Solutions Consultants Belong in the Driver’s Seat

Imagine two demos. One is clunky, generic, and boring. The other is a flawless, relevant presentation that gets the buyer talking about next steps before the meeting even ends.

The difference isn’t luck. It’s not even about the demo environment itself. It’s about who’s in the driver’s seat.

The key to success for GTM isn’t just a great product or a sharp sales team. Top-performing companies know how to take maximum advantage of a great Solutions Consultant (SC). SC’s are demo experts, but their super power isn’t in great presentation skills. It’s in being strategic partners who turn complex products into revenue.

What does a solutions consultant do?

A solutions consultant is the bridge between your product’s potential and a customer’s actual business problem. They have the technical skills of an engineer and the selling acumen of a salesperson. Their job is to design and deliver demos that move deals forward.

Day-to-day, a solutions consultant is responsible for:

• Leading discovery: SCs go beyond surface-level feature requests to find the root of the prospect’s pain points and identify the most relevant use cases and solutions.
• Architecting solutions: SCs map the customer’s problems directly to your product’s capabilities, value, and benefits.
• Customizing demos: SCs build demo environments that connect with the prospect’s industry, role, data, and unique challenges.
• Delivering a compelling story: SCs don’t just click through features. They walk buyers through a vision of their own success with your product.
• Working across the GTM team: SCs are the connective tissue between Sales, Engineering, Product, and Customer Success. They know the product better than Sales, and sales better than Product.

Put simply, SCs don’t just show the product. They make the buyer feel like you built it just for them.

SCs and SEs: Different roles, same demo challenges

In many companies, Sales Engineer (SE) and SC titles are used interchangeably. SEs might go deeper into the technical architecture, while SCs focus more on the business application. But at the end of the day, both roles are trying to prove your product’s value. 

And both are getting bogged down by the same demo problems:

• Wasting hours every week on demo prep. We found that presales teams spend 24% of their time just maintaining demos. That’s a quarter of your most expensive GTM headcount spent on non-selling activities.
• Fighting with unreliable demo environments. Your team is probably dealing with buggy staging servers, stale data, or exorbitant cloud hosting bills for individual environments. These issues kill deals and bloat your GTM budget.
• Struggling to scale their impact. As you hire more reps and the product gets more complex, manual demo creation becomes a huge bottleneck. You can’t personalize every demo when your best people are stuck doing repetitive, manual work.

These aren’t small annoyances – they’re a direct drag on revenue and efficiency.

How SCs elevate the entire sales journey

The impact of Solutions Consultants goes way beyond a single demo. They affect your entire sales process, making it smarter, faster, and more profitable.

Demos become personalized, not generic

Your reps are tired of giving generic, one-size-fits-all demos. Solutions Consultants fix that. They build a library of demos for different use cases, prospects, and industries. And when it comes to custom demos, they use the discovery they’ve done to build something that speaks the customer’s language. They show them their potential future, not just a list of our features. That relevance is what grabs a buyer’s attention and keeps it.

The discovery process gets deeper and more actionable

A generic demo gets you generic feedback. A tailored demo, built with real discovery in mind, prompts the specific, high-intent questions that actually move a deal forward. SCs are masters at this. Their demos ask the right questions upfront, qualifying the deal more effectively and saving your AEs from wasting time on bad-fit prospects.

Deal velocity increases

Slow deals and slipped forecasts are killers. Solutions Consultants are built to fight that drag. By showing a crisp, relevant demo early on, they build confidence and address technical objections before they can stall a deal. A buyer who feels understood is a buyer who moves forward. We see it with our customers, who report sales cycles shortening by as much as 50%.

Solutions resources get used more strategically

You shouldn’t need your top-tier, most expensive engineering talent on every single sales call. With an SC-built demo library, AEs can handle the early-stage demos. This frees up your senior SCs for the deals that absolutely require them — the highly complex, high-stakes calls where deep architectural knowledge is non-negotiable. It’s a smarter, more cost-effective way to deploy your best people.

Buyer confidence skyrockets

Think about the last bad demo you saw. It was probably buggy, slow, or totally irrelevant. It doesn’t inspire confidence. An SC’s job is to be a guardian of that trust. A polished and personalized demo sends a powerful message: your product is competent and your company understands the buyer’s business. That trust is critical, especially in competitive deals.

Win rates improve

This is what it all adds up to. Deeper discovery, personalized demos, faster deal cycles, and more confident buyers. The result is a higher win rate. Giving SCs the leverage to do their best work isn’t just an operational tweak; it’s a direct path to more revenue. It’s how leading GTM teams see a 4% lift in their win rate.

How a SC-led demo strategy works with Reprise

How do you give your Solutions Consultants this kind of leverage without burning them out or breaking the bank on tooling and cloud costs?

You give them a platform that automates the grunt work.

Think of your SCs as the architects of your demo strategy. They design the narratives, choose the use cases, and script the flow. Reprise is the AI-powered platform that lets them build and scale that vision instantly, without needing a team of engineers or a massive AWS budget.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Instead of spending weeks manually building a demo environment, an SC can use Reprise’s Agentic Demo Builder to automatically capture a perfect, interactive clone of your product. Our AI agents learn your software and automatically write the code needed to make the demo environment work, right out of the box.

From there, the SC can use AI-powered data injection to fill the demo with realistic, industry-specific data. They can build a library of reusable templates for different verticals or use cases, so any AE can generate a personalized demo in minutes.

The result? Our customers have cut their demo prep time by 80%.

That’s time your Solutions Consultants can now spend on high-value work: talking to customers, coaching AEs, and refining the sales strategy. Agentic AI is here to remove the single biggest bottleneck that has been holding your presales team back.

Ready to put your Solutions Consultants in a position to drive more revenue? See how the Reprise platform works.

FAQs

How do solutions consultants work with sales teams?

Solutions Consultants are strategic partners to the sales team. They join discovery calls to uncover the real business problem, then build and deliver custom demos that solve that problem. This helps AEs close bigger deals, faster.

Can Reprise really reduce demo prep time?

Yes. Reprise automates the most frustrating and time-consuming parts of demo creation. Our Agentic Demo Builder creates a perfect clone of your application in minutes, not weeks. That’s how our customers cut demo prep time by up to 80% and free up their presales teams to focus on selling.

How do I start scaling a SC-led demo initiative?

Start small and focused. Have your best Solutions Consultant identify your top three sales plays. Use a platform like Reprise to build a master demo template for each one. From there, you can easily create custom versions for different industries and empower the entire sales team to use them. This drives consistency and quality in every single demo.