When an SE runs a demo, they’re not just walking through the product for the sake of it.

They’re thinking about the prospect: what that team cares about, what’s going to wow them, what they need to see to sign on the dotted line.

It’s a deliberate, consultative process which sounds an awful lot like sales. But is presales really a sales role?

To find out, we sat down with Navattic advisor and Head of Enterprise Presales at Wise, Matthew Young James.

Here’s his take on what people get wrong about the difference between presales and sales, how to know which is right for you, how both teams can work better together, and where both roles are headed.

The most fundamental misconception about presales and sales is that they’re operating in completely different lanes:

• Sales = relationships and hustle
• Presales = technical sidekick

The reality isn’t so clear-cut. “These two roles are more similar than people think because they’re focused on the same objective, which is: success for the customer,” Matthew explains.

Yes, AEs and SEs have distinct jobs. But those jobs aren’t as far apart as people make them out to be.

“In my mind, the subtle difference is: AEs run a project, SEs figure out what that project looks like.”

Here’s how:

AEs Build Depth in the Account

They know all the goings-on behind the scenes – at both the company and team level.

They know what the champions and the skeptics care about. And they herd all the cats to keep the deal moving.

SEs Build Depth in the Product and Market

SEs know the customer and their goals intimately, too, but they bring another kind of value. By the nature of their role, they have:

1. A broad view across multiple geos and verticals, which gives them a birds-eye view of the market (plus a sense of what works for some prospects and doesn’t for others).
2. Close relationships with product and engineering, which give them a front row seat to what’s been released and what’s launching next.

“That’s a unique position to have internally, because you can tell your AE, ‘Hey, I heard about this as a need from another set of customers, and here’s how we handled it there,’ and you also have the leverage to push for new features on the product side,” Matthew says.

For example, there was a feature a prospect needed, and Matthew knew he didn’t quite have enough information to make a business case for it.

Then he realized a much larger prospect had asked for almost the exact same thing, and his colleagues were already seriously considering prioritizing it.

“So I talked to both account teams, and we had a longer conversation about how we needed this to get enabled. That helped us overdeliver for both parties.”

If you get energy from diving headfirst into a product, nerding out over architecture, and exploring complex use cases with customers, you’re probably wired to be an SE.

If you’re excited by risk, go the AE route.

“When you’re an AE, the buck stops with you,” Matthew points out. “If you’re ok with your results directly impacting your pay, become an AE.”

If that sounds intimidating, remember that it can also be empowering.

As an AE, if something isn’t working, whether it’s the way an account is moving or how your company is supporting you, you have the agency to make a change.

If you’re on the fence, this doesn’t have to feel like a one-time, make-or-break decision. Matthew’s heard of AEs becoming SEs and SEs becoming AEs.

“People naturally find themselves drawn to what they need. You’ll know if something is right or if there's an opportunity that is calling your name,” says Matthew.

When orgs treat presales and sales as more separate than they are, misconceptions start getting baked into:

Process

It’s not an AE’s job to own the conversation, and it’s not an SE’s job to show the product. Which means a rigid structure – two calls, then a demo – shouldn’t be the end goal.

“What SEs and AEs need to do is figure out what customers are looking for and what problems those customers are trying to solve. If they can show off the product to get there, amazing,” Matthew emphasizes.

But if they just shoehorn in a demo because the Salesforce tracker says that’s what they’re supposed to do on the third call, they’re missing a trick.”

Pay

AEs and SEs are both accountable for revenue. For AEs, that’s made explicitly clear through quotas.

But because presales can feel like a totally different role, SEs are often measured on proxies for revenue, like:

• Number of demos per week
• Time spent on deals per week
• Qualitative feedback from account teams

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it may not be the best way to encourage SEs to be a true partner in deals.

Matthew suggests asking, “‘Are we coming at sales engineering with a hypothesis of what we want this to do in our set of deals? And are we incentivizing and measuring our SEs to get that done?”

Looking for more guidance? Read How to Measure SE Impact.

Org Chart

When presales is seen as a completely different role, it’s easy for SEs to get placed under product, engineering, or implementation, rather than sales.

Again, this isn’t inherently wrong. But it does have knock-on effects:

• When presales reports into implementation or delivery, handovers tend to be tighter and onboarding runs smoothly – but that comes at the expense of deal speed.
• When SEs report into product or engineering, they’re pulled deeper into roadmap conversations and feature validation, which can improve long-term product fit and adoption. At the same time, it creates more distance from sales.
• When SEs sit inside the revenue organization and report into sales, they’re more deal-focused. That accelerates deals, but it may also mean handovers to customer success aren’t as detailed as they could be.

“All of these setups can work,” Matthew says. “But there’s probably a best fit for your organization. Being aware of the tradeoffs is how you get there.”

Top AE and SE teams don’t divide and conquer, they actively push each other.

“They should be constantly giving each other feedback and iterating on things together,” Matthew says. “Think of it like two rocks in a stream bumping up against each other and smoothing each other out.”

That friction creates a better work product. And ultimately, makes the roles even closer in scope and skill.

Matthew likened it to mixed doubles curling.

“Both players are experts, one in sliding the stone and one in scraping. Then they swap. Obviously, you don’t swap in the sales cycle.

But you want to get to the point where the AE and SE have the same high standard of skills, the same high understanding of your customer, what they need, and what your product does. Because it’s incredible what can happen when AEs and SEs are really in sync.”

Product demos look completely different today than they did even a year ago. A lot of that has to do with – you guessed it – AI.

“Every org has considered or purchased a demo automation tool by this point, and it’s shifting what both teams are doing on a daily basis,” Matthew notes.

Instead of spinning up new environments and running multiple demo calls a day, SEs are using tools like Launchpad to:

• Build standardized interactive demos that AEs can customize and share with customers earlier in the sales cycle
• Maintain reusable sandbox demos, which eliminate the risk of bugs or setup issues on live calls
• Track buyer interest and uncover new stakeholders, giving both teams more context for productive, high-converting follow-up conversations

“Demo automation is giving both teams more time to obsess over how to make customers successful, and that’s something AI can’t replace,” says Matthew.

He also thinks presales teams will also always have a hand in figuring out:

• What new use cases are on the horizon
• How customer expectations are evolving
• How competitors are switching up their strategy

“There are things we don't know at any time, for any product, on any deal,” he highlights. “If you try to automate that, AI will be right sometimes, and it will be wrong with 100% certainty sometimes as well. Presales will act as that source of truth.”

Want to see how other teams like Wise are using demo automation to free up their SEs for higher-value work?

Read How SE Teams Are Using Navattic.