the uh, you know, the larger organizations to actually change a bit and look at things in a different way and get some of those quick wins. And we've been able to do that in the the current opportunity. So it's it's kind of like a test case through it out. So yeah. Yeah. I love that. Actually, that was a very interesting piece of how you said it. It's not the leadership that changes, it's the management. And it makes sense just because of you know the environment overall. And I agree, I don't think leadership should change because that's mainly you as a person and how you lead. So if that changes, it's that might be a problem, I would think. It it should be you as a person, right? Because and again, we can talk more about the book, but one of the things that's really important to me is is authenticity. And if if someone is not perceiving you as being authentic, they're perceiving you as being fake, then you're gonna have a really hard time developing a relationship with that person, whether it's someone on your team, a counterpart, a stakeholder, or a customer. So that's one thing that's really, really important. And I think authenticity a lot of times is perceived by people who interact with us as consistency over time in their interactions with us. So I think that's really, really important. Um, and at the end of the day, too, I talk more about leadership because again, it's people. The people are the most important resource, right? And then time is the second most important resource. So if you've got the right people in the right job, then the rest of it to me as a leader is just again setting that vision and then getting obstacles out of the way and allowing them to do the things that they would like to do or you need them to do that they enjoy doing. Yeah, I love that. Ron, I think something that's also very unique about your experience overall is you told me that you've spent some time on the AE side. Oh, yeah. What did that experience teach you about pre-sales? You know, that maybe you couldn't have necessarily learned inside the role itself. No, that's a that's a good one. So I was actually leading a pre-sales team at IBM and I had the opportunity to take a seller role. And why did I do this? Well, over my experience in pre-sales, I saw that typically pre-sales leaders came in one of two flavors, right? One was someone who'd been around for a long time. Everyone knew they liked them really, really well. They'd smile and nod at them like you do at your uncle at Thanksgiving, but they really couldn't make things happen. They didn't have any influence. Then there were other pre-sales leaders that were able to make things happen. They were able to get uh, you know, tools for their team. They were able, they were able to make big process changes and set things up, and you could see the impact they were having. And I wanted to be more like that than than the uncle at Thanksgiving. And as I studied and dug in a little bit on this, most of those who had the influence had more direct sales experience than I had at the time. Again, both you know, individual contributor, pre-sales leader, but no real direct sales experience. So I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to go and gain some of that. So it ended up being a three-year stint. I did all the things, I did the cold calling, I did the negotiating, I did the signing, all that kind of stuff. And from that experience, what I can tell you is anyone who is in pre-sales, you could do the AE job. I guarantee you could. Um, but there's gonna be things about it that you do not like, there'll be aspects of it that you don't enjoy. For me, the part that I didn't enjoy the most was what I refer to as reputational fluidity. What I mean by that, if I had a good quarter, everybody loved me, right? You go a couple of weeks into the next quarter, you don't close the deal. It's like, what are you doing? It's like, wait a minute, you know me, you you know I'm good, you know I've got value. Yeah, but that's not how you were perceived. So that was that was really that I didn't like that. And so what I learned is I'm not coin operated, and I don't mean that in any bad way, but I don't wake every I don't wake up every morning, you know, who am I selling today, you know, how much money am I making? I wake up every morning energized by different solutions I'm going to solve. Solve different problems I'm gonna solve, just different solutions I'm gonna work on, whether that's coaching someone on how they're going to present something or trying to fix some process to gain some efficiencies in our business. That's what energizes me. Yeah. The other thing that I learned from the experience, I'm really, really glad that I got it, is developing empathy for the very difficult job our selling partners have. And how that informs me is listen, sellers are always going to be kind of crazy and ask for something at the last minute when it's not justified. I'm not always gonna say no to them. I'm gonna say, hey, I understand what you're trying to do. Tell me a little more about why you think this is the best route. And then we just basically open it up and have a conversation and try to land on the best solution for them, for the organization, and for my team. But the empathy was a really important thing to gain and develop. I was gonna say that definitely probably made you appreciate salespeople a lot more. I I agree. I think you have to have a lot of thick skin to be like a salesperson and a good one too. It's it's hard, it's not easy. They go through a ton more ejections than probably, you know, sales engineers goes or just pre-sales in general, unless you're doing both positions. But yeah, that's um, that's actually really awesome that you got to experience that. And I agree, I think it probably gave you a perspective that not a ton of pre-sales leaders, even nowadays, really good because not everybody will, you know, try both the sales side and the pre-sales, you know, or post sometimes. So that's pretty awesome. And then you published your book in 2024, uh, which was focused on pre-sales soft skills. What was there like a moment that you realized this needed to be written, or what kind of sparked the idea to go through with that? Oh, good question. No, um, I'd always felt like um there was a book up here, right? Uh, I really enjoy writing, it's expressed itself in different ways over the years. Um, but I didn't want it to be some vanity project, right? Uh just writing a book for the sake of writing a book. I wanted to have a purpose. I didn't understand what that purpose would be. And then I read uh this book here by Mr. Chris White, and it was amazing. Yeah, it is, it is six habits of highly effective sales engineers. But um, I read Chris's book