Adapting to the Changing World of Presales with Steve Bullington

[MUSIC] Jack, I was once at JP Morgan San Francisco campus and I was about to give a presentation with our CEO and our opening slide was time is money and we kind of went back and forth and were like, is this too obvious to say to JP Morgan? I think based on what we talk about today, pre sales people need to be very conscious of where the money is coming from. What is the business value that we're really getting at in our sales? I 100% agree with that Matthew and it's almost to the point where it felt cliched to think about that at a certain point because we've heard for years now, I have to prove value, speak to value enough features. That's for the tenant of what we've been doing in pre sales but it's always been in a different context than what we talked about in the episode today because I feel like now, right at point we can actually give legs to the value conversation. It's no longer just this hypothetical thing that someone's going to have to sell up the chain to executives in order to get a purchase decision made. It's like getting someone to understand the value is how you're going to make money as a company because until they get it, until they use it, you're not making any money off of them, which is vastly different. We've got tools, roles, leaders that all can enable us to talk more about the value. And you're right on today's episode and welcome to the pre sales podcast, by the way. I'm your co-host Matthew James with Jack Hocker and our other incredible co-host. We got into a lot of this, Jack. We talked about everything about the kinds of sales I've never done, which you had some experience with, to what things look like today. Yes. Like, perpetual license, which hails a little bit of like, okay, this is going from physical media on your CDs that you're buying to having a subscription, right? We did the same thing with software back used to own stuff. You don't own stuff anymore, Matthew. You don't own stuff. But now it's getting even worse. I wish Netflix would let me pay for just what I watch. Jack, could we talk to today? We talked to Steve Bullington, who is the global public sector sales onboarding a strategic program, so the Salesforce, that's a mouthful. Effectively, he is the head of all the onboarding for the strategics and public sector stuff at Salesforce. He's been there for a number of years in various roles, very focused on onboarding and talent development of SCs. He's put in part of the pre sales collective, I think just about as long as that longer that I have been. And so, as a pleasure, he gets to talk to him today and hear his perspective on what's changing in the industry, some of which as it relates to a lot of consumption based business changes, we talked about AI. If you're someone who's listening today and you are feeling the need to become more able to talk about those value conversations, listen in, Steve's got some great tips as well as if you're just trying to think of what's the next thing for you when it comes to automating your role and where you want to take that free time that you may or may not now have. Hopefully not too much. Hopefully it's good free time for sure. I'm excited for it. Let's hop right into the conversation with Steve right after the break. Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to tell you about something I'm genuinely fired up about, which is Solcon 2026. In case you don't know, Solcon is our flagship conference for solutions professionals. It's going to be August 26th and 27th in Chicago with a pre event mixer the night before on the 25th. In case you're flying out and joining us the night before as well. This year's theme is strategic impact, driving change inside your own org and helping your customers get deals done in a buying landscape that's shifting very fast. It's two days, three different tracks and sessions built for the way you actually work. There's one of many that I keep looking forward to, but one I'm really excited about is Ron Wittson and Chris White running a workshop called Busy, Light and Ignored, the pre sales leadership trap. It's about why the very strengths that get you promoted can quietly stall you as a leader and how to build real influence. Instead, I'm looking forward to that. I hope you are as well and you want to join. Here's the best part. This is the year to bring your team. Grab a group of three or more on your team and you're in at just $549 a seat. Learn together and walk into September ready to make an impact and finish your year strong. Head to the link in the show notes to grab your seats. I'll see you in Chicago. Steve, welcome to the pre sales podcast. We're so excited to have you on the show. Thank you, Joe. It's great to be back. It's been quite a while since I've been on. I'm excited to talk to you. I think there's lots of people on. I know I wasn't hosting the show. I got to just listen before, but now I get to chat with you directly. We've had a lot of good conversations and you also have had a wonderful career seeing lots of different aspects of pre sales and solutions. You've seen it change. I'm sure already a couple of times. Oh yeah. Everyone's noticing. Pretty big shift right now. I think everyone is feeling. But before we get into that, I'd like to know everything that you've ever seen across all your decades of pre sales and all the changes. What's been the consistent thing that we can keep in mind as we're looking at these next change? What's been the consistent thing that you're like? This is the definition of what makes a great solutions professional. I think it always foundation like boils down to being a great communicator. Because if you think about it, the power of pre sales is you are this interpreter of, I've got all this technology that will do all these things. How do I connect that back to those business outcomes? Regardless of technology or where things have come or certainly where they will go, I think continuing to develop great communication skills, both written and verbal, is always going to be a differentiator for not just any pre sales professional, but I think for any professional period, technology, business outcomes, and then being able to communicate that really well. I think you did just capture all of pre sales. So, if that is the thing that is