The AE sent the demo request on Tuesday afternoon for a Thursday call. It had the company name, three attendees, and one line of notes: "They want to see reporting." The SE blocked an hour on Wednesday to build something, and by Thursday morning both of them felt ready enough. Then the call starts, and the buyer's VP of Operations turns her camera on, says good morning, and waits. The AE waits too, and so does the SE, and for about five seconds everyone on the call can feel it.
Brian Lewis described that moment on our panel. Without a plan, he said, "Quite literally, in second number one, who's talking? Do I go or do you go? Okay, now what? And for how long?" His short version is an old sales line: hope is not a strategy.
Treating the demo as a team sport means the AE and SE both answer for how the deal turns out. Winning pairs plan together before the call, starting from the decision the buyer should make, and keep talking between meetings. The chemistry buyers notice is mostly the visible result of that shared planning.
We dug into this in a recent 2Win! Global webinar, Demo Is a Team Sport, with three people who've worked both sides of the AE/SE pairing: Jack Cochran, General Manager of Presales Collective; Brian Lewis, Co-founder of Home Run Presales; and Chad Wilson, COO and Go-to-Market Transformation Lead at 2Win! Global.
When a demo goes sideways, the easy explanation is personality. The AE talked over everyone, or the SE went too deep on features, or the two of them just don't click. The panel pointed somewhere less dramatic: two capable people walked in assuming they were aligned, and neither one checked.
Jack sees the same assumption from both sides. "Most SEs assume the AEs don't care how the demo or the value conversation is done," he said, "and most AEs assume SEs have no opinion on everything else: the setup, how we're talking through use cases, the relational pieces. Ask any SE. They want to know, and they have an opinion about it, and vice versa." The problem, he added, is that "it means you're not talking about it."
Chad sees the same pattern when 2Win assesses a team before an enablement project, and he traces part of it to how the process gets explained. Giving the AE business discovery and the SE functional discovery is sound design, until it gets communicated as two separate jobs. That, Chad said, "starts to create silos in the way the team functions."
The best teams keep the roles and share the understanding. That shared picture is what lets a pair "improvise and finish each other's sentences in a client meeting," Chad said, because both people know what the customer is trying to get done. In his words, "the playbook is the starting point. It's not the finishing point."
Every task needs a name next to it, but Jack pointed out that the named person isn't the only one who should care. "We tend to go, well, it's not my responsibility," he said. "It is your responsibility to contribute to the success of your sales opportunities, even if you're not the one on the RACI chart with the R."
Brian took it a level higher with an idea he credits to his brother and co-founder, Kevin: own the outcome.
When a marquee deal is lost, and leadership asks what happened, "they don't care whether I was prepared or the AE was prepared," Brian said. "They're going to say, what was your strategy? Did we understand the buyer's needs? Did we sell the value?" Arguing over who prepped which meeting doesn't get anyone far with leadership, Brian said, because what they see is the lost revenue.
Chad added a limit on that. You can't control your counterpart, he said, "but I can influence it," and good pairs care enough to push on each other's thinking "because I think we could do better together." When influence isn't enough, Brian added, the plan should already include an escalation path both people know about, so a drifting deal gets raised while it can still be saved.
Chad's planning starts with the end of the meeting. "The objective is not, I need to show these things," he said. "The objective is we're trying to lead the client to a decision point at the end of this meeting."
From there, the planning works backward:
Roles, proof points, and backup plans get worked out after that. The mistake Chad sees most often is starting with the capabilities, which he summed up as "show this, show this, show this."
"I don't need more information. I need clarity of your point of view." -Chad Wilson
Chad said an eight-page discovery transcript doesn't help the SE much, since they'll run it through an AI tool anyway. What helps is the AE's read on the room: "You were in the room, you saw how people reacted, you saw the body language, you understand the momentum," Chad said.
Jack thinks this prep has to happen before every meeting, "because every meeting has a chance to kill a deal." He also pointed out that buyers now know a lot about a product before anyone from the vendor is in the room. Chad added that depth should match the deal: an enterprise seller can map every stakeholder, a high-volume team can't, so the question is which deals get the full treatment.
Brian's company was once choosing a payroll and benefits provider and got down to two vendors that were probably equal on paper. A few people on the team had doctors they wanted to keep, so the question Brian cared about most was whether those doctors would be in network.
Asked about the doctors, one vendor said, in effect, "Definitely. We work with everybody. Don't worry about that. But let me show you this."
