<p>“Just go and show our tool in the best way possible.”</p><p>I have heard this sentence wayyyy too often coming from a salesperson, and the solution engineer on the receiving end just died a little bit inside.<br>Of course you want to make a good impression when showing your tools to your customer, but more importantly, you want to start building a relationship and engage with them. For that you have to get them to a point where they open up and tell you what they *really* think—and a “no” is a good indicator that this relationship has formed.</p><p><br></p><p>And we are happy to have a pro in this field as the guest of this episode: Max Lüpertz. Max is a solution engineer who took over as account executive and grew until he led the whole sales organization of the UK for one of the companies he worked for. </p><p>Now he helps fast-growing SaaS companies close more deals by making their sales demos (and their general presales) better. He provides hands-on coaching and sets up a simple, repeatable demo process with his firm, <a href="https://presales.rocks/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PreSales Rockstars</a>.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of the <a href="https://www.whatsyourbaseline.com/podcast/">podcast,</a> we talk about: </p><ul><li>Solution engineers are too often treated as “demo monkeys”—pulled in before proper discovery has happened because AEs need to show pipeline progress. There is no solution without a problem: if you don&#39;t understand what the customer is trying to solve, any demo you run risks being irrelevant or overwhelming.</li><li>Once a prospect has seen the functionality and shortlisted vendors, their mindset shifts entirely—from “Can it do this?” to “What happens to me personally if this goes wrong?” </li><li>Oversharing is one of the most common and costly demo mistakes. Bombarding a prospect with features increases cognitive load, raises perceived risk, and dilutes the message. </li><li>Max&#39;s lesson from an 18-month stalled deal: FOMO caused him to show 50 features when the customer only needed three. The extra complexity made the project feel like a burden, and the prospect concluded they weren&#39;t ready. The “shotgun” method—showing everything and hoping something lands—is an AE-driven trap. Effective demos need a curated storyline built around confirmed needs, not a feature parade.</li><li>Discovery is not a one-time AE activity. SEs need to run a secondary, deeper discovery to uncover the personal risks and motivations of individual stakeholders—not just the organizational problem.</li><li>How you introduce yourself sets the ceiling on your influence. Being framed as the “technical conscience” boxes you into a narrow role. Instead, position yourself as someone who knows the industry, has seen implementations succeed and fail, and will proactively surface the risks the customer doesn&#39;t yet know about—the things they don&#39;t know they don&#39;t know.</li><li>SEs act as a “human API” between customers and product management—translating vague feature requests into actionable feedback and pushing back on requests that turn out to be aspirational rather than genuine buying signals. </li><li>POCs are high-cost investments—often two people for two to four weeks—and should never be offered just because it&#39;s “the next step.” Success criteria must be defined upfront, and the SE should use the POC as a “gift and get”.</li><li>The value conversation must anchor every interaction. If a customer can&#39;t explain why they want to model processes beyond “so that we have modeled processes,” they aren&#39;t ready to buy. Every conversation needs to come back to outcomes, not features. </li></ul><p><br></p><p>Max is also on LinkedIn—check out his profile here: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-luepertz/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-luepertz/</a>.</p><p><br></p><p>Please reach out to us by either sending an email to <a href="https://[email protected]/">[email protected]</a> or signing up for our newsletter and reading articles about process and architecture on our Substack… Go and subscribe at <a href="https://whatsyourbaseline.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">whatsyourbaseline.substack.com</a>.</p><p>And if you like to support “the little podcast that could,” become a Patron at <a href="https://www.patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://www.patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline</a>. We appreciate you!</p><p><br></p>