the through line, what in your definition of a great solutions engineer has changed over the last decade? I think the ability, I would say even shorter than the last decade, I think it's the ability to delineate value of the solution. When I started working with solutions engineers back in the mid 90s, they were the technical experts. Their job was to come in and demonstrate the thing or put the pieces together or spec out hardware or whatever the case may be. They didn't ever have a conversation about the value that was going to bring. Today, I think it's imperative that our pre sales professionals get even more effective at talking about the value the solution is going to bring. I know there are organizations that have value engineers or value consultants, and that's great, but there's never enough of them. Every pre sales pro has got to get better at delineating the value this is going to bring because it's going to get tougher before it gets easier at yet. What have you seen when it comes to someone balancing going deep into the technology, but then also being able to talk about that value? What does it look like in your experience? I've always been a believer in as I've trained associates over the last decade. It's always about if I show something, I need to immediately talk about the value that's going to bring. It's going to become even more important as we go to more consumption-based selling models because there's not that fixed, hey, it's $100 per seat per person per month, the math is pretty straightforward. Now we've got to be masters at really defining what that consumption is going to look like and tying it back as accurately as possible and as realistically as possible to the outcomes that the customer is going to get because the reality of it is if we go in and we say, okay, this AI tool is going to have a $50,000 impact on your operating expenses and it's going to cost $10,000 to do that. If we didn't do an accurate job and it is of costing $20,000 and they still get the $50,000 worth of value, they're going to be unhappy because, hey, you said this was going to be $10,000 and we get $50,000 back. What was $20,000, I got $50,000 back. So you didn't have those problems when you had fixed licensing models. But in this variable-consumptive age we're moving into, it's going to be really important that we dig deeply into understanding and going in with this accurate representation of the cost-to-value ratio as we can. I was around, believe it or not, for when we moved from perpetual license into the SAS world. My first thing I sold was perpetual on-premise installations and data centers. When SAS was coming around, I remember everyone's thought at the time was, yeah, for a niche, for a small amount of people, that's the way things are going. Now it's like, you sell perpetual license. Whoa, I didn't realize anyone ever did that anymore. It's all SAS. Are we at that same point? I definitely hear about the consumption models. It makes sense for things like snowflake and your data warehousing data centers or your AI models where you're consuming AI credits. Is that where we're going from your opinion? Are we all going to be looking at a consumption-based selling motion? I really think so. If not 100%, maybe like an 80-20 kind of break. Because the reality of it is you're seeing this with companies like Sierra and some of these which are going in and they're charging based on results, which is another way to split this consumption model. And so as more organizations start to see traction and start to see success with that model, as we well know, just like we saw with SAS, that all of those. people who used to ship the boxes, CDs, all moved to SAS, we're going to see all those SAS providers moving to some variation, in my opinion, of that consumption model. And whether it's just pure consumption or whether it's like a company like Sierra where they're going to charge on results, it's going to put more pressure on the sales teams to really accurately define what that's going to look like so the customer satisfaction doesn't fall off the board. I'm a little jealous. I never had the chance to sell these perpetual licenses. It's been all SAS for my entire career, all usage-based pricing. And I think there really is something to this. If anyone wants to do a little more digging, go and Google a company called ORD. Their whole thing is about getting usage-based pricing right every single time. And I think the fact that a company like that can exist and thrive goes to show exactly how much you've hit on the Steve. Because not only when you were talking about business value, you didn't just stay at the value proposition. You actually put the hard numbers on it. And I think that is something we can all challenge ourselves to do a little more in free sales as well. I agree. The idea behind the value consultant, right, has something that's not necessarily new, but it takes them a whole different light when you're saying your success as a value consultant is now a revenue impacting thing for us, the person selling the software. Exactly. It used to be kind of the cost justification. Hey, this is where we're going to take it to sea level leadership or renting the board or whatever. And now it's going to be what you're measured against. And it's going to impact customer retention and things like that because customers are not going to want to see their bill skyrocket if the value is not correspondingly or at a greater angle skyrocketing. So it's going to be quite a challenge, I think, for the next few years. The other part of it being that as these companies move from these license-based models to this consumption models, they're going to be at a disadvantage from some of these startups who are building the consumption-based model right out of the gate. And so you talked about Orb Matthew, I'm assuming they probably built that as the foundational piece. Well, it's a lot easier to get great at the foundational piece when that's all you've ever done. It's a challenge to go, just like it was, to go from selling you quarter a million dollar boxes of CDs to consumption, to the licensing, we're going to go through that same challenge as we go from licensing to consumption-based pricing because of the infrastructure that was all in place for the seat-based licensing. It does seem