and it resonated with me so strongly because in it Chris kind of tells the story of how he came into the profession and the things that he developed to help him succeed. And it really unlocked for me, well, what if I told my story? And my story was that very, very technical person coming into this role, showing up doing the perfect demo. I mean, RV, I had all the bells and whistles, I had the slick the slide transitions. I mean, it was amazing. Um, and then I'd get the feedback afterwards, hey, you know, good demo, Ron, thank you. And but they wouldn't buy, they wouldn't, they didn't buy the software. I didn't convince my audience, I didn't build those relationships. And so the feedback was good demo, you got to work on your people skills. Like, what do you mean, people skills? I clicked all the buttons, I did the mouse. It's great. And so it was really this journey of all the soft skills. And I started out by, you know, let me go study this and find this. And I really couldn't find many resources that spoke to me in my engineer brain about the soft skills stuff. So the book ended up being a story of the things that I needed to develop to get better at the role. And then understanding how Chris approached his book, it's like, well, maybe I'll just tell that story and maybe it could be helpful to others. And it's it seems to be doing pretty well. People seem to enjoy it. So I'm I'm really, I'm really super proud of it. Yeah, I love it. And your book literally tackles what you just said, where white people don't buy even when the demo goes well. Have you even for yourself back then? And I think honestly, that's still relatable because there's everybody can come into pre-sales, whether it's like, you know, I've had people tell me, hey, I came from marketing into pre-sales or very technical backgrounds into pre-sales. And either way, just because you're from marketing doesn't mean that you have those soft skills already like set up for you in your brain, you know, it's not natural for everybody. So, what were either for yourself or what you've seen most SCs like get or are are missing when it comes to like the soft skills or like a real gap? Yeah, I think it's really the way I'll speak from my viewpoint. The way I approached it initially was I'm here to do the best demo of our software and show you how it all works, right? Yeah, and that's where I kind of stopped initially. And I don't think it was the best experience for my audience because it wasn't addressing any of their needs directly. But I didn't understand that I was there to help their needs, it was all about me. That's kind of where empathy and humility come into play. So the book really covers what I call seven timeless behaviors, right? We already talked about the first one, which is be authentic, because if your audience doesn't perceive you as authentic, you have zero chance of making impression and connecting with them. The second one is listen actively. Sadly, something I had to spend a lot of time working on because I was not very good at it initially, but really spending the time to hear our audience and understand them. The third one is um show empathy. That's an important one. And and when we're talking about being in a meeting and presenting, and this one really stuck out to me because, again, it was all about me and my presentation. It really should be more about our audience and understanding what they're wanting to get out of this meeting. Why are they spending time in the room or in the box with us, right? On a virtual meeting. Um, four is have a conversation because I've seen way too many solution presentations, demos, whatever you want to call them, where it's very much one way. The presenter talking at the audience and delivering all kinds of information. And today, with our gone calls, being able to go and look at that, you can scope that out pretty quickly. Yeah. Um, number five is practice humility. Uh, sadly, another behavior I had to spend a little time working on because again, I walked in the room, I'm the presenter, I'm the performer. This is gonna be amazing. Just wait. No, my audience is amazing. I really need to spend the time to learn and get to know them. Uh, six is tell a story, and tell a story is really about how we communicate, how we share information, speaking in plain language, using analogies and things like that. And the last one, uh, number seven, is leave an impression. And that came to me, and there's a very specific story. There's a very specific story. This is back in the day when we would travel, right? So we fly somewhere, and I'm carrying this suitcase-sized projector because not everybody had a projector in the conference room. Uh, so anyway, we get to the meeting and we set up, and it was one of those days that everything was on. The seller and I, we we knew our lines really, really well. We didn't step on each other, the audience was great and engaged. And we walked out of there and we were on cloud nine. And you know, you you tried not to high-five each other in the lobby. You you waited until you got to the parking lot, right? Yeah, but as we're going through the lobby, over there in the corner, we see our competitors. We we know these people. I know the sales engineer, Scott. Anyway, um, we we know them. And for whatever reason, that day, as we're we're walking out to the car, I'm thinking, wait a minute, Scott's gonna go in there. And he may think that he nailed it, and he did such a great job. And it really got me to thinking about what was the experience I just gave my audience. I was thrilled with my performance. What did my audience think? So it really got me to this idea of when we're showing something to our audiences, it's not the only one they're seeing, guys. Um, I read one study where, and this was a government study, so you can you know you can trust it, but the study said that they would see between eight and thirteens to make a decision. That's crazy now. Think about it, it is, it is. Think about being invited to 13 of these virtual calls. Yeah, and I I got to worry that they all started to sign the same where the salesperson jumps on, yucks it up a bit, you know, shows the NASCAR side with all the logos of the companies who love us and the magic quadrant that the analysts love and everything else. Then they hand it off to the sales engineer and they're like, Oh, this is cool. Now check this out, now check this out, now check 13 times. Yeah. Make a decision. So So that really got me thinking about what is the experience of delivering my audience. And what I really started focusing on was I want them to like me, right? So I'm going to spend time and energy just projecting that way. Much more difficult in a virtual sense than it was in person or it is in