The other said, "I don't need to show you anything right now. I'm going to connect you with the benefits coordinator who can answer that question for you. Once that's done, I want to show you everything else."
"Guess where we went?" Brian said. He suspects both products would have covered the doctors. One team heard the thing he said mattered and changed course to handle it, and that team won.
Jack explained why that lands so hard with a buyer:
"This is the one thing I care about. If you're ignoring that, what else are you ignoring about me?" -Jack Cochran
The buyer's next thought, he said, is about life after the contract: "Are you going to put me in a bucket with everybody else?"
Planning backward from the decision only works if the pair is talking early enough to do it, and Jack thinks that starts with how the SE gets pulled in. Instead of a demo request, he wants an SE request: "Not, I'm requesting a demo. I'm requesting the strategic skill set that comes from a solutions professional on this opportunity." The shift, he said, is feeling "added to an opportunity, not added to a meeting."
One AE Jack worked with set up a recurring meeting with him, whether they shared one deal or five. They'd go line by line through each opportunity:
Compare that with a call Jack has gotten too many times, the day before a demo: "Remember we promised them a demo four weeks ago? This is that demo. It got rescheduled three times. Do you remember what you're supposed to show them? Because I don't."
Brian noted that no buyer is asking for these meetings today, "but they are the most impactful time you can spend." They save time, too. When the AE flagged a group that needed a demo, Jack would ask what they were trying to get, and sometimes the answer was "actually, I feel like we can just send them an email."
"We saved so much time not doing pointless demonstrations and calls because we were being strategic," Jack said.
For sales and presales leaders, Chad's question is where the energy comes from, because "somebody's got to care enough to put energy into it." If your SEs support assigned AEs, the SE can set up these meetings and run them. In a pooled or round-robin model, it probably has to come from you and your counterparts in sales.
Chad thinks chemistry can be built on purpose. "Chemistry can definitely be built," he said, "and I would say it should be built." Some people just click, and chemistry looks different with each partner. What buyers pick up on, he said, is "a feeling of being in sync and supportive of one another," and it matters because "buying decisions are emotional decisions." Chad's view is that most products in a category are close enough in capability that how the team feels to work with can decide the deal. He guessed that's what happened in Brian's payroll decision: the vendor made Brian feel heard.
Jack offered a practical test. Compare a meeting where you had a plan and knew why you were doing each part with one where you walked in on "let's just see what happens." You felt more connected to your counterpart in the first one, even if you get along better with someone else.Buyers feel the difference too. Of sitting across from an unprepared team, Jack said, "It feels like, can we leave? Because I can tell you guys want to leave."
"A buyer's experience in the sales cycle is a predictor of their experience as a customer." -Brian Lewis
When a pair has done the planning described above, they look coordinated on the call, and Brian's point is that buyers take that as a sign of how implementation and support will go. None of it requires friendship. "I don't even have to like you" to execute a shared plan well, Brian said. "It's a bonus if we like each other."
The bonus is real, though. Years ago, working as an SE in supply chain management, Brian wore a light blue collared shirt and black shoes with blue laces to match. On a trip to Australia, he met up with the partner rep he'd been paired with and noticed the rep had blue laces too. It became their thing.
Buyers sometimes called it out, and before every meeting they'd ask each other, "Are we doing shoelaces? Of course we're doing shoelaces." Brian calls it a form of meeting prep: "This is how we're gonna present, literally, software, but also ourselves."
He added a caveat right away. Not everyone is a shoelace person, and too much lightness can hurt a deal that needs to feel serious. He thinks being yourself matters more than performing, because buyers can tell the difference.
To close the session, Erin asked each panelist for the one sign in the first five minutes that an AE/SE pair will win. All three went straight back to the opening seconds of a call.
Brian listens for hesitation: "Is there no, no, you go, no, you go? You can tell, I think immediately, does it feel like this team came prepared?"
Chad watches what the AE's opening is about. If the rep spends up to twenty minutes on the company, then hands off with "this is my technical expert, you're in great hands," the opening was about the vendor, and the SE inherits an expectation nobody can meet. The pairs Chad trusts open on the customer's problems instead.
Watch the people who aren't talking while someone walks through the agenda. "If they look surprised," he said, "you know there's a problem."
Nobody on your side should be surprised by your own agenda. Before your next significant demo, block thirty minutes with your counterpart to agree on the decision you're driving, who's in the room, and who owns each moment. Then keep that meeting on the calendar after the demo is over. SalesTeam2Win is built around that habit.