Imagine you’re a new sales representative — you have a list of prospects, and your task is to sell them software as a service (SaaS) products. The problem is, you know next to nothing about those prospects. You lack data about their pain points, and your handle on the complex product you’re trying to sell is anything but solid.
You land a meeting with a client looking for you to share insights with a technical audience and the primary decision-makers. What will the new sales rep do?
It’s possible to avoid that problematic scenario by employing one proven tactic: presales. When a sales team invests in the presales process, crucial data and technical assistance boost the chances of closing deals. In this article, you’ll learn what presales is, why it’s so crucial to sales success, and how you can use it to ensure your sales team has everything it needs to achieve your company’s goals.
What you’ll learn:
- What is presales?
- Presales vs. sales: What’s the difference?
- Why is presales important?
- What is the presales process?
- Presales best practices
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What is presales?
Presales includes all the activities and support that occur before a sale closes. These include customer research, prospecting, discovery calls, and qualifying prospects. The intent is to gain a deep understanding of customer needs and match those needs to your solutions. It can be helpful to think of presales as a team effort – the account executive owns just part of the process.
For example, before a salesperson begins building a relationship with a prospect, they rely on presales teammates to lay the groundwork. That can include a presales contributor (an “engineer”) who can provide technical knowledge about the product or perhaps an associate who conducts prospect research and vetting. In essence, presales is how a sales organization conducts its due diligence. A company that fails to invest in presales will almost certainly see its sales strategy fall short.
Presales vs. sales: What’s the difference?
Simply put, presales is all the work that needs to happen before a sale happens. It’s much like the pre-game prep a star athlete does before they take the field. Like coaches and scouts in sports, the presales team provides research and guidance that the sales professional can use to achieve success. By laying the groundwork, presales ensures the sales team works on deals most likely to close. With all the prospect’s details on hand, sales representatives can serve them better, which ultimately leads to greater speed in the sales pipeline as well as increased revenue.
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Why is presales important?
Presales paves the way so sales representatives can close deals, and it clarifies the decision-making process for prospects. This is especially important now as products are becoming more complex.
Here are a few ways presales can help streamline the sales process:
- Enables sales reps to focus on their strengths. All the research and preparation that go into sales take time. Proper presales clears the deck for your sales team to do what they do best — relationship-building and selling. A technical expert working in presales, for example, will likely have a much easier time explaining how a product will solve a customer’s problem than an account executive would. They can also find solutions sales representatives might not have considered or been aware of.
- Puts the focus on qualified leads. When you have a sales prospecting system in place to find and qualify right-fit leads, your team won’t chase prospects that don’t pan out. Presales efforts yield research and deep understanding of high-value prospects. That will help your reps determine which deals are most promising so they can spend their time cultivating those relationships — and closing deals.
Creates a better customer experience. Because you’ll have a deeper knowledge of each customer, you can tailor your solutions to their needs. Instead of outlining a generic offer, your team can speak directly to customer pain points. Showing demonstrable return on investment — a result of the presales process — helps seal the deal.
What is the presales process?
Let’s start with the basics of the presales process. First, your team will need to identify who owns each part. Often, that will mean assigning a sales engineer to handle the technical aspect of the sales relationship, and the sales rep will handle personal interactions. You might also have a sales consultant or staff researcher onboard to conduct market analysis, develop talking points, and build out buyer personas. Lastly, you can have a business development representative help identify and qualify a lead as part of the presales process.?
Here are common steps in the presales process:
- Conducting market research and competitive analysis. Before your reps make calls or send emails to prospects, your presales team will engage in knowledge gathering. That means digging into what prospects need and want (an AI-powered CRM makes this far easier), pinpointing common pain points, and determining competitor strengths and vulnerabilities. As part of this process, a buyer persona should emerge.
- Qualifying leads. With deep expertise in hand, your presales team can identify prospects who came from leads brought in by marketing via the sales funnel. Prospects can also arrive through a request-for-proposal (RFP) process, depending on the market (government agencies and nonprofits often take the RFP route, though some corporations do, too). The presales team will meticulously match leads to your buyer persona, conduct additional research if needed, and even engage in a discovery call.
- Generating sales proposals. As mentioned, a technical expert can provide essential information about complex products. As they help draft a sales proposal — a slide deck or verbal sales pitch, for example — they’ll rely on that product knowledge and their understanding of the prospect and market. It’s not enough to know the product; a presales engineer also needs to be a strong storyteller with a head for sales. And they must be comfortable mining their CRM for important prospect context.
- Creating demos. Like the famous movie line, “Show me the money,” prospects will need proof of concept before inking a deal. Armed with information from the discovery call and your detailed buyer persona, a presales team member will help the rep craft a demo that will resonate with the prospect.
Note that these steps are fairly uniform, especially in the SaaS world. However, depending on the complexity of the industry, a sales engineer might own the entire relationship from end to end. Take the pharmaceutical industry, for example. Software that enables those companies to manage drug development and navigate the regulatory landscape is incredibly complex. In cases like that, the line between presales and sales can blur. However, in other cases, a presales team member might step aside once they’ve set up a sales rep for success.
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Presales best practices
Presales best practices are not a one-size-fits-all approach. Specific tactics resonate more than others depending on your industry, your team’s experience level, and your team’s sales methodology. Here are some general best practices that have proven effective in various sales environments.
- Hire people who know the industry well: Let’s consider the pharmaceutical industry again. Say you’re selling software that helps drug companies during the research and development stage. Having a presales engineer on staff with direct experience in pharmaceutical development — someone who understands the industry’s complex data and compliance requirements — can help you quickly zero in on a customer’s pain points and build strong personal relationships.
- Define your process, and stick with it: Be sure to map out your presales steps clearly — who owns what, when each team member gets involved, and so on. Everyone should know their role and the reason behind it.
- Gather as much information as possible: Instead of focusing on closing a deal, focus on understanding the prospect’s pain points. Have they tried to solve their problems before? How? Who makes buying decisions, and are there other stakeholders who need to be involved? Your presales team should focus heavily on researching your potential customers.
- Play up your true value: Your presales team is crucial to understanding your customers. This takes thorough analysis. It might include sending surveys to customers, reading up on industry trends, or taking a close look at competitors. That prework will give you insights about how to help your customer understand the value of your proposal.
- Be prepared when bargaining: Everyone’s time is precious. The presales team can help you prepare for all meetings, presentations, product demos, and other meaningful interactions. If it looks like you haven’t done your homework, you’ll sour what would have been a productive relationship.
- Set expectations: Early in the presales process — during the qualification stage, ideally — the presales team can coordinate the details so you don’t miss a beat. For example, they can deliver a schedule of what’s happening and when, so you’ll avoid misunderstandings about pace and timing. Some sales techniques, such as the Sandler sales methodology, stipulate that sales teams should get a “contract” in place with a prospect so communication methods, meeting frequency, and other factors are spelled out clearly.
- Measure performance: The presales team can help you pull data from your sales CRM to gauge how you’re doing. For example, they can measure win rates, time spent in each phase, and time to close. That will tell you where you’re successful — and where you can improve for next time.
Make sales with presales
There’s no doubt about it: Sales is a team effort. And as products have become increasingly complex — and competition fiercer — the importance of investing in presales teams has risen accordingly. While hiring talented account executives will always be critical, investing in your pre-sales team is just as important. Your sales team will only be as good as its win rate. With a strong presales operation, you’ll ensure your sales leaders have what they need to do the job.
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