Pre-Sales Therapy: A Day in the Life

Yes, I fixed the POC, but emotionally? No, I’m not okay.

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a Solutions Architect or Sales Engineer?

Here’s a typical day. All events are true. Some names have been changed to protect the clueless.

6:43am – Wake up to a Slack message:

“Hey, the customer says their test data is gone… can you check?” It’s gone. They deleted it. I fix it. I’m not even out of bed yet.

9:02am – Sales meeting. The AE promises the product can do “real-time ingestion of unstructured multi-source analytics with live visual dashboards.” Which is cool. Because we don’t do that. Yet.

11:15am – Internal huddle. Product says the feature is in “early alpha.” Engineering says it’s “basically done, just needs documentation.” Translation: it exists in the dreams of a developer who quit last quarter.

1:30pm – Customer call. They ask, “Is this future-proof?” I say “we’re built on scalable cloud-native principles.” What I mean is “no, but we’ll refactor it when it breaks.”

4:45pm – Live demo. WiFi cuts out. Sales forgets the customer’s use case. I reconfigure the dashboard mid-call while smiling like I’m not sweating through my shirt. We close the deal.

7:00pm – I write an internal post-mortem. No one reads it.

☕ Summary:

Being a Solutions Architect or SE isn’t about features. It’s about grace under pressure, empathy for chaos, and the kind of multitasking that would make a Navy SEAL dizzy.

It’s not just tech. It’s therapy. And we do it every day. On time. With a smile. And four open tabs that all say "login expired" (Salesforce I'm looking at you).

Next time someone says “I’d love to shadow you for a day,” Tell them to bring snacks, caffeine, and a fireproof laptop.

💬 Sign-off:

This post was run through ChatGPT for proofreading. Typos are human. Sarcasm is mine.

☕ See you Monday for Issue 4: Technical Demos That Don’t Suck. (And yes, I will be yelling.)