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A conversation with Nicole Jackson, Solutions Consulting Lead at Brex, recorded on PSC Unscripted on January 8th, 2026.
In an industry where polish is prized and every demo is rehearsed to perfection, Nicole Jackson is here to tell you the truth: leadership is messy, growth happens in the uncomfortable moments, and the best teams are built by people willing to admit they don't have all the answers.
Nicole leads a team of 14 solutions consultants at Brex, where she's spent 12 years in the presales trenches. But before you picture the typical SC leader story of someone who simply climbed the technical ladder, you should know that Nicole's two sons are a professional digital marketing entrepreneur and a dancer who performed at the Super Bowl with Kendrick Lamar. Her leadership philosophy? It comes from parenting, not textbooks.
"I really do believe that my leadership style comes from my parenting," Nicole says. "I nurtured their passion." That same principle guides how she develops her team today.
The Intelligence Engine You're Probably Underutilizing
If you've been treating your presales team as "the people who do demos," Nicole has news for you: you're missing the entire point.
"I've been using this phrase of like, this intelligence engine, right?" Nicole explains. "At the end of the day, when you think about presales, we get the signals before everyone else, and we're touching far more of these customers than anyone, or prospects or customers, than any other team."
Think about it. Your SCs see patterns across hundreds of deals. They hear objections before they reach the sales leader's desk. They understand product gaps before they hit the roadmap meeting. They know which features actually matter and which ones are just marketing fluff.
But here's the kicker: most organizations don't extract that intelligence. They treat SCs as executors, not strategists.
Tom jumps in with a common scenario: "A lot of times, I've seen reps say, well, this is a very unique situation, I think we need to do it this way, and it's not necessarily the best way, or it's partially right, and you need to guide them somewhere else."
Nicole's approach? Don't just correct the rep. Show them the data. "When I work with my other account executives, the exact same scenario, 9 times out of 10, this is what happened. Here's how I think we should move forward." It changes the entire conversation. Suddenly, the SE isn't the person saying "no." They're the person who's seen this movie before and knows how it ends.
This is how you unlock what Nicole calls your team's greatness. "Instead of you just working on a deal here, a deal there, you're actually changing the direction of the business," she says. "The fundamental business."
It's why so many deal strategy teams are staffed with former SCs. They've been trained to spot patterns, synthesize complex information, and communicate it clearly. As Tom notes, these are skills that turn individual contributors into cross-functional leaders.
The Boundaries Conversation Nobody Wants to Have
Nicole's team at Brex was building from scratch. And like most eager SC teams, they immediately fell into a trap.
"We just start supporting everyone, right?" Nicole recalls. "And so, you just kind of spread yourself thin, everyone has an expectation that you're going to come and quickly show this overview of your product, and it could lead to burnout in the team."
They knew they needed boundaries. They documented their point of view. Everyone said, "Oh yeah, your point of view is so nice." And then... nothing changed.
So they set actual boundaries. And here's what happened:
"Everything got better, to be 100%," Nicole says. "People got self-sufficient. The teams that should be self-sufficient got very self-sufficient. The teams that needed our help had access to our bandwidth. We were able to show up stronger, prep for it, and all of those things."
This is the counterintuitive truth about presales capacity: saying yes to everything means showing up fully to nothing. When you set boundaries on when and how SCs engage, you concentrate impact where it matters most.
The high-value work conversation usually lands differently when you frame it that way. Because the question isn't whether an SC can run through walls for every rep who asks. It's whether they should.
"In you is all of this knowledge, and you won't share it when you're in a velocity mode that isn't giving you kind of that high-impact work," Nicole tells her team. "This role really has a lot of greatness to it, and it's in your curiosity, and it's in your insights."
Why SCs Have an Unfair Career Advantage
Tom shares an observation he's had throughout his career: a lot of the management skills he uses today, he learned as a 24-year-old teacher. The pattern recognition, the adaptation, the ability to read a room and adjust on the fly.
"Poor thing is getting, like, I'm like, field testing management principles on my daughter," he laughs.
But there's something else teachers and SCs have in common: they practice high-stakes communication constantly. And that creates a compounding advantage over time.
"Public speaking is the best gift we can give to ourselves," Nicole says. "It just builds up your confidence, right? When you can go in front of people and you can explain what you've researched, what you've learned, your lived experiences."
Tom jumps in: "It penetrates other parts of your life as well. You come off as more self-assured and more confident than most people, because you have to."
This is why presales professionals often transition so smoothly into executive roles. They've been developing executive presence the entire time, whether they realized it or not. Every demo is practice. Every objection handling exercise is confidence training. Every technical presentation in front of a C-suite buyer is a masterclass in influence.
As Tom puts it: "Most people are very scared to do this. And if you're not, and you enjoy it, it's the most empowering, greatest feeling."
Nicole adds the crucial mindset shift: "Even if you botch it, we've all probably had a session or two where it's like, damn, that could have went a different way. But okay, you know the next time. The world keeps going."
Failure in presales is low-cost education. You learn, you adjust, you improve. And that growth mindset becomes part of who you are.
The Demo Metaphor
Tom offers a perfect metaphor for how presales professionals operate in these spaces: "We all know, when we're prepping that demo, or the first few times, it is ugly, and it's not gonna meet the needs. But when we get in front of that prospect, we nail it."
Nicole completes the thought: "It can be so messy, and you know it's messy, but you know who doesn't know it's messy? The person on the other end. So you get to own how you deliver that out to the world."
This is the essence of presales. You do the messy work behind the scenes. You do the research, the iteration, the technical validation, and the deal strategy so that when you show up for your customer, it looks effortless.
The same principle applies to leadership. Your team doesn't need you to have all the answers. They need you to be thoughtful, to create systems that work, to show up with confidence even when things are uncertain.
They need you to lead with heart.
Because at the end of the day, the most important thing isn't whether your metrics are perfectly clean or your processes are fully documented. It's whether your people feel supported, challenged, and empowered to do work they're proud of.
As Nicole puts it: "You gotta have curiosity, you gotta have empathy for others, and then you just gotta want to do the work. It's grindy, it's meaty, it's not always celebrated. But it's definitely meaningful work."
And sometimes, meaningful work is messy. That's when you know you're doing it right.
Join the Conversation
Want to dive deeper into presales leadership, career development, and the real challenges facing SC teams today?
Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/l8OdIR3TqRs
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PSC Unscripted is a weekly series featuring unscripted conversations with presales leaders. No rehearsed answers, no polished talking points, just honest dialogue about the challenges and opportunities in being in presales. New episodes are live every Thursday, and you can find the full playlist of past episodes on YouTube.
About the Guest
Nicole Jackson leads Solutions Consulting at Brex, a fintech company specializing in spend management for modern businesses. With 12 years in presales, she's built teams from the ground up and helped define what strategic presales leadership looks like in high-growth environments. Nicole is based in Syracuse, New York, where she's also a mother of two adult children and grandmother to one. When she's not developing the next generation of SC leaders, she's running a travel community of over 500 people that's been connecting across the U.S. for more than 20 years.
About Presales Collective
Presales Collective is the largest community of solutions consultants, sales engineers, and presales professionals in the world. Through events, content, resources, and peer connections, PSC helps presales professionals level up their skills, accelerate their careers, and build the relationships that matter. Learn more at presalescollective.com.
