By SE Rockstars · Last updated June 2026 · ~8 minute read
This idea didn't come from a marketing brainstorm. It came from eight years of conversations with PreSales executives, on and off our podcast, since 2018.
“If you have six hours to chop down a tree, you better take five hours to polish the axe.”
Jon Upton — who led hundreds of Solution Engineers at Splunk (now a Cisco company)
We kept coming back to that line as we tried to understand why so much enablement money produced so little change. Eventually we saw the pattern. It wasn't the trainers, and it wasn't the content — the famous workshops teach genuinely good material. The problem is what happens after. Most first-line SE leaders simply don't have the capacity, the system, or the bandwidth to make sure what was taught actually gets applied, consistently, by the whole team, week after week. So a team flies in a great trainer, runs a brilliant two-day workshop, everyone leaves euphoric… and three weeks later they're back to feature-dumping. The money is spent. Nothing changed.
Roughly 1 in 10 SEs are A-players who change behaviour from a workshop alone. The system is for the other nine.
So we asked a simple question: what could we build that helps leaders with the after — without costing the organization more than a workshop already does? The answer, grounded in the neuroscience of how memory and skill retention actually work, was a continuous delivery model. That's where Hermann Ebbinghaus came in, and his forgetting curve became the thing we set out to beat.
We run an Enablement-as-a-Service program, so read us with the appropriate skepticism. But every claim here is either sourced to learning science or drawn from real, recorded conversations with the SE leaders we work with.
Enablement-as-a-Service (EaaS) is the application of the SaaS model to skill development: instead of buying a one-time training event, you subscribe to a continuous program that develops your team over months, adapts to the deals they're working right now, and measures whether it's actually working.
The shift is the same one software went through twenty years ago — from “fire-and-forget, pay once” to an ongoing service. One SE leader we work with described his own decision in exactly those terms: moving “from fire-and-forget, pay once — to subscription… an integral part of a twelve-month journey.” He wasn't repeating our pitch. He'd arrived there himself, because the logic is obvious once you've watched a workshop fade.
Weekly touchpoints over a year, not sixteen hours in two days.
SEs bring the actual deal they're working on, and leave with something they use that week.
The provider measures the same KPIs over time and stays on the hook for whether behavior changed.
If a provider only has the first property, you have a subscription to content. All three is a service.
The uncomfortable truth: the quality of the trainer barely matters if the model is wrong. Here's the science every enablement buyer should know:
A modern replication of Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve confirms most new knowledge decays within days without reinforcement.
Murre & Dros, 2015, PLOS ONEA meta-analysis of 317 experiments shows distributed practice reliably outperforms cramming.
Cepeda et al., 2006, Psychological BulletinTraining only changes job behavior when the post-training environment supports it: practice, manager reinforcement, follow-through.
Blume et al., 2010, Journal of ManagementWe have a blunt name for ignoring this: the Workshop Way of Waste. Business pain emerges → a skill gap is diagnosed → a “silver bullet” two-day workshop is booked → fleeting enthusiasm → the pain persists → repeat next year. The money changes hands, the LinkedIn posts go up, and the win rate doesn't move.
One of our customers — an international SE leader at a global cybersecurity vendor — said this better than we could. Years ago his team did a multi-day demo training. His verdict today: “We still talk about how good that training was — but we never got to the point of rolling it out across the rest of the pre-sales organization.” Excellent content. No mechanism to persist, scale, or survive a cancelled kickoff. That's the one-off model in a single sentence.
Here's the analogy we use, because it makes the math impossible to argue with.
Imagine you train your biceps for sixteen hours straight. You wouldn't get stronger — you'd end up in the hospital. Now take the same sixteen hours and spread them over thirty-two weeks: thirty minutes, once a week. Identical total time. But there's no contest about which version actually builds the muscle.
A two-day workshop is the sixteen-hours-straight version of skill-building. It feels intense, it looks impressive on the calendar, and physiologically it's close to useless for lasting change. Your SEs perform daily — every discovery call, every demo, every POC is a live rep. They don't need one heroic training binge a year. They need thirty focused minutes a week, every week, on the things they're actually doing. That's not a skill gap. That's a system gap — and the system, not the syllabus, is what EaaS fixes.
