ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Pre-Sales Pathways is a podcast that showcases highly successful pre-sales professionals and the career paths they've taken. Find out how they got into pre-sales, what their roles involve and what's driven their career success so far. Pre-Sales Pathways is hosted by Chris Clark. Having had a successful career as a Solutions Engineer at companies like Slack, Salesforce and Glean, Chris now helps other pre-sales professionals do the same through coaching and mentoring. You can follow Chris here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-james-clark/
Hosts:
Update frequency:
every 9 days
Average audio length:
36 minutes
Guest interviews
English
United Kingdom
21 episodes
since April 6, 2026
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
What if you could turn a side project you love into your full-time role? Hee Jin’s done it not once, but twice, most recently as an SE at OpenAI.
It all started with a holiday in Korea, where she offered to meet local customers. That led to helping US colleagues with their Korean accounts and, even…
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PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
The move from pre-sales to sales doesn’t have to be a one-way door, and Eric’s career path is a great example of that.
He got his start in go-to-market as a Solutions Architect, after being headhunted by the vendor of a product he'd implemented internally.
Since then, he's moved back and forth betw…
Deciding how much to specialise, and when, is one of the biggest choices in an SE's career. I think Richard Barrett’s approach is spot on.
Richard has spent almost 17 years working with Microsoft's productivity and collaboration technologies, so you might think he's the archetypal specialist.
And …
After almost 12 years at Salesforce, Gavin Guinane felt disconnected from the tech, so he left leadership to become an IC again at Glean.
Since then, he’s worked on some of the company’s largest and most complex deals, and has built out a local SE team which he now leads.
In our conversation, we ge…
Few people know pre-sales better than Chris. He’s been an IC, a leader, the GM of PreSales Collective and is now Head of Community at Iris.
Chris's current role combines evangelism, partnerships, voice of the customer and more. It’s not one you’ll find advertised, Chris crafted it himself.
His adv…
In a world of agents and MCP servers, interoperability matters more than ever. Business Development teams are a critical part of that.
Niromal Perera, now Senior Manager, Slack Product Ecosystem at Salesforce, was the first SE I knew of to make the move from SE to Business Development (aka Partners…
Fear of failure is what stops SEs becoming AEs. Karishma overcame it 7 years ago and is now an AE at the hottest company around: Anthropic.
Karishma has had such a varied career, spanning IC and leadership roles in Product, Solutions Engineering and Sales.
She’s also been an early team member at …
SEs have always come from all sorts of backgrounds, with a wide range in how technical they are. But something has shifted lately. AI-native companies in particular want SEs who don't just explain the technology but are comfortable deploying and customising it as well.
If you came into pre-sales f…
For a lot of SEs, management looks like the obvious next step. After all, it's what progression is meant to look like.
But it isn't a rung on the same ladder. It's a different job, with almost the opposite rewards.
As an SE, you're the one delivering the demo and getting the credit. As a leader, …
If you're an SE who's dreamed of running your own business, AI's made it easier than ever, and your role's already given you a head start.
SEs are generalists who sit right at the intersection of product and sales, the two things every business actually runs on.
And the barriers keep falling. AI …
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Clark, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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