About Rob Steele
I have spent twenty years inside enterprise technology. Not watching it from the outside. Inside it. Selling it, architecting it, building the presales motions around it, and helping large organizations figure out how to actually get value from the technology they buy.
That experience spans Fortune 500 companies across manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and technology. I have worked every angle of the enterprise deal: presales engineering, solutions architecture, technical discovery, proof of value design, executive presentations, and the messy, human work of getting buying committees to say yes.
Along the way, I noticed something that nobody was talking about. Sales had its own methodology. Account executives had MEDDIC, SPIN, Challenger, and dozens of frameworks built for how they work. Presales had nothing. The people doing the technical heavy lifting in complex deals were expected to figure it out on their own, improvise under pressure, and hope that tribal knowledge would be enough.
It was not enough. I watched talented sales engineers lose deals they should have won because nobody taught them how to run discovery that uncovers politics, not just requirements. How to design proofs of value that test what actually matters to the decision. How to build business cases that resonate with a CFO, not just a technical evaluator.
So I started writing down what I had learned. The frameworks I had built over two decades of doing this work. The patterns that separated the presales professionals who influenced deals from the ones who just showed up and demo’d.
That became the book.
What I’m building
Modern Presales is the book I wish someone had handed me when I started in this profession. It introduces the VERTEX framework, a presales-specific methodology covering Vision and Value, Environment and Evidence, Risk and Readiness, Trajectory and Transformation, Evaluation and Experiment, and Execution and Expansion. It is designed to work whether your sales partner follows a framework religiously or has never heard of one.
The book is the foundation. Around it, I am building modernpresales.com as a platform for frameworks, templates, tools, and training that help presales professionals operate as strategic partners, not demo support.
Modern CXO is a weekly newsletter for executives and technology leaders who want clear, honest perspective on enterprise technology decisions. No vendor spin. No buzzword soup. Just the kind of thinking that helps leaders move faster with less risk. Subscribe at moderncxo.com.
Speaking and advisory
I speak at sales kickoffs, industry conferences, and executive offsites on topics including modern presales methodology, enterprise go-to-market strategy, building presales teams, and AI readiness for enterprise organizations.
I also work with select companies on presales team enablement, helping organizations build repeatable systems that improve win rates and deal velocity without relying on heroic individual effort.
If you are interested in having me speak or work with your team, reach out at hello@robsteele.co.
Connect
The best place to find me is LinkedIn. I am also on Twitter/X. Or just send me an email at hello@robsteele.co.