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“Anyone can be a Product Manager. If you’re in a presales role, if you’re in consulting, if you’re in support, if you’re in customer success, it doesn’t matter, you have a skillset and you come with a point of view and if you’re able to articulate that point of view and relate that to the…

“Pushing is important, but it’s not the only thing that helps you become an effective manager. Earning trust and respect and showing the people that work for you that you work for them and that you’ve got their interests at heart, along with the interest of the company, and demonstrating compassion, that’s critical and helps…

“I don’t think the playbook should be written in pen, I think it should be written in pencil because you need to be able to erase parts of it and adjust it. The core elements are the same, but every organization is unique. Every industry is unique. Every Solution is Unique. Taking a playbook and…

“If you’re going to remain successful you need to constantly be thinking about adapting and changing. Even if you’re winning all the time, you should expect that to stop eventually and you need to be thinking about what’s happening next. Change is not a bad thing – you should be more worried if change isn’t…

“Leave your ego at home. When you’re out there selling, it’s about the product, it’s about the value, it’s about the company, it’s about the success of everybody involved and it’s not about you. You could be right, that’s a bug in the product and it shouldn’t be there, but guess what? That doesn’t matter….

“I’ve seen people go in to pre-sales leadership because they want to make more money and that is the worst reason to become a Sales Engineering Leader of any sort. If you’re just doing it to make another small bump in OTE, it’ll crush you. You’re no longer just dealing with your prospects, your sales…

“At CloudHealth over 50% of our business was being driven by existing customers so the Customer Success team was accountable for making sure the customer is always in buying mode. The more you take care of your customers, you minimize the churn, you maximize the expansion, and when that’s working in conjunction with new business,…

“There’s an actual skill in being able to translate technology in business, fluidly back and forth. The top presales engineers are ones that understand business and sales. They know where we are in the sales process, they know the way deals work and how they flow, and they also know exactly where the technology fits…

“I think that every great sales organization has an even greater presales organization right there with them. I think it truly is one of the most unique roles where you have that perfect marriage of business and technology. If (we) had a crappy presales team at BladeLogic, I guarantee you, it would not have been…

“I still have to explain the WHY. The WHY is about painting a picture of a future state that could be many miles down the road – you’re looking at that mountain way off in the distance and saying, if people are working for me, why should they take that long journey to the top…