“Just go and show our tool in the best way possible.”

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.

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.

Max Lüpertz: Solution Engineering

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.

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, PreSales Rockstars.

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about:

  • 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’t understand what the customer is trying to solve, any demo you run risks being irrelevant or overwhelming.
  • 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?” Drawing on the SPIN Selling framework, Max explains that risk becomes the dominant concern at this stage, and SEs who keep selling features after that point are talking past their audience.
  • 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. When perceived risk exceeds perceived benefit, customers don’t choose a competitor—they do nothing at all.
  • Max’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’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.
  • 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. Good SEs ask uncomfortable questions, including ones that could surface a “no,” because proactively raising objections prevents them from becoming deal-breakers at the contract stage.
  • 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’t yet know about—the things they don’t know they don’t know.
  • 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. The right question is always, what outcome are they trying to achieve, and is this feature actually the best way to get there?
  • POCs are high-cost investments—often two people for two to four weeks—and should never be offered just because it’s “the next step.” Success criteria must be defined upfront, and the SE should use the POC as a “gift and get”: offer time and resources in exchange for early involvement in security review, legal, or procurement so both sides avoid losing months at the finish line.
  • The value conversation must anchor every interaction. If a customer can’t explain why they want to model processes beyond “so that we have modeled processes,” they aren’t ready to buy. Every conversation needs to come back to outcomes—regulatory compliance, operational change, and team efficiency—not features. And on the buying side, prospects who show up without a clear brief fall into the paradox of choice, get overwhelmed, and make worse decisions.

Max is also on LinkedIn—check out his profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-luepertz/.

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Additional information

What the British say and what they actually mean

Credits

Music by Jeremy Voltz, www.jeremyvoltzmusic.com