PreSales Unleashed | Sales Engineering im B2B Software Vertrieb
Why Solution Engineering Needs Its Own Operating System, with Edward Kandel (252)
31 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Presales Unleashed.
Chapter 2: How did Edward Kandel transition from investor to solutions community builder?
This is your podcast for sales engineering and B2B software sales. And my name is Tim and as presales experts with more than 25 years of experience, we help SaaS and IT companies unleash their presales performance for higher win rates, delighted customers and more fun in the role. And today I have a very special guest, Edward Kendall.
Chapter 3: Why is solution engineering often considered a 'black box'?
He's the founder of Coform and Focal, and Edward has conducted over 300 discovery calls with SE teams around the world through his community and in the process uncovered something many of us feel every day, but rarely articulate this clearly. Solution engineering is a black box. We can't prove our impact. Our knowledge is trapped in silos and the tools we use weren't built for us.
From that insight, Edward didn't just build one of the largest global presales communities, but is also now building a product designed to solve exactly these problems.
We talk about why he went from investor to the solution space, which problems he keeps seeing across SE teams, and where the journey is heading as software moves toward consumption-based pricing and go-live becomes more important than just the signature. And with that, please enjoy today's episode. I found your background quite interesting.
The first time we talked, actually, I think one of the first sentences you said to me, hey, Tim, please keep in mind, I haven't worked in pre-sales for 10 years. I am not necessarily from a solutions team. That being said, you have now built an entire company around to serve solutions teams.
Chapter 4: What challenges do solution engineering teams face today?
So obviously, for me, it was an interesting thing to understand. You've worked, I think, a lot at Founders Factory. And then your transition was founding a company around the solutions topic. So can you maybe share with us a little bit why you decided to go into that direction? What was your experience at Founders Factory that led to that?
Chapter 5: How can we measure the impact of solution engineering beyond revenue?
Yeah, 100%. I think if you look at Nick and I, we come at this from two sides. So Nick, my co-founder, was an SE at Puddle. He was doing pre-sales and delivery, mid-market up to enterprise. So he Doing this role, seeing how important it was, but man, how under-supported, under-appreciated, overlooked, and how important the impact of those things were on the companies also.
He came at it from that side. At Founders Factory, I was investing and working with founders building our enterprise fintechs.
Chapter 6: What does the future hold for solution engineering in a consumption-based pricing model?
So pretty much every single one of them had this very important motion where with these bigger teams, if we are not scoping the right things, if the deals don't get scoped properly before they get signed or delivery goes wrong, those companies were not growing and raising.
So I kind of came at it from the other side, where I was like, okay, well, what is the impact of if you don't do pre-sales and delivery, right?
Chapter 7: How can solution engineering teams build trust within their organizations?
Nick came at it from the other side of I am in pre-sales and delivery. In addition to that, like I built a bunch of communities before that around problems that I really cared about. So previously had built communities around queer people in sports because that was an area that being a gay man in sports and that being not a place I could go.
And so when Nick and I were really diving into the space and it became something that almost became all encompassing, it felt like the logical step of like, well, actually, surely the first way we should try and solve this is by bringing the best people together in spaces where they can go, hey, what is actually working? What are you actually doing to solve this? How can I improve this?
And so that was the first step.
Chapter 8: What skills are essential for solution engineers in the age of AI?
And that's where Cofilm started. So that was our route into it.
Yeah, it makes sense. And I really love the way you just described your philosophy, bringing people together who care about the same problem. I mean, this is a lot of, I think this is where we share a lot of the philosophy. This is what we've been attempting here for the past couple of years in the DACH region specifically. So I love that you're doing this.
Now, when I first checked out, hey, there's Ed, there's his co-founder, there's CoForm, there's Focal. To be honest, I was a little bit confused around the namings and what it all means. So maybe you can sort for us a little bit like what is core form, what is focal, and what's the whole thing with the names?
I think it's easiest if we start with looking at the goal we're working towards, which is that we believe solutions and delivery are super important to software companies of today actually being successful. If you don't sign the right deals, scope them in the right way, they don't go live, and your company doesn't realize that revenue and customers don't solve the problems they're trying to.
And actually, we think that's going to get more important as AI is rolling out, where everyone's moving to outcome, usage-based, so not going live becomes critical. And then the complexity of every deployment is getting more complex. So that's the kind of overall mission. But when we started, the thing we kept hearing from SEs in London is, well, it's a black box.
I've got no idea what is actually good, what works for doing solutions. I've got no place to engage with my peers and get those advice. All the tools we use are built for other people. We can't prove our impact. And we're in these little silos repeating the same things over and over again, right?
So we were looking at this and goes, okay, if we don't solve those things, solutions isn't going to be able to play this super pivotal role, which it should do as software is evolving. So the first thing we did, which is what we started in Cofilm. Cofilm has a very simple and very focused mission as we create these super intimate spaces with really high quality people.
We make sure we've got great solutioners from great companies and all our meetups are focused around how can we get the maximum transfer of information between people on the stuff you can't find online. So for example, we were in New York two weeks ago and we were doing with Notion there pre-sales to delivery handovers. We were diving into what are the incentive structures different peoples use?
What are those templates? When do they get brought in? Next week in London, we are hosting with Snowflake, and we've got the head of Anthropic for Amiya for Solutions, one of the leads at Snowflake, diving into like, actually, how will our roles change? Not the BS on LinkedIn, like actually, and what skills do we need to focus on? So that is CoForm.
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