The Incredible Powers of PreSales & How C-Suite can Boost their Sales Growth

PreSales is becoming increasingly significant in the B2B tech industry today because of its high-yielding results, i.e, increased revenue.

Not only does PreSales provide you with the right plan for success but also makes your customer's experience worthwhile giving them technical underlining insights into the product.

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➦ What is PreSales or Sales Engineering

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What PreSales teams achieve

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A business development team is responsible for Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and moves it to the Sales team who works on Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).

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After qualifying a SQL for technical fitment, Account Executives (AEs) push the lead forward as an opportunity to close or win the deal.

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A PreSales Executive or Sales Engineer (SE) is brought in to support the technical process and help win the opportunity. Important PreSales activities include:

1) Early presentations and demonstrations

2) Technical exploration through technical demonstrations

3) Requests for Information (RFI)

4) Requests for Proposals (RFP)

5) Technical validation

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1) Quick access to in-depth product knowledge:

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Remember what your prospect needs from you is a trusted advisor and single point of technical support who can explain the product in great detail and apply it to their particular needs.

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You will observe a positive shift in your sales funnel, once your sales team becomes well-acquainted with the technical understanding of your product.

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This enables your clients to receive prompt responses to their detailed technical questions.

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Thus, by having a distinct team with in-depth knowledge, your customer can feel valued, understood, and resolved.

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2) Improve product experience for prospective customers

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In traditional PLG-led motion, users get educated by several different materials on the website or interactive demos accessible by a simple login, completely independent of PreSales.

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But while selling complex solutions, product education is not as simple and requires care from PreSales to improve product experience for prospective customers.

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PreSales learn prospect requirements, challenges, and pain points to design impact solutions. And make sure prospects understand the solution they’re buying and how it’s going to benefit them.

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How to improve your technical win rate? And decrease costs

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3) Setting clear expectations for buyers

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Clarifying expectations early on in the sales process is an important part of a technical sales cycle.

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It's your responsibility to ensure that customers understand what to anticipate while using your service.

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With the help of PreSales, you will be able to assess the client's expectations and needs which will surely benefit your customer interactions.

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4) Creating an Evaluation Plan for success

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Having an evaluation plan is the first step in establishing transparency between the Sales and PreSales teams.

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Not only this, if the evaluation plan is shared with the customer, this increases trust for all stakeholders involved in the evaluation and decision making process and provides transparency on the value delivered by the product.

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5) Smoother handover to Customer Success (CS) and maximize retention

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PreSales documenting all the info and sharing it as a handover doc to the CS teams help understand the customers needs from day one and what was the evaluation plan like and what are their future needs.

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This would help these teams to better engage with the customer, identify red-flags well in advance, and resolve them even before it becomes a problem.

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How can C-Suite help PreSales do more, and get better revenue numbers

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1) Add a purpose-built tool to the stack

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Sales Engineers (SE) should have access to a platform that allows them to track all of their technical sales activities along with the customer interactions.

That is how PreSales Managers will analyze each won, lost, and closed deal.

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The tool should serve you with technical data which can shape your upcoming strategy, ensuring high revenue rates.

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With the help of PreSales Intelligence, once you begin assessing skill-based performance, you can allocate your resources more efficiently in a way that will guarantee profitable growth, boosting your technical revenue.

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How the PreSales team is functioning, what are the most common bottlenecks and time drainers, how occupied or available they are, all of these data points help a leader and a manager better understand and strategize to help the team give the best performance without being burnout.

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How a Sales Engineer saved 15+ hours per week and converted more dollars

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2) Allow PreSales teams to share their vote with other GTM functions

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Let's face it, with the surge in product-led growth, aligning your PreSales and other GTM teams together has now become really important. Thanks to the self-service trials and freemium models.

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A Sales Engineer can pull and push customer and market feedback back to the GTM teams, addressing the client's concern.

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Why is alignment between the two so important?

1) The products designed will be efficiently customized, increasing the win rate.

2) It will strengthen your PreSales team and turn your business into a cross-functional unit.

3) Your company will be in a better position to identify product gaps, outranking its competitors.

4) Your product strategy will be more impactful, thanks to the valuable insights

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How PreSales can contribute to product roadmap

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3) Invest in resources, training, and community for PreSales

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Working in PreSales requires one to develop hard and soft skills in equal strength. A Sales Engineer with not-so-satisfactory soft skills will not be able to put up a strong image of their company.

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On the other hand, an SE with weak hard skills will fail to conceptualize solutions that bridge challenges and create impact for their customers.

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There should be constant learning for PreSales Engineers, and that doesn’t stop at just internal training and courses. PreSales leaders must go beyond their default curriculum to have a holistic approach to training and skills development.

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That’s why we have curated 500+ links from around the entire PreSales community, called the PreSales Library, for beginners (looking to start their career in PreSales), professionals (who actively work in the industry), and leaders (experts who give a direction to the PreSales momentum) to learn and grow in their respective careers.

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Trainers like Chris White, John Care, and Peter Cohen, as well as organizations like PreSales Collective, We the Sales Engineers, can assist you in bringing out your underlying potential in closing your best deal impacting your technical sales.