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The latest episode of the Presales Podcast featured a fascinating conversation with Micah Joel, a GTM leader with 25 years of experience in presales and one of the foremost thinkers on demo engineering. Hosted by Jack Cochran, General Manager of Presales Collective, and Matthew James, the episode explored what it means to build a dedicated demo engineering function from the ground up, and why it might be one of the most overlooked leverage points in presales today.
Listen to the full episode now!
The Moment You Know You Need a Demo Engineering Team
Micah has a surprisingly simple diagnostic for when an organization is ready to invest in demo engineering: listen for one specific phrase from sales leadership.
"When someone says, 'our solution engineers are heroes,' that's when," he said. "Because you know what it means—their solution engineers are overworked. They're doing way too much." When SEs are celebrated for their heroics, it's a signal that the underlying infrastructure is broken. And fixing it doesn't require a massive team. It starts with one person whose sole job is to make everyone else more effective.
Jack reinforced this from personal experience. He described spending more than half of his time in previous roles just wrestling with demo environments by spinning up servers at home, managing virtual machines, and fighting with configurations, all before ever getting in front of a customer. "Your time is better spent in front of customers," Micah countered simply. We all know that the more time an SE spends with customers, the better the outcomes for everyone.
Two Sides of the Demo Engineering House
One of the most valuable frameworks Micah shared was the idea that a demo engineering organization has two distinct functions, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes companies make.
The first is what he calls the "scale side." This is the team managing demo environments, building automation tools, handling provisioning, and thinking strategically about infrastructure and content. The second is the "deal side.” These are the team members who jump in to support SEs on specific opportunities, providing technical depth or design expertise when a deal demands it.
"Deal work will always take priority," Micah warned. If these two functions share the same team, the strategic work never gets done. Every time a deal comes in, the infrastructure projects get shelved. "Your strategic team will never be able to make strategic changes, and your deal team will never get better." The solution is simple but requires discipline: keep them logically separate, even if they share a manager.
Swimming Upstream into Product
Perhaps the most compelling part of the conversation was Micah's vision of what a mature demo engineering team ultimately becomes. It's not just a group that fixes broken environments and solves provisioning headaches. At its most evolved, it's a team embedded in the product development cycle, attending product planning sessions, raising their hands when new features are announced, and asking the question nobody else is asking: "Have you thought about how we're going to demo this?"
Jack admitted he'd never thought about having someone in product meetings specifically advocating for demo readiness. He described an organization he worked with where the demo environment was treated as the lowest priority and received product updates six months after general availability. Micah's vision inverts that entirely: a demo engineering team that pushes for API access, data tools, and demo scripts to be ready on launch day so SEs can walk out of the customer announcement and immediately start showing the product.
"It's a go-to-market team," Micah said plainly. "Just like product marketing and just like training and enablement, they're part of the journey from product to customers." He even floated a different title entirely: go-to-market engineers. Jack liked it. "It's all the things we talk about at SKO that we want to be able to do about being strategic, but no one is actually doing it as their full-time job."
Getting Started: Start Small and Stay Consistent
For organizations ready to take the first step, Micah's advice is grounding. Start by asking your SEs what they hate doing most. Whatever answer comes back, so long as it’s solvable with technology, that's your first project. Don't try to boil the ocean. "Nibble around the edges on some of the little tactical things that drive people crazy," he suggested. His preferred cadence: two small improvements and one big one per quarter. "After a couple of quarters, it becomes really obvious how valuable this team is."
And when it comes to talking to leadership? Speak their language. "Management is money-driven. They want to understand the dollar impact of the work that you do." Metrics aren't optional. Measure the outcomes and be ready to speak on impact and value to the organization.
Part two of this conversation is already in the works, where Micah, Matthew, and Jack will dig into how to actually measure and prove the value of a demo engineering team. Stay tuned.
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