like it's got a little bit of an advantage. I was just having a conversation with someone yesterday talking a little bit about this consumption-based stuff forward-to-point engineers, the shift in the market. And I remember I talked to someone about it and their first response is someone who's not in sales, not in tech was like, "Boo, that seems like that's not going to be great." And I was like, it sounds that way at first until you consider the fact that the way the current model is set up for most companies is they'll sell it to you and they really don't care if you use it because they're selling you a three-year license. And I actually remember one company that worked the first deal I sold churned because the customer never got it off the ground up and running. There's no incentive by the company to get someone up and going if you don't care about retention. But the consumption model is, I feel like really good for the customers, the consumers because guess what? If they never use it, they're not paying for it really. And so it's almost like it's a way that customers can now hold companies accountable, which means that yes, what we do, the skill that we have to help people understand how to get going, it's now becoming our job to be the ones to get you used to using it and actually running those credits, they're spending them down, things like that. Yeah, if you think about the term shelf wear came from somewhere and that came from those days when you just shipped the box of CDs and the IT guy just never got around to implementing it and then he's literally put the boxes CDs on the shelf and we did see the same thing and we continue to see the same thing within the SaaS licensing model. But particularly if you move to a very heavy weight, you know, of 75, or 100% consumption based licensing, if they don't use it, you don't make any money. I spent a very early in my career, you know, business called the long distance business. Back then you had to pay per minute to pick up the phone and call somebody that was not in your local area. And part of what we had to do is the sales team is kind of forecast what we thought they were going to bill. We used to put a weight against after sales rep had been on board for three or four months. We put what we called a confidence factor. So if you said, okay, this guy's going to bill a thousand bucks and you'd prove in that your confidence factor was only 80%. We forecast 800 bucks even though you were signing for a thousand and we're going to see some of those similar things. You can come in and say, hey, their consumption is going to be $100,000 a year. But if you don't get it implemented, their consumption is going to be zero. And they're probably depending on how company set of contracts, there may not be anything to report to the sea level or to the board or to the shareholders. So it's going to be a very, very different mindset going forward. And companies are going to have to look at this not just as a product approach, but a holistic approach to everything from how it's evaluated, how it's communicated, and ultimately how it's reported to the shareholders. When you talk about implementation, every company makes a decision on how far their pre-sales team is going to be involved post-sale. And I think this consumption model is pushing us more and more towards pre-sales people having responsibility of getting these projects off the ground and implemented. Let's talk about two things that are happening here. The forward deployed engineer trend, there I call it a trend. So the data says about a year ago in April 2025, they're roughly 500 FDE roles listed. And we've 10x to that today in May, 2026. So that I think is a trend that is happening. What's your take on that? Is it going to stick around? And what do you have to say about pre-sales people taking on more post-sale responsibility? I think one of the challenges has always been the disjointed handoffs. And I blame the predictable revenue model for that. I'd never been a fan in I spent 30 years in sales and sales leadership. And I really believe that the predictable revenue made less professional sales people because somebody was sitting around waiting for a lead to come in. Go beyond that. There was been that disconnect where it got handed from, you know, sign contract to customer success or implementation. I think there is some real value to bringing resources into the sales cycle and having them be a part of it at an earlier stage. So whether that's your pre-sales solutions engineer being involved farther in the back end or whether that forward deployed engineer who gets brought in as that juncture piece, I think it's going to make a lot of sense because the good part of consumption-based products is the more they get used, the more they get billed, the more value they see, the more quickly they see value, the more opportunities they'll find to apply other agentex solutions to their organization. So I think the faster we can get somebody sitting side by side with that customer and helping them get their agentex experience off the ground, the faster we'll be able to bring on the second experience and the third experience and the tenth experience. And so I'm excited about it. I'm excited to see where it goes. I think it's going to be real interesting to look at the different ways that organizations implement them, whether they're going to be more closely aligned with their solutions team or whether they'll be more closely aligned with their customer success team. But my gut reaction is I like the idea of having them in the solutions organization and bringing them in earlier as part of the final presentation. So they're hand and hand and hey, you know, you got your AE, you've got your SE, and now I've got my forward deployed engineer. And so the AE is going to talk about business, the SE is going to talk about the solution in the forward deployed engineer is going to talk about the fast start. I think about that three-person model that set up. Does that de-emphasize a little bit the importance of the stress of picking a solution? If I'm thinking about this, if I'm going and buying something and I know there's not a lot of really upfront costs, I can try something out. I feel like the FDE might become more important than the AE and the SE in the long run because I just want to