person. Sometimes we still get to do that. And the other thing I wanted to do was try to distill the message to something really, really simple that they could remember. Because if they can remember it, then they could share it with other people of the company. Because at the end of the day, after those 13 presentations, if they thought, well, I liked Rod and what he showed us seemed like it would work. I feel like that was enough to get me to the next stage in the evaluation. So that's what the impression is all about. So that's the seven timeless behaviors. And I think, you know, those were the ones that I needed to work on. And a lot of the people who I've run across during my time in pre-sales, they had maybe a couple of those that they could develop further as well. So that's what it came in to be. First of all, um, number one, crazy that you had to carry around a projector. Oh, there's lots of crazy times. Yeah, times have changed quite a lot. Two, I can believe that. I mean, I believe it because like obviously you said it's a trusted source, but that most people take 13 eight between eight. You said it's a 13 times to make a decision. I I mean, I personally don't have the patience for that. I would never go max I would go through is like three, and then I'm making the decision. So that's pretty wild. Um, and then I I I understand where you're coming from because and and I mean, obviously not on a pre-sale side, but on the candidate side, I tell everybody the same thing when they're interviewing with hiring companies. Um I always tell them, like, hey, it's not about like impressing and nailing the interview on the first step because they're not gonna offer you the job there. It you just need to do enough to is show or tell make them want to invite you to a second round, right? And the first thing is just smile and make them laugh and be likable and personable. If they remember you that way, they'll say, you know what, maybe RV wasn't like the best fit, but I really enjoyed my conversation. I want to at least have one more with her, and that's what it's all about. And you have these little wins to take you to the next stage. That's so good. I I I you know talk to a lot of people, and there's been a lot of people lately who are in that situation where they're looking for that next opportunity, right? Yeah, and and a piece of advice I I give them is very similar. It's like when you're on that interview, yeah, I know it's it's really, really difficult, but you've got to relax a little bit. And I know you're worried about you really need the job, you really need the money coming in, or whatever, you really, really want this opportunity. But as we allow those fears and that anxiety to manifest, we're no longer who we are. We're not coming across as our normal, charming selves. And that's what we have to project. I want to be me because if you're gonna hire me, hire me so I can go and be me at your company. I can't go there and be somebody else, right? I can't be way easier to be yourself. Yeah, it is, it is. You know, it's right. Yeah, it's funny you said that because I um I've been trying to take some like speaker training. You know, I I want to be a better communicator. There's just kind of like you said, I mean, you're never the best at your craft, there's always somebody doing it better or something better you can learn. And um a very veteran speaker told me if you're nervous, whether it's on stage in an interview, you know, about to present in a demo, make a joke, like make yourself laugh because that also relaxes you while it also relaxes the audience, you know, as they joke. So a little tip out there, you know, even if you're in an interview or going through, you know, a presentation or a demo, just make yourself laugh. You know, tell a joke to the audience that's relatable, and you will kind of see yourself relax a little bit and those kind of initial nerves go away. So very cool. Love that. Uh, Ron, you also have a four-pillar leadership framework. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it's authenticity, alignment, accountability, and achievement. Can you walk us through what that looks like in practice, like on a team level? How do you apply that? I think the first one is is self-explanatory in a way. And again, just always going back to authenticity, which is a big thing for me, and that is consistency. The people on my team, I want them to see the same Ron day in and day out. And uh, it may be a situation where there's a lot of stuff going on, there's a lot of anxiety going on. But when it's our one-to-one time, I need to be focused and centered and be really attentive and listening to this person, right? And that's how I want them to experience me. There'll always be stuff going on, there'll always be things we've got to address and work on. There'll always be the fire drills. But, you know, we've got to have this consistency over time that this is a vision, this is a place that we're moving to. We may not always get there as quickly as we would like, but that's the direction we're going. So there's that kind of steadiness and that kind of care because I do care for the people on the team. I want them to understand that, I want them to feel psychologically safe to share stuff and for us to have very candid and open conversations. So that is the whole authenticity piece of it right there. Then the second piece, alignment, is is it's amazing to me how there can be misalignment in companies. And this was something that I experienced really early on. I'd go and I'd talk to some of the biggest companies in the world with different solutions that we were representing, and we'd pull people together in a room again, back in the day when it was around a table in a room. We'd pull all these different people together from different departments, and one department would start talking, and the other department, no, that's not how we do it. It's like, wait a minute. What? Yeah, this is like a major soft drink brand, and they don't have their stuff together. They were misaligned. And and there's lots of different reasons for that. I don't have to worry about that. What I have to worry about is my team aligned. And what that means is do they understand what the overall mission is, what the overall goal of the team is for solution consulting is give demos, right? No, no, it's to convince our audience that our solution is the best for them. It's that technical win aspect. Again, another thing from Chris's book that I like. The technical win is what we should be driving to. It's it should be delivering X number of demos. No, that's a performance metric that can let us know what capacity is and what uh our available resources are. You got to be clear on the mission first. Okay, so