A real continuous program has a cadence, not a calendar invite. The shape we run — and a useful checklist for evaluating anyone:
That last point is the evergreen problem, and SE leaders feel it acutely. As one put it about his own team mid-growth: “Getting better is the only way we can grow — you can't just keep closing deals, you have to get better. And there's a lot of room.” A one-time fix can't address a problem that never stops changing.
This is the part most “continuous” programs skip, and it's the one that matters most to leaders defending a budget.
A real service measures itself. We build a business case with every customer, baseline the relevant KPIs, and re-measure the same metrics each quarter to check we're moving in the right direction. The point isn't the dashboard — it's that we make ourselves accountable for the outcome, the way a service should.
Leaders tell us this is the thing they can't get elsewhere. One described a new, data-demanding CEO asking him point-blank: “Can you prove the workshop formats are actually worthwhile?” — and his quiet panic that he had no data to defend his enablement budget.
But there's a trap worth naming: measurement can curdle into surveillance, and the moment SEs feel individually monitored, the psychological safety that makes practice possible evaporates. So our adoption reporting is team-level and anonymized — managers see whether the team is engaging, never how a named individual performed in a role-play. Accountability for the program's impact; safety for the people in it.
A subscription model solves a problem one-off workshops structurally can't: consistent ramp. With a workshop, a new SE either waits up to a year for the next cohort or gets nothing. With a continuous program, they enter the moment they join.
Several of our customers have made us part of standard onboarding — every new SE runs the twelve months as part of getting up to speed. One scale-up onboarded an entire layer of first-line managers across Germany, Spain and Ireland together, and mapped a brand-new manager in before his official start date so he wouldn't miss the kickoff. That's only possible when enablement is always on.
The last property of EaaS is one buyers underrate: an ongoing program comes with an ongoing peer network, and that network is a live resource. When one of our SE leaders was evaluating demo-automation tooling, his instinct wasn't to Google it — it was to “put the question to the community and ask what people's real experiences are.” Cross-company benchmarking, honest tooling reviews, and simply being seen by peers at other companies — that only exists because the program persists. A workshop ends and the room empties. A service keeps the room open.
Here's something that's, frankly, ridiculous when you say it out loud: companies pay Solution Engineers and PreSales professionals north of €100,000 a year — and then get stingy about helping them reach their actual potential. The same organizations will happily drop a fortune on a sales kickoff or an SKO: a few high-energy days, a hotel ballroom, a motivational speaker, and a measurable behavior change of roughly zero by the following month.
We're not against kickoffs. We're against the math. If you spend serious money on a one-time event for people you've already invested six figures a year in, and you have no system to make any of it stick, you haven't bought enablement. You've bought a feeling. The most valuable asset in a PreSales org is the compounding skill of the people in it — and that compounds with consistent practice, not with an annual adrenaline hit.
Is continuous practice the model, or a paid add-on to a workshop?
Do sessions work on your real, live deals — or canned scenarios?
Does the provider measure the same KPIs over time and share accountability?
Is reporting team-level and trust-preserving, or individual surveillance?
Does it cover the whole SE lifecycle (discovery, demo, sales alignment, POC) — or only demos?
Can it onboard new hires continuously, not just run an annual cohort?
Is there a standing community for cross-company learning?
Does it fit your team's language and time zones?
A continuous, subscription-based model for developing PreSales / technical-sales teams — replacing one-off workshops with ongoing practice on live deals, quarterly measurement, and shared accountability for outcomes. It applies the SaaS logic (continuous service, not a one-time purchase) to skill development.
A workshop is a one-time event; EaaS is an ongoing service. Learning science is clear that retention and behavior change depend on spaced practice and post-training reinforcement — which a single event, however good, cannot provide.
The honest answer: only if the team engages, and time is the real constraint — roughly 30–45 minutes a week. The advantage of a continuous model isn't that engagement is automatic; it's that low engagement is visible monthly and can be fixed, whereas a workshop's fade is invisible forever.
PreSales / Sales Engineering teams in B2B SaaS that want lasting behavior change and provable impact — especially leaders who need to defend an enablement budget with data, and teams hiring continuously who need consistent ramp.
About this page: written by SE Rockstars (PreSales Unleashed GmbH), founded by Tim Brömme and Jan-Erik Jank. The “polish the axe” line comes from Jon Upton, shared publicly on our podcast. Customer quotes are from recorded, transcribed customer conversations, anonymized and used with permission. Learning-science claims are linked to primary sources.
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