try something out or in my missing something in that dynamic of what's going to change. I think the challenge is that these are not standalone solutions. These are sales force in 2000. I'm going from literally three by five index cards to my first CRM solution. These are customers that are going to have to pull data from a wide array of sources and that data is going to have to be effectively structured and brought into it. So I think the reality of it is they're each going to play a very important role. I think the SE is going to become much more of the architect of the solution where the FDE is going to be much more of the implementer of the solution. Or we get to a point where it is really effective and those two roles merge together and you just have your solutions consultant who plays that forward deployed in G or on those deals and pulls them all the way through and then moves on to the next deal. So I think that's yet to be defined. I think there's a lot of options. They'll bring themselves forward. Just in the way that we've got a pretty good idea of what a pre-sales role looks like now. I think you're right. We are still in that early era of defining how, if DEs and pre-sales people work together. So looking at how pre-sales is changing throughout this, it's time to talk about our favorite topic, AI. AI has obviously impacted everyone's kinds of roles. What have you seen as the most impactful way to impacted pre-sales? And what is now being unlocked for pre-sales people to be able to spend their time on instead of some of the things we can now automate? Some of the ways that they're able to use tools to create really tight custom demos, whether it's the tools that are being put out there by companies or just using some of the generative AI tools that are out there is really impressive. And I've seen some essays that have built just incredibly strong presentations and demos that three years ago, October of 2022, they would have never built something like that because it would have just taken far too long. But now I can go out and I can go to Cloud Code and I can have it write me some code that I then import into the application and bam, now I've got this incredibly robust application. And I've maybe spent an hour doing it. I think that's amazing compared to where we were, which was you go back 10 years, very structured demos. You stayed within very tight parameters. A lot of cases you didn't even hardly deviate from a script way back when. And now I can go out and use Cloud Code or something. And I can build this wow demo that is totally replicable in the production environment, which is amazing. - You're bringing up some PTSD with me of my first demo that I learned. I remember specifically going, "When happens if I click this one?" I was like, "No, don't click that button." No, you can only click this button here when you're demoing. It is amazing how far we've come and we think back to like how very specific things used to have to be. We're definitely going to be like with all the tooling available, not used to that anymore. And I think you're right. We're going to continue to see those clear advancements and capabilities on again, how we use those tools to demonstrate that value kind of tying it back, which we're saying before, right? That's becoming more and more critical as the customers evaluating, as I think I'm hearing you're saying, how can what I'm looking for not disrupt what I've already got going? How can it integrate with the things that I've got? So that when I'm going down on the path of then using that tool and paying for it as I'm using it, I'm not paying for something going, now I've just lost time because now I've broken all the things to find a way to rip it back out and try something else. So it definitely is almost like, as these are more of a, trust me, your life's not going to break when you try this out. Person as opposed to a even convincing you, this is the best choice. It's more of we are a choice that's going to work with what you've got type of a conversation. Yeah, and I think when you think about bringing these resources together, you know, we hear a lot of talk about the SAS POC ellipse and you know, how all of the SAS companies are going to go away they're going to replace by opening I, I just don't think that's going to be the case. I think the interfaces and the way they work together are going to change dramatically. For example, you know, if you're a Salesforce user, you may not pull up sales cloud, you may go to Slack and you may just have natural language interactions with Slack that's going to feed that structured data that's in sales cloud or in service cloud. So I think we're way early into this. We're in the 2000 era of AI, if you think back to where SAS was in 2000. We're still there and it's moving faster than SAS moved, but it's not mature by any stretch. And so everything we're doing right now, it's just kind of prognosticating where it will go. And we all just got to hang on and go for the ride. - It is prognosticating though with knowledge of the past, right? Obviously, what's the disclosure on every financial thing? Past performance is not a definitive future result or what are the two, something like that. And again, the same thing, but it's like, yeah, but we've been here before. Like we've seen this happen before and it is following that similar trend as you've been saying. And so I think it's important to learn those lessons from the past of be ready for, learn everything you can about it, but understand why it's important to the company. You work for a white's important for your customer and not just, you can't ignore the fact that people still have to get their work done, which is the thing that we like to forget. 