once we're clear on that, then it's like, well, what are the what are the overall things that we're doing to achieve that? So, how are we delivering these solution presentations in order to achieve that technical win? So then we start getting into the different areas that we evaluate for the team and the different skills we want to build. And I have basically uh three buckets of skills. One is um what I call your technical chops. And again, that's I was really strong coming into the role from that, but it doesn't mean you've got to be a developer. It's your comfort with technology, it's your ability to pick up software. Some people have it, some people it's more of a struggle, right? The second bucket is what I refer to as business acumen. And that's just you know, understanding that B2C is different from B2B. It's understanding the environments that our customers are operating in, it's understanding their domain and their business language, that kind of stuff. And then the third one, what my book is about, is soft skills, the human skills, the relationship skills, whatever you want to call it. It's not just about, you know, building the relationships, it's about how you present, it's about the active listening, it's about all those things. And it's it's funny, RV, because we spend so little time and money and investment in that area. And I think that's the one that can have the absolute biggest impact on how our teams perform. So that's all about alignment, right? Uh, the third one, as you mentioned, is accountability. And accountability to me kind of goes hand in hand with authenticity. And it, I can I can sum it up with a very, very simple sentence. Do what you say and say what you do. Yes. Okay. So if you're an assignment, then you're accountable for getting that assignment done. And if it doesn't get done, I don't want to hear excuses, I don't want to hear reasons. I want the assignment done. So either you're the wrong person for the assignment or it's the wrong assignment for you, or you didn't have the resources. Let's figure it out so it doesn't happen again, right? And always learn from something. And then the last one is achievement. And achievement is kind of like the product of all those things. If we've got all the things in place and we're doing the things properly, then we'll get achievement. And the other thing about achievement is we should celebrate it. Um, most companies I've been at, when a deal closes, the AE sends out a nice little win report, right? Hey, we got this deal. Here's the amount, here's the team that helped. And they'll call it the sales engineer, they'll call it the services people, maybe they call it the BDR and some of the marketing folks that helped. And that's something that's not all companies do, but they really should do because we want to celebrate that together. It takes that team, it takes that village to get that win. Let's make sure everybody knows about it. Yeah, that is so good. And I feel like all of them, I mean, everybody has different aspects of those to work on. You know, some people can be really good at being aligned or communicating alignment or accountability. And others, you know, struggle a little bit with the achievement or the success or authenticity. I will say, at least personally, what I've seen may, and correct me if I'm wrong because you've probably been around a little bit longer than I have, but one of the biggest things that people struggle with is accountability. It's like just being accountable to, you know, taking taking accountability whether you did it right, you did it wrong, or either even on the leadership side, right? I feel like that's that's also something that leaders lack sometimes. It's they'll make a decision, they won't be accountable to that decision, or they'll blame it on others. And it definitely has a lot to do with like your upbringing, or you know, what what kind of leadership you've also been exposed to in your career. But what would you say to the accountability piece? Like how, first of all, how can I recognize it? Maybe you might have some tips like if I'm not holding myself accountable enough, or I have this thing I joke around with my teams called BCDing, uh, blaming, complaining, defending. So we always joke of like, hey, are you taking accountability or BCDing on these topics? Um, so you know, what what are some things maybe if you have any? And if not, that's okay, but that you feel like I uh I can implement myself either as a leader or as an individual contributor to take accountability. How do I look myself in the mirror and say, like, you know, be okay with that? I I think the biggest tip, if it is, if it is a tip on something like that, is you you don't have to be perfect all the time and you don't have to have the answers all the time. And if you fail at something, it's absolutely okay to say, yeah, you know what, that's on me. I screwed that up. I've got a great story. Um, at Percolate. Percolate was about 140 people, a little startup with uh marketing software. It was the orchestration of all different marketing content. There's a really cool UI that we had. The use case wasn't completely defined, but it was a lot of fun to be there, met a lot of incredible people there, had a really great team. And we decided we we had um a Slack channel that was set up where all the sellers could ask a question. And the sellers would put this this question in the Slack channel, and our team had responsibility for answering it. And it was great. And we could probably do that with AI today, but this is a few years ago, Sky, so it wasn't it wasn't quite there. But the sellers really loved it because they felt like just about any time, day or night, they could pop a question in there, get an answer. Maybe they're on a customer call, they needed something. It wasn't like, oh, let me get, you know, call you back or whatever. So they liked that a lot. I had this idea hey, let's turn the same thing on for the the customer success folks. Now, there were a lot more customer success folks than the sellers. Yeah, they had very different questions. We turned this on, it was immediately a mess. And it was a mess not because these were bad people or anything, but because the number of questions started swamping the channel, people kind of started losing the thread. It was hard to address all the questions. And after we did this for about four weeks, I turned it off and I went to the team and said, you know what? That was my idea, that's a bad idea. We'll do a different channel for maybe CSM, we'll handle that a different way. Yeah, I didn't have to go to my team and say, Well, it didn't work because you all did this or that. No, it's like tried something, right? Uh, there's a concept of failing fast, but