The Disappearing Global Solutions Leader
Breaking down what we're seeing across the network.
We have spent the last several months with senior Solutions leaders across the network whose global roles are being restructured, are on the line, or have been eliminated altogether. Global Solutions leaders are disappearing.
We know this is a tough subject. If you are sitting in one of these seats or previously were, what you’re navigating in private is harder than anything that gets written about publicly. With this, we’re hoping to bring into the open what we’re hearing across those private conversations, for the benefit of the leaders living it and the profession watching it unfold.
Some of this is cyclical. Some of this is not.
For those of us who have been doing this a while, we have seen this pattern before.
Companies go global when they are pushing for scale. A few years in, the executive table decides the global function has gotten too far from the customer, and the structure pulls back to a regional model. A few years after that, the regional approach feels fragmented, and the case for a global layer gets made all over again. The full swing runs on a four to five year clock.
One enterprise software company in our network restructured a senior Solutions executive’s role from global to regional last year, and just consolidated it back under a managing director with global purview again.
A structural problem is also catching up to the function. The GTM org has become bloated and siloed. CS owns renewals and expansion. Sales owns revenue. Solutions and Professional Services sit in the middle without a metric they clearly own. The handoffs are bad. The fiefdoms are real, especially in large enterprise. And something has to give. In an environment where investors are celebrating profitability and AI-driven productivity, anyone not in a quota-carrying capacity is easier to cut than anyone who is.
Solutions has not built the political case for itself the way that Sales has. The global Solutions leader is easier to cut than the global Sales VP not because the work is less important, but because the function has not been positioned as one that owns its own outcomes and owns a number. That is the gap the profession has to fill.
This is starting to change. We are seeing Solutions leaders take on specialist sales teams as part of their remit. The model is not yet standard, but it is becoming more common, and it is one of the more concrete ways the function is reaching for ownership. And the leaders absorbing that type of work are the ones we expect to see survive the swing.
Why this matters.
We are biased, obviously. SolutionExec exists to support the leaders sitting in these seats. What follows are the arguments we think hold up best when you need to make the case to your CEO, CFO, or CRO. The hardest part of defending the function is having the language ready when the conversation surfaces.
The first is the work that does not get redistributed when the seat goes away. Things like designing new AI-powered GTM motions, pricing experimentation feedback loops, customer technical advisory board input, cross-regional POV consistency. These are administrative work, but rather work that compounds.
Neither the CRO nor the CIO sits close enough to both the technical reality and the buying motion to pick this work up well. The regional Solutions leaders are too close to their own quarterly number. The work either stops, gets done badly, or quietly lands with someone who does not realize they have inherited it. The cost shows up two to four quarters later in a number nobody can clearly attribute. By then the damage is structural.
A regional Director of PreSales at a publicly-traded SaaS platform described what that looks like from inside one of those structures:
“If you don’t have strong global leadership to try to make a mandate on things, you’re always going to be pushing a giant rock uphill. And that’s the hardest thing about the job.”
The second is the function’s voice in the GTM redesign happening right now. Solutions is in a position to either chart how technical value gets delivered to customers in the new GTM or be redesigned around by everyone else. There is no third option. Our argument in The Modern Solutions Mandate was for charting. Our fear is that the leaders who are being cut are ones who could be charting this redesign and proving the value of Solutions as the innovation and experimentation arm of GTM that is going to help foster the next era of GTM. This is also why we think the cuts happening now will look more costly in retrospect than they do on the spreadsheet today.
What you can do.
Most leaders do not see the cut coming. Whether you are reading the tea leaves right now or have no signs at all, the work is the same.
Document the value the function delivers at every level of the org, in CFO-friendly language. Make that value visible to the people who drive decisions in rooms you may not be in. Build a CFO relationship that does not start with a headcount ask. A quarterly walkthrough of where the function’s impact shows up in the P&L is what lands best.
But documentation alone will not save the seat. The leaders who are not just surviving, but thriving, are doing something more aggressive. They are asking for a number to own or for a bigger remit. They are stepping outside the traditional “presales” job description and operating like the executive their title says they are.
This is why our network is called SolutionExec. The function has outgrown “Presales.” The leaders treating themselves as the technical arm of Sales are operating from a job description that is being retired. The executives absorbing implementation and post-sale work are the ones who are best positioned right now. The executives who embrace this and are taking on more accountability and responsibility are the ones who are getting invited to the proverbial table.
Wherever you are in this journey, the SolutionExec network is built for this conversation. Tell us what is working and what is not. If you went through this and survived, tell us how. If your seat did not survive, tell us what you wish you had done differently. The leaders who share publicly are the ones who change what this profession looks like in the next swing.
Jeff & James