Are We Even Doing the Huddle?

Nate: I had a conversation with one of my SE Directors recently about pre-demo prep. You know, the huddle between the AE and the SE before a customer call. And I asked her— how's the quality of those huddles? And she just looked at me and said... "Nate, we're not even having them yet."

Ava: Oh no. So you jumped straight to "are they good" and the answer was "they don't exist."

Nate: Right. And my first instinct was to fix it immediately. Build a template, make it mandatory, put a quality bar on it. But she pushed back and said something that stuck with me. She said— "Step one isn't making them effective. Step one is making them HAPPEN."

Ava: So she wanted to separate the habit from the quality. Get people in the room first, worry about what they discuss later?

Nate: Exactly. And I'll admit... that goes against every instinct I have. If we're going to do something, let's do it RIGHT.

Ava: Welcome to Leading PreSales. I'm Ava.

Nate: And I'm Nate. Every episode, one idea, five minutes. Today— why doing the thing badly might be better than not doing it at all.

Ava: Okay so I actually have strong feelings about this because I went through exactly this when I was building my team. We had zero process around AE-SE alignment before demos. And my instinct was the same as yours. Build the perfect huddle template, define the agenda, make it a real thing.

Nate: And what happened?

Ava: Nobody did it. The template was too much. The AEs felt like it was homework. My SEs thought it was bureaucracy. So I had this beautiful process that existed in a document and nowhere else.

Nate: I've seen that pattern more times than I'd like to admit. Even at our scale. You design the perfect framework and then wonder why adoption is at fifteen percent.

Ava: So I stripped it down. The new rule was simple. Before any demo, the AE and SE have a conversation. That's it. Five minutes, fifteen minutes, a Slack message even. I didn't care about the FORMAT. I just needed the behavior to exist.

Nate: And did adoption change?

Ava: Massively. Because the barrier went from "fill out this template and book a thirty-minute prep call" to "just TALK to each other before we get on with the customer." Most people were already doing a version of it informally... a quick hallway chat, a message right before the call. I just made it explicit. Expected.

Nate: That's an interesting tension though. Because I think there's a real risk of getting stuck at "just do it, however badly." At some point you need those huddles to actually produce something useful. Otherwise you've got people checking a box but not actually preparing.

Ava: A hundred percent. And that's where the phasing matters. I gave it about six weeks of just "are we doing it?" before I started asking "what are we covering?" And by then, something interesting had happened. The SEs who were having those conversations started naturally asking better questions. "What's the customer trying to decide? Who's in the room? What did the last call cover?"

Nate: So the habit created the soil for the quality.

Ava: Exactly. They didn't need me to hand them an agenda because the CONVERSATION itself taught them what they needed to know. The AE would say something in the huddle and the SE would go "oh, I didn't know that— that changes what I'm going to show." And THAT moment is worth more than any template.

Nate: I'll push back slightly. That works well in a twelve-person team where you have visibility into every deal. At my scale, I need some structure. I can't rely on two hundred SEs independently discovering what a good huddle looks like.

Ava: That's fair. So how do you handle it?

Nate: We ended up doing something similar to your phasing, actually, just with guardrails. Phase one was exactly what you described. Just make it happen. My SE Managers tracked whether huddles occurred, not what was said. Phase two, about two months later, we introduced three questions that had to be covered. Not a template. Just three questions.

Ava: Which three?

Nate: What is the customer trying to decide? Who in the room has influence over that decision? And what does the AE think will be the hardest objection? That's it. If the AE and SE can answer those three before the demo starts, the session is going to be dramatically different.

Ava: I like how minimal that is. Three questions you can ask in three minutes. No form, no document.

Nate: And the adoption stayed high because it didn't FEEL like process. It felt like a conversation with a point.

Ava: So the move is— if your team isn't doing pre-demo huddles, don't build the perfect template. Just make the conversation mandatory. Track that it's happening. Then after a few weeks, introduce the minimum questions that actually matter.

Nate: Habit first. Quality second. Get the muscle working before you try to optimize it.

Nate: I'm Nate.

Ava: And I'm Ava. See you next episode!