it's okay to fail. If you're not failing anything, then you're not trying enough. And it's hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and you see the tennis rackets on the back, and there's a tennis icon on my thing. I'm actually playing tennis this evening, so let me pull some tennis in. Yes, tennis, a point starts with the person serving. We got some rolling grows going on right now, right? And that's where you know you throw up the ball, you hit it over the head, you try to get it in the court, and there's a box on the other side that you've got to get it in. You've also got to clear the net, right? And if you mess up on the first attempt, you get a second serve. Now, if you mess up the second serve, that's called a double fault and you lose the point. Yeah, there are some players who never double fault. You think that's great. Well, maybe not, because a lot of the second serve is just a simple spinny serve that's going to be sure to be in, but then your opponent can just wail on it. So I actually think if you're not double faulting ever, you're not trying hard enough, you're not trying something different, you're not trying to win that extra point. So, again, I'll just fill all that down to it's okay to make a mistake from time to time. And if you do, just own it. It is so empowering to be able to say in a meeting, yep, that's on me. I'll and people look at you like you're nuts, but they're like, Wow, that's accountability. Um, and I can't remember the author right now, but there's a book by a former Navy SEAL called Extreme Ownership. Uh yes, uh Jocko something. Was that Jocko Willock? I think so. Yeah. Okay. But anyway, that's a really that's a really good one. I mean, you talk about listen, my decisions aren't going to mean someone lives or dies, right? Yeah, that is true. So, but I can own all my decisions. Yeah. No, I I love the concept and I live by that, fail fast. Like I said, I'm I'm a fast decision maker, which sometimes it's a problem because I took a decision too fast without thinking it through. Um, but for me, at least that also means I learned fast and now I can move on and I don't have to think, what if I did this or what if I didn't do it? Um, so I love that. Yeah, I think that's a great tip. And Ron, I'm gonna have the pleasure of seeing you in person uh at SolCon in 2026. Yes. Um, but I wanted to, without you giving all the secrets and everything you're gonna talk about, I wanted to ask you, because one of the topic you're talking about is pre-sales leaders as people pleasers who lack influence. Yes. That that's a really good topic. It is a little bit spicy, which I also like. Where where did like how did you uh even hear about that? You know, what does that pattern come from? How does it cost you as a leader or your team or the company itself? And maybe a couple of tips you can give us, you know, again, without giving away your entire presentation of how not to be that leader. Yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, how did this come about? It comes about because I see it way too often. I see really great, strong pre-sales leaders fall into this trap. And that's what it's called. It's called the pre-sales leadership trap. It's busy, light, and ignored. So wow, yeah, that's a good triangle. Oh, for one. I see a lot of us uh falling falling into that. And it stims from a couple of areas. And one of the areas is a lot of us who are good at pre-sales are really good for advocating for our solution, advocating for our customers, not so good at advocating for ourselves. And we are unable to really share what is our value to the organization, to our leadership. And and squarely on pre-sales leaders, they have a challenge in my uh experience of going to leadership, going to sales leadership, going to CRO and saying, here's what we're doing, right? We chase all these holy grills of different types of reports, you know, um acceleration of deals because of SE involvement, attach rates, everything else, but I've not really seen the uh proof in the pudding with real reports where people are showing this. So, so that would be one area where I think we could do a much better job is communicating our value in a way that's meaningful to the business. Now, that ties immediately into a second thing that I see a bunch of pre-sales leaders struggle with, and that is basically selling a business outcome to their leadership. They're very good at going in and doing discovery and helping their team, you know, analyze an opportunity with a prospect and coming up with a solution for that prospect and justifying it and everything else. But they stop doing that when they want to sell something internally. They fall back to some of our base SE instincts, which is this makes sense, we should do this without explaining where the savings would be, what's the ROI going to be, how are we going to improve efficiency? So that would be the second piece is we have to do the same kind of discovery on internal stakeholders and make that business argument. And I think if we get better at doing those things, then we can start to have more influence. And to me, I've I've got a little model about influence, but really it starts with the behaviors that you exhibit because that's how someone perceives you. And if they perceive you in a certain way, then you're going to develop trust for that person. This is obviously what happens with our customers, right? We become the trust advisor. That needs to happen internally with stakeholders and leadership. Once you've got that trust, then what you've got to do is convince the receiver of that trust that you can deliver a value. And that value can be many different things, right? For me, in my current role, the value is the experience of industry that I bring to our company as we're looking to make some transformational changes. Um, for our customers, it's how our software is going to deliver an outcome to them. That's the value. But if you got trust, if they, the receiver, perceivue, then you're in position to have influence. But you've got to kind of work to that. You can't you can't shortcut any of it. So that's what we're gonna do. It's it's gonna be a workshop. We're actually gonna dig in and have these leaders share some real experiences and give them a way to reframe it where they could move more into an influential space. So that's the goal, anyway. I love that. And I think honestly, sometimes I feel like you can't necessarily blame leaders in the space because most of the time they were, they became leaders without necessarily like learning it, you know, they were just kind of thrown into it. Maybe they were a great IC, and the company was like, hey, you'd be a great leader. And you're like, what do you mean? Like I've