About

SE Velocity for Lean Software Teams

We help smaller software companies build AI workflows that give their sales team the velocity a Solutions Engineer would provide—across demos, POCs, security reviews, and onboarding—before they hire one.

Lean teams hit a predictable wall: AEs run into technical questions they can’t answer, demos feel generic, security and RFP questionnaires eat days, and the founder is still the only person who can go deep. The instinct is to hire an SE. But for a 10–50 person team, that’s expensive, slow, and often premature. The faster move is to build the workflows an SE would run—tailored to your product and your motion, powered by AI.

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10+ Years Solutions Experience

Nico Castagnola

Founder & Principal Advisor

New York, NY

Connect on LinkedIn

UC San Diego

B.A. Economics & Business

Harvard Business School

Credential in Leadership, Impact, Management, and Business for Experienced Leaders

About Our Founder

10+

Years in B2B SaaS

F500

to Startup Scale

2K+

LinkedIn Network

I lead Solutions Engineering at a large software company, and I’ve spent 10+ years inside B2B SaaS—running Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Implementation, and Technical Account Management at high-growth organizations. I didn’t watch these problems from the sidelines; I ran the teams and closed the deals.

I’ve built SE teams from the ground up, designed technical sales processes end-to-end, and owned the full revenue lifecycle from first discovery call through demo, POC, security review, implementation, and renewal. I know exactly what a great Solutions Engineer does at every stage of a technical deal—because I’ve done it, and I’ve taught others to do it.

Solutions Advisory Partners is where I put that experience to work for leaner teams. Most 10–50 person software companies can’t justify a full SE hire yet, but they feel the gap every day—in demos that miss, questionnaires that pile up, and a founder who’s still the only one who can answer the hard questions. The breakthrough is that a lot of what an SE does is now buildable as AI-powered workflows: tailored demo prep, security and RFP responses, POC tracking, onboarding handoffs.

So I help founders and GTM leaders design and build those workflows—tailored to their product and sales motion, not a generic prompt library. The goal isn’t to replace people; it’s to give a small team the velocity it would get from an SE it hasn’t hired yet. Based in NYC.

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Operating Principles

How I Work

What clients can expect

I build, not just advise

You don’t get a slide deck and a wave goodbye. You get working AI workflows wired into how your team actually sells.

Workflows over heroics

A founder pulling an all-nighter on an RFP isn’t a strategy. Repeatable workflows that run without anyone’s heroics are.

Tailored, not off-the-shelf

No generic prompt packs. Every workflow is built around your product, your buyers, and your real sales motion.

Your team owns it

I build workflows your team can run and maintain—not a black box that breaks the moment I’m gone.

Velocity you can measure

Every engagement has clear success criteria—hours saved, faster turnarounds, deals unblocked. If we’re not hitting them, we adjust.

Our Approach

What a Solutions Engineer Does, Rebuilt as AI Workflows.

A great Solutions Engineer isn’t magic—they’re a repeatable process. They prep tailored demos, answer technical and security questions fast, keep POCs on track, and hand off cleanly to delivery. The reason it feels magic is that most teams have never written it down, let alone systematized it.

For a lean team, that’s the opening. A large share of SE work is structured, document-heavy, and pattern-driven—exactly what modern AI is good at when it’s wired into your real product docs, security posture, and CRM. The point isn’t to replace judgment; it’s to take the repeatable 80% off your plate so your people spend their time where it actually moves a deal.

So instead of hiring an SE and hoping they build all this from scratch, we map the technical moments in your deal cycle and build a workflow for each one—tuned to how you sell.

Discovery & Demos

Solution Design

POC & Evaluation

Onboarding & Handoff

It starts before the demo. A demo-prep workflow pulls the prospect’s context—their industry, stack, and stated problem—and drafts a tailored demo narrative, talk track, and likely-objection list, so your AE walks in sounding like they brought an SE. No more generic product tours.

Then comes solution design—the stage where the buyer’s technical team pressure-tests the fit, and security reviews and RFP questionnaires start piling up. A workflow grounded in your real security posture and past answers drafts those responses in minutes instead of days, so your team reviews and approves instead of starting from a blank spreadsheet at 11pm.

During the POC, a tracking workflow keeps success criteria, open items, and stakeholder updates in one place, so evaluations don’t quietly expand and stall. And at the finish line, an onboarding-and-handoff workflow turns everything that was promised in the sale into a clean summary for whoever delivers it—so what was sold is what gets delivered.

None of this is a generic chatbot bolted onto your site. It’s a set of workflows designed around your product and your motion—built by someone who has run these plays as a Solutions Engineering leader, delivered either as advisory guidance or a full build-and-implement engagement.

The goal is simple: give your team the velocity of a Solutions Engineer—before you hire one.

SE Velocity for Lean Software Teams

Who We Work With

Company Stage

Deal Motion

Buyer Personas