How to Scale Presales, Without Burning Out Your SE Team

If you look at an SE’s calendar any given week, you’ll wonder how they do it.

They’re constantly in meetings, presenting live demos, aligning on enterprise deal strategies, or helping reps fill out RFPs or security questionnaires. In the little time they have in between, they’re spinning up POCs or responding to other one-off internal requests.

That’s a fast track to burnout, and burnout is tough on SEs and the business. Research from SHRM shows that the cost of replacing an employee can cost between .5 - 2x their annual salary. For SEs, who are highly specialized, 1.5x is a conservative estimate.

On top of that, Gallup finds that burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take sick days – and every delayed RFP or slow demo response risks pushing deals weeks (even months) down the pipeline as procurement cycles and buying committees often run on strict timelines.

It’s no surprise then that many SE teams are starting to rethink how they work.

Below, we share a bit more about the realities of the SE role, then dive into how leading teams are preserving their focus and energy for the most important deals with streamlined processes and helpful tools.

SEs have one of the toughest jobs in SaaS.

They have to flip between being technical and personable. They have to make the product look perfect, even when the backend might be anything but. They have to be ready to answer any prospect's question, no matter how easy or how hard.

That kind of work takes a toll:

• Back-to-back live demos → little time to prepare and little time to reflect on what went well and what didn’t.
• Repetitive RFPs and security requests → high-context switching that negatively impacts productivity.
• Internal bottlenecks → new SEs struggle to ramp up, and more seasoned team members have to pick up the slack.

What makes it even worse is that SEs are often promised creativity – only to find themselves stuck for weeks handling admin work like RFPs, demos, and documentation.

Before they rethought their SE strategy, BuildOps SEs were experiencing these problems firsthand.

“What should have been routine responses were consuming entire days – with multiple team members tag-teaming RFPs that could take six hours or more to complete. This manual, fragmented process pulled focus away from strategic work like customer engagement and deal advancement, and clearly wasn't built to scale.”

As presales teams adopt more automation, the SE role is shifting from reactive support to proactive strategy.

Instead of scrambling to answer questions, SEs will spend more time guiding solution design, influencing product strategy, and deepening customer relationships.

To make that shift, SE leaders are focusing on four key changes:

Tactic 1: Productize Repetitive Demos with Interactive Product Demos

A good chunk of SE work is creating the same style of demo (with slight tweaks) over and over.

One way to lessen that burden is to create automated interactive demos for your most common flows.

Instead of having to walk through a demo live, SEs can build interactive demos that live on your website, letting prospects explore your product on their own time.

This can really help if you’re moving your product in a new direction. Dropbox, for example, has evolved from a cloud storage file-sharing company to an AI-powered, universal search tool.

Interactive demos were key to educating their audience on all the great new features at their disposal. Jonathan Paredes, Solutions Consultant at Dropbox, reports:

“We kept running into the issue of giving generic demos that our customers were not getting the full value out of. The product tour has been incredibly successful from day one. It took off like wildfire.

We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in repetitive, generic live demos, freeing up time for the SE team to focus on complex enterprise deals. We’ve also had faster sales cycles as prospects get hands-on earlier and better understand its value.”

Tactic 2: Automate Admin to Free Up Strategic Time

RFPs and security questionnaires pile up fast. Leading SE teams are leaning on platforms like HeyIris to cut hours of manual lift – and reduce reliance on tribal knowledge.

HeyIris learns from past RFPs, other relevant content, and current documentation to draft RFP and security questionnaire responses in minutes.

It also shows exactly how it arrived at each answer, making it easy for a human to double-check.

Class, an edtech company, uses HeyIris to complete hundreds of complex security questionnaires and RFPs every year.

“We use HeyIris to automate the tedious and mundane aspects of filling out security questionnaires, allowing Class teams to focus on more important tasks.

Now, completed questionnaires are ready for the prospect by the next day, instead of the next week, or even a month later.”

Tactic 3: Prioritize Where SEs Engage

Not every deal needs live SE support. Use the data that you have to decide when the team needs to get involved.

Haloo, for instance, uses interactive demos to gauge where prospects are in their buying journey:

• If they don’t seem that interested → Sales and SE teams may not need to engage quite yet. Marketing can drop them into nurture campaigns to hopefully turn them into warm leads later.
• If they seem very interested → Demo analytics can reveal what features or use cases they spent the most time viewing, so reps and SEs can tailor live demos.

Per Emily Casaccio, Commercial Director at Haloo, “We distribute our demos to prospects before they meet with sales, and we do that so that in the sales call itself, we can say something like, ‘I see that you spent a lot of time looking at comprehensive search. I would love to talk to you about that.’”

Having a more personalized conversation and live demo accelerates the sales cycle and allows SEs to use their time more effectively.

Tactic 4: Enable Others to Scale SE Impact

SEs can’t be everywhere at once. But they can give other teams a foundation of product knowledge to fill in the gaps.

For example, SEs can give AEs, PMMs, and CSMs access to:

• Short product flows to get them up to speed on your product’s key features and value props quickly. These flows can be repurposed as a leave-behind to reinforce what was discussed in a meeting with a prospect or customer. And because the links can be made publicly visible, champions can share them with colleagues to promote adoption or nudge a deal toward close.

• Role-based demos, which can teach your teams what specific personas care about most and how they can get the most value from your product. These can be shared externally as well. Dropbox uses them for event coverage. “Our product marketing team has been promoting demos via QR codes at our booth and on flyers, note cards, and other similar items. We also leverage mobile support, so customers or attendees can walk by, take a picture, and view that demo on their phone.”

• Self-serve onboarding tours, to help reps and CSMs set up their own sandboxes in case they need to give an impromptu demo. Onboarding tours can also help customers set up their workspace so that they can spend more time addressing their specific needs with a CSM. The team at Haloo creates interactive demo flows for every new product release, noting “Educating customers first frees up CS to focus on more complex questions.”

SEs aren’t losing work to automation. They’re gaining back the creative, high-impact side of their role.

With tools like Navattic and HeyIris, SEs can:

• Decrease time spent on repeat demos (before vs after interactive demos)
• Reduce average RFP turnaround time
• Limit SE involvement to the highest-pressing deals
• Improve win rates on deals with automated vs manual processes

Most of all, SEs can focus on what they do best: solving problems, building trust, and winning business.

Start transforming your SE org today:

Scale your SE team and close deals faster with Launchpad.

See how HeyIris can cut your RFP response time in half.