never led anybody before. So sometimes those issues become because of that. And again, that's normal. We're all human beings that we need to learn. Nothing is like given to us. And um, I love that you're doing this as a workshop as well. With that being said, I feel like this also leads to another problem is especially as if you were a high performer before as a leader, you might do this the wrong way and like jump in and try to save deals instead of trying to develop your team. Is there any tips or anything that you've learned throughout your career on how to break that habit? Oh, yeah. Yeah, because I did exactly that. So, so my story was I was at high performing SE and I had the opportunity to move into leadership. And I was very fortunate, Arby, that my first leadership opportunity was with IBM. And the first thing they did was they sent me off to uh basic blue for new leaders. And that was that was such a godsend, and it was really transformational for transformational for me in my career. So I really appreciated that. Um, but you're right, we we take the great individual contributor, and okay, now you're running the team. And without that training, without any support, without a lot of help, you fall into that trap of, okay, now I'm just super SE and I'm inserting myself into every deal. And that is such a dangerous trap because, well, number one, you're gonna exhaust yourself. You you can't scale that way. But number two is you're limiting the growth potential of your team. You're not giving them those opportunities to fail quickly or to learn or to develop. So that's a real disservice. So the biggest tip is as a new leader, you've got to get super comfortable with letting go of stuff. And that is scary. That is scary because most great pre-sales people who are great individual contributors who I've seen, they're very aware of their work product. They're very proud of their work product. They're very cognizant of their reputation, right? So, this idea of I'm gonna go let Joe do the demo, and I'm not gonna have any influence over that can be super scary. Well, I would do it this way, and he should do. You got to change that thinking. You're you're Job is no longer being the super SE helping everybody. Your job is to develop that performance of your team and to understand they're not going to perform the same way as you and be comfortable with that. And that is so tough. And that's that's why I think you need these models. That's why I think you need these buckets because you can't say, hey, Arve, just do the demo like me. That's that's not gonna work. You've got to do the demo like you, and you've got to bring your own charm and everything to it. But if we've got some commonalities with these buckets, I can say, Arvey, you are so good with the technical stuff. What we got to do is work on the business acumen a bit. What I'd like you to do is go study this industry a little bit. Let's find a trade show for you to go to to pick up some more industry lingo, right? Because I'm using these buckets as a way to kind of determine where to upskill somebody. And again, that's something that we can have an objective conversation about rather than subjectively, well, the AE does like the way you did that demo. That tells nobody anything. Yeah. That's actually you know, it's funny that you said it that way. Um, actually, last week I had Diana on my show as well. And she said the mistake she made in the beginning was trying to make clones of herself. And I think that's exactly what you were saying is trying to have people, you know, do it exactly how I would do it. And it's true because I've made that mistake too. Um, and I'll just give a tip that helped me is that was given to me. Obviously, I didn't just go out there and invent it. But instead of giving answers, when I get questions of like, hey, RV, how do I do this? Or hey, how do I whatever? Instead of giving answers, you ask a question back. You know, okay, what would you do? Oh, here's the problem. Okay, what are your ideas? How did you try to solve it? Because there's been times where I know how it should be solved my way, but then I've got an answer of something I didn't even think to solve it that way. And I'm like, you know what? That's actually a better idea than mine. So go ahead and solve it. And sometimes you just have to let people fail in a way, even knowing that the answer might be wrong for them to learn and figure out, okay, maybe you know I need to do it a different way. Um, how do you feel about like failing and letting your team fail? Because I've heard it two ways. It's like, one is like if I know that your team will, if I know that that's the wrong answer, but I'm gonna let you fail anyway, that's costing, you know, time and money to the company. But on the other side, it's like, okay, how do I learn if I can't fail? Because you can't just learn from having everything, you know, either given to you or going wonderfully, as we just established. I think it's that fine balance, and you've got to kind of weigh the opportunity cost as well. Yeah. Because if it's a five million dollar opportunity that your company is planning for and you let the junior SE do it without a dry run, well, that's just stupid. That's not well. I'm letting them fail fast. No, you're failing fast, right? Um, no, I I think you've got to measure a lot. If that was the situation for whatever reason, what I start doing is looking at a way of mitigating the risk, right? So one way of mitigating the risk is the aforementioned dry run. Hey, no, let's actually listen. This is a big opportunity, guys. Let's sit down. We're gonna spend the full hour. We're gonna have the AE on the call. He's gonna play like he's the customer, and we're actually gonna walk through click by click, step by step. Oh, you're not prepared to do that? No, no, no. It's a five million opportunity. We're gonna do that. Yeah, um, another way I can mitigate the risk is okay, junior SE, you're gonna lead this call, and senior SE, you're gonna ride shotgun. And I'm gonna have a very direct conversation with the senior SE. Do not rescue them, but don't let them sink us. Right. Yeah, and there's there's language. I think what you meant to say is let's consider it from a different perspective. There's ways of making that a soft transition, right? Right. And then we also tell the junior se if you get nervous, just ask the senior SE, hey, what do you think? And that gives you an easy opportunity to jump in. So that's what that's the way I think about it. I think about how do I mitigate the risk of something bad happening, but still allow this person that growth opportunity. Um, and I want to give a shout out to a woman who I admire greatly. Her name is Cleo Clark. She was my leader at IBM, and