'Cause I actually remember myself when I was trying to look for SAS tools to help me win with my job. And it's how fast and easy it was even then to say, oh, I'll just buy something and try it out if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And I remember how much pain I caused myself by trying to implement things that didn't work. And I feel like we could be doing the exact same thing again with AI is, I mean, I've enjoyed learning about AI tools, but I think about the amount of time I've spent messing around versus the time I've spent actually being productive with those things I messed around on. I'm not anywhere close yet to being more productive with the time I've spent messing around. I think that's the danger we have to be aware of is it's good to learn it, but let's not over promise ourselves what we're gonna be able to do until it's just have more mature, more capable. - Yeah, I had heard a story probably six months ago of a bank that had spent seven digits with one of the large language models to build a customer service portal. And it was getting about 40% accuracy. And a vendor came in with a purpose built, AI empowered tool. And took the same documentation and was getting 98% accuracy without any fine tuning in with them even really knowing what all these documents were. And so will the large language models, will the frontier models catch up? - Yeah, probably. But there is real value in having those purpose built tools that are AI empowered versus trying to use AI to empower the organization. And so I think the more organizations that are building this power into their tools really, really effectively and making them more productive and easier to implement, the better off those companies, those are the companies that are gonna survive. It's the ones that are gonna struggle to bring AI empowerment into their platforms that are gonna end up either getting sucked up by the ones that do or getting sucked up by the frontier models. - So the hot take I gotta ask you Steve, okay, you got your BDR, you got your AE, you got your SCE, you got your FTE in the world we just described, right? Which of those is being replaced first by AI? - I think BDR, again, I openly stated, I'm not a big fan of predictable revenue model. And if you think about some of these tools that are gonna be built where outreach can be automated, and it can be really effective, really personalized outreach. To me, that's the first place to go. So the downside obviously to that is, as a college professor who teaches sales, I have a lot of students who have gone into those BDR roles. And so one of my biggest fears of AI across the board is we're not gonna have those people that are coming in and growing, you're gonna have the people like us who've been around who are coming in and gaining productivity for it, but then what happens when we go away? - What's the new path into sales, right? - Exactly. So I worry about that. I think that's why quite frankly, more universities need to have sales programs. So we're bringing them in at a higher level than a BDR. So they can start down that path. And quite frankly, they're gonna be AI fluent coming into those jobs. And so they can come in and they don't have to be taught new tricks 'cause they're not old logs. So looking ahead, let's say three to five years from now, we're very between talking a little bit futuristic, right? But the pre-Sales function we talked about FTEs coming out, what's that ideal world? Like if you had to define what things would look like with a sales team maybe with that path in for new students coming out of university and they're able to actually land a great associate AE role somewhere, whatever that path ends up being. What does that intersection of AI look like in a way that you think is gonna be sustainable in the long term? - I think the reality of it is we have all got to be focused on getting better every single day. I've been a long time believer in James Clear's Atomic Habits and his idea of 1% better every day was telling something the other day, I don't think 1%'s enough anymore. I think we've got to be focused on, maybe it's 3%, I don't know what the number is, but we've got to all be focused not just on the technology, but as I started out on those outcomes and being able to articulate those outcomes and be incredibly accurate at helping the customer to find monetize and measure those outcomes because that's what's going to be important. If these are going to increase sales and productivity, we've got to help them define it and then measure it on the back end. There's just gonna be a lot more pressure on the sales teams to be great business advisors and not just great technical advisors. I think that's gonna be the biggest transition that we're gonna have to make in the next video. three years. Absolutely agree. We'll see we're almost out of time here. So before we go, if someone's like, "Hey, I want to talk to Steve more about this." What's the best way for that? Best place is LinkedIn. I'm on the regular lady and love meeting new people and have a great conversation. So feel free to connect me. There's only two Steve Bowling tens of the other ones, an etymologist in Pennsylvania. That's not me. I mean, it's a very close career path. I mean, you could almost flip between the two. Exactly. Great. We'll see before we go. Any kind of final hot takes, anything that you want to emphasize again, maybe something that you want to bring up and make us bring you back on the show to talk about that next. What do you got for us before we go? Yeah, I think one of the things to think about is get out there and start getting connected with your university sales programs. If you went to a college that has a sales program or if you went to a college that you think should have a sales program, go start supporting those sales programs because they need our technical aptitude. A lot of the careers that they support are in consumer goods and things like that. We need them to help us develop the next generation of sales professionals. And so as pre-sales professionals and sales professionals, you can get connected with a local university that has a sales program. You can bring a lot of value to that program and shine a light on roles that they don't know exist because nobody goes to college to be a solution to engineer yet. Not yet. I'm hoping someone comes through someday and saying that. I knew I want to do this when I started college. Agreed. No, I love that. I love that. Well, Steve, it's been awesome talking to you today. I really want to say thank you for being on the show. And I know I have some things that I'm going to be thinking about as far as where SCs and pre-sales is going. So thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks guys. Really appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the pre-sales podcast by pre-sales collective. 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