“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.

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?”
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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”.
• 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, not features.

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

Please reach out to us by either sending an email to hello@whatsyourbaseline.com or signing up for our newsletter and reading articles about process and architecture on our Substack… Go and subscribe at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com.

And if you like to support “the little podcast that could,” become a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline. We appreciate you!

Business transformation programs rarely fail because of technology. They fail because the organization is not aligned, not clear, and not ready for change.

There is an art, science, and emotional intelligence to leading successful business transformations, and our guest, Meherban Faroogh, has been helping clients for decades now to navigate this maze of major changes for organizations.

He founded PPS Partners in Toronto and has spent 20 years helping organizations navigate business transformations—with a particular focus on discovery and change management. Drawing on nine years across three major ERP implementations at Enbridge alone, Meherban brings hard-won clarity to why so many transformations fail and what to do instead.

In this episode we are talking about:

• Business transformation failure rates sit stubbornly at 70%+ regardless of which analyst report you pick up—and the root cause is rarely the technology itself.
• The three reasons organizations fail: lack of strategic alignment on the why of the transformation, insufficient clarity on the current state before signing large contracts, and inadequate change management throughout the journey.
• Successful transformation requires balancing three distinct dimensions—the science (methods and tools like Lean Six Sigma, BPMN, and TOGAF), the art (knowing when and how to apply those methods given the culture, scale, and politics), and emotional intelligence (building trust from the boardroom to the shop floor).
• There is no such thing as “digital transformation”—it is always business transformation, because technology is part of the business and should never be the tail that wags the dog. A CIO alone should never be the sole sponsor driving the shots.
• The Titanic analogy cuts through the noise: business transformation is turning the entire ship, not rearranging the deck chairs. Process improvement is fixing the supply chain for the rocket; transformation is the mission to the moon itself.
• BPM done well effectively eliminates the need for a lengthy discovery phase—because you are already doing it every single day. One client came back four years after implementing BPM ready to select a vendor, and told the integrator, “Here you go.” That is the value proposition in action.
• Strategic alignment cannot be assumed—even C-suite leaders are frequently not aligned with each other on the transformation why, and it is the consultant's job to surface and close those gaps through structured one-on-ones before the first workshop even begins.
• Identifying the right 15 to 25 core end-to-end processes—and assigning single, accountable process owners to each—sounds mundane but is precisely what keeps projects on scope, on time, and on budget.
• The central decision that gets made a thousand times during any transformation: do you change the organization to fit the tool, or change the tool to fit the organization? Clarity on the current state is the only thing that makes that decision an intelligent one.
• Trust is built through three things: empathy (genuinely listening, not just waiting to respond), logic (being quick on your feet and connecting the dots), and authenticity (being yourself rather than performing a role). Of the three, empathy is where things most often break down under the pressure of deadlines and cost overruns.

• Change management is not a workstream bolted on at the end—it is the continuous act of building trust and relationships across the entire organization so that people take ownership of the change rather than enduring it.

You can find Meherban on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meherbanfarooq.

Please reach out to us by either sending an email to ⁠⁠hello@whatsyourbaseline.com⁠⁠ or signing up for our newsletter and reading articles about process and architecture on our Substack… Go and subscribe at ⁠⁠whatsyourbaseline.substack.com⁠⁠.

And if you like to support “the little podcast that could,” become a Patron at ⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline⁠⁠. We appreciate you!