we were having a one-to-one at one point, and she asked me a question. This is shortly after I got my first leadership position. She says, Are you leading your team or are you rescuing your team? And I was rescuing them. I'm jumping in, I'm trying to insert myself in everything, right? And I said, Well, what do you mean? Explain more about you know, leaning. She says, Well, you need to understand what each of them need. And she did something really smart for me. She unlocked it as discovery, right? I know how to do discovery. I'm really good at discovery. So you're you're what what triggered this? I mean, was you were talking about, you know, instead of giving the answer, ask a question. That's discovery. And so we get off a call with someone. The first question I love to ask them is, Well, how did that feel for you? And that just gets them talking about, you know, how they kind of walk through the process and gives me a perfect opportunity to say, well, what did you notice when you said that and the customer did this? Right. And it starts to open up those opportunities. So love that you said that. And again, just shout out to Cleo because that was something that really kind of changed my direction on how I was approaching what I was doing. Yeah, yeah. So good. And it is true. It's definitely got away the opportunity cost and just see, you know, like you said, having somebody more senior and gently having them go in as needed, or maybe it's not needed because we did such a great turnaround. Love that. Yeah. Um, I wanted to jump onto our rapid fire questions, and they don't have to be fast answers, they can be uh, you know, long answers. Take your time. But what is one tool that you can't live without right now? Chat GPT. Okay. Is there anything specific that you use it when it comes to pre-sales that maybe is useful for other people to implement right now? Um, I use it as a sounding board. And what's interesting for me is at first uh chat was a bit too optimistic for my taste. I I've been using it for uh three or four years, a while. And and you know, oh, that's a great idea, Ron. And it's like, yeah. So I actually uh developed a GPT and I asked it to pressure test ideas and and you know argue against the blind spots and things like that. I really, really like that one now because it's not just oh, that's touch a great idea. It's like that's not bad. Here's some things you need to consider. So just as um a sounding board to work out ideas and thoughts. Um, yeah, I really like it. I love that. I I uh tell it to rip it apart. I'm like, hey, here's this, rip it apart for me. What's not what's you know, what's happening, you know, what am I not thinking about? So I love that. Yeah, and I agree. I think it can be optimistic at times, so you have to train it to not. Yes, yes. Um, what is your biggest growth lover for SaaS in 2026? Um, this is interesting. It's the human element, it's not AI. AI to me is making the human aspect of it, the connection aspect of it that much more important. Um, because we all get AI slop in our inboxes and our feed constantly. I think a lot of us are educated enough now to know almost immediately when we see something that was AI generated. And when I see, I don't read it. I'm not interested in it. So the realness, the rawness, the human piece, I think that's the big lever for this year. As we get to more in-person meetings, as we get more, you know, face-to-face stuff, I think that's going to be a big lever for us. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's um, I at least part internally, I call it scaling the unscalable. How can we scale? Well, she can't technically scale it if it's unscalable, but the human element is becoming more of and more of a distinction, which is uh crazy to think about in a world of AI, how things have changed because we wanted more automation, now we have too much of it. So now how do we get back to like a balance? And and I wonder too, I mean, we've got a generation that is digital native, and a lot of these people, I mean, I have my phone on me all the time, but if we've got our phones on us all the time, has that impacted our human connection ability? Is that an area that we're struggling with? I I don't know. I think it's a really interesting question. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Is there one belief that you have that most people would disagree with? Um I don't know if most people would disagree with it, but we put way too much importance on the demo. Um the demo to me is one of a dozen tools that you've got in a uh presentation when you're trying to convince someone. And uh it's just the easiest tool to reach for. What they say, if if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every every problem looks like a nail. If if an AE is the only thing we've got is the demo, then you've got a very limited approach to talking to your customers. So yeah, demo importance is much less than people think. Love that. That's great. I wanted to end our our time here with with the hiring section. Um, in terms of like when you obviously you've been a leader for a while. Is there any things that you look for when it comes to when you're hiring yourself? Maybe two to three skill set that is super important to you and you know you can teach the rest. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I look for technical curiosity. And again, it's just you've picked up software over time, you're interested in software, that kind of stuff, right? Again, you don't have to be a developer, you don't have to know Python or any of that kind of stuff. And I really think that's an aspect where AI has made that a lot lower entry level, right? Because if someone had to write up some Python code for an application, they could have chat do it, and how would we know? So uh technical curiosity. The second thing is I look for people who specifically for pre-sales who have the grit for the grind. And what I mean by that is to me, pre-sales is pretty cyclical in how we work. There are weeks that I have no idea how I'm gonna get everything done, and then there's weeks where it's a little bit lighter, and that gives me time to go look at demo environments or maybe some processes that we need to show up. So you've got to be someone who can manage that, not freak out if you've got two RFPs and four demos this week, just manage it, right? Um, the third one is they have to understand that pre-sales is a sales role. So even though you do the best demo in the world, Ron, and you're not closing a business, you're not gonna be a pre-sales person for very long. We've got to close the business. And that doesn't mean you have to be the best seller. You're not gonna be out there, you know, in the used car lot doing stuff. But understand sales methodologies, understand what your sales forecasting method is. Be able to have those conversations with your sellers and maybe even sales leadership about, hey, you know, you're forecasting this, but we haven't done the technical conversation yet, right? So just kind of understand sales in general. And then the last one, and this is kind of where the title of the book came from, is you've got to be a friendly human who can have a conversation. Seems like table stakes, but again, I've known a lot of geeky people like me who that was a real challenge for, right? So I'm gonna suss that out during an interview, see if they're able to carry on a conversation, or are they, you know, deer in the headlights and they're just waiting to answer the next question. So those are the four things I look for. And I feel like uh if if someone exhibit those four things and they've got what it takes to be good at what we do. Yeah, I love it. And by the way, the the soft skills is not just uncommon for technical people, right? It can be uncommon for shy people like myself. I was horrible to hold a conversation with because I would get so overthinking in my brain and I didn't know what to say next. I would overthink what I would say, and then obviously it would come out like horrible. So um hard to imagine, Artie. I will say I've definitely worked a lot on it. So it's it's way different now, which is good, good for me. Um, okay, awesome. Is there anything on what you just mentioned on like how do you test for that in the process? And again, don't give away all your secrets, but just maybe a couple of things of like, how do I test for this? If I'm a leader listening and I don't know, you know, what to implement? There's there's a reason. There's a reason that time's favorite number four is have a conversation because I feel like a lot of the things that we need to suss out, a lot of the things that we need to understand can be done by just having that conversation, right? So again, we talked a little bit earlier about people seizing up on interviews. Yeah, don't approach it as an interview, approach it as a conversation, right? Come to it open in that way. Obviously, have the stuff prepared that you want to talk about, right? But be an active listener, be a participant in the conversation, know where it's going. But this also goes for the interview, the interviewer, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, you you can't sit there with your list of eight questions, okay. Okay, and RV, what kind of tree would you be and why? And just you know, go you need to hear what they're saying. And so when people interview with me, it's it's it's maybe not what they expect because we're just going to chat about stuff. And it could be the weather, it could be something happened last week, it could be about gardening. It doesn't matter. That conversation that I'm having is telling me a lot about what's going on. So I think if we just get good at that, that could be helpful. Yeah, really, really good point. Um, one little tip that I implement on my end. Obviously, I'm I'm a recruiter, so I'm dealing with scheduling interviews, you know, and things like that all the time. I never call it an interview to either side. Hey, when would you like to have a chat or a conversation with so-and-so? And then even on calendar invites is always like conversation with, you know, Ron and Arvey versus like interview call with Ron and RV because it's it's a minor psychological thing that makes you think I'm not going there to try and sell myself because it's it's the most uncommon thing to do is sell yourself for some people. You know, some people are like so good at it, but when you approach it as a conversation, it's like, okay, I'm just jumping in to you know talk to Ron and see how things go. So a little tip. Um, okay, and last but not least, in your opinion, is what separates somebody that's like a good SE versus like an A-player S E? So from good to great on the SE side? Yeah. Um, it's really about understanding what the end result is, right? And a great SE serves their customer, right? Uh a great SE goes in there and they're really trying to understand what it is this company is trying to fix and understand that our solutions can actually help fix it and guide them to that, right? And and care about the broader organization and up leveling everyone else. Uh a good SE shows up, does what's asked for them, and maybe not much else. Yeah, yeah, very true. It's um, I I would say, I mean, kind of how you said it, but just going a little bit above and beyond, right? We're not asking you to do, you know, twists and turns and all these ninja tricks. It's just a little bit, you know, above and beyond your role and your sales process or whatever that looks like. And then, like you said, most important of all, just being a friendly human in pre-sales. I think it's about the objective of the meeting. Why are we having this meeting? You're not having the meeting to deliver the demo, right? Right, right. On the start, so understand what the objective is. And too often our sellers approach it the same way. What's the purpose of the meeting? Oh, we got to show them the demo. No, no, we we got to go back and fix that to have a better understanding of why we're actually there and why these people are investing time with us. Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much, Ron. This was awesome. Thank you for coming on, sharing all of your knowledge and just being super transparent. Um, there's honestly so much notes to take from this episode. If you're listening to this, make sure if you were live, make sure that you took some notes or re-listen to it and have your note takers open or something so you can start implementing whatever Ron said because it was really, really awesome. And thank you again for joining. Is uh where where would be the best way for people to connect with you? Yeah, listen, connect with my LinkedIn. Search for Ron Whitson if you see the tennis ball, you found me. Um, if you're interested in the book, there's a landing page for it called TimelessBehaviors.com. Uh, the book is on Amazon. We've got a Kindle version, we've got uh Audible version of it. So if you like it, it's out there. And I may have a couple of audible codes too. So someone'd like that, maybe, maybe send me a DM. Maybe you get an audible code for me. Absolutely. And I'll make sure to link it at the bottom too of our show notes. Um, obviously the book, Amazon link, and then your LinkedIn as well, so people can make it can make it easier for people to find you. Uh, but thank you again, Ron, and thanks everybody for tuning in and to our podcast. I'll see you next time. Thank you, Arvey. What a great pleasure. Appreciate it.