Presales Best Practices: Tips & tools for the presales process

“Presales” is a revealing word. 

It highlights that we’ve traditionally considered Customer Success to happen post-sale—the starting line was the customer signing a contract.

Now, CS teams are pulled into deals long before they close, but we’re stuck with the term presales for good.

So whether you look at it as the presales process (as CS teams do) or just the sales process (as Sales teams do), there’s no doubt that everything leading up to signature is far more collaborative than it used to be.

In this guide, we’ll explore presales team structures, best practices for high-performing presales teams, and tools to get the most out of your team.

What is presales?

Presales has a few different meanings.

In its most technical sense, presales is also used as another word for sales engineering or solutions consulting—a dedicated presales role or team that involves scoping out the customer’s needs and pitching the right product or service to set the stage for a healthy and growing partnership.

In its most general sense, presales refers to any Customer Success activities that take place in the customer lifecycle before the deal closes—typically with the goal of demonstrating value to the customer or creating a smooth post-sale handoff. 

For example, pulling in CS to demo more technical features or preview the implementation process can be considered presales activities.

Presales vs. Sales: What’s the difference?

In some ways—not much. It’s normally more about who is doing the pre-selling. When it’s the CS team, it’s “presales.” When it’s the Sales team, it’s just “sales.”

That said, a presales process generally focuses more on: 

• Going deep on customer needs and hosting a discovery workshop to gather deeper technical requirements. ‍
• Technical validation, like ensuring a software solution integrates with the customer's existing infrastructure. ‍
• Solution mapping by creating a customized product demo that highlights how the solution addresses the customer's pain points. 

Whereas more traditional sales activities involve:

• Lead qualification to determine customer-solution fit. 
• Closing deals by negotiating pricing that aligns with the customer's budget constraints.
• Relationship management to build and maintain strong customer relationships and ensure their ongoing satisfaction.

Presales is ultimately one aspect of a larger sales enablement strategy. It often grows organically out of pain points experienced by your sales or customer success organization:

• Sales representatives handle so many deals that they need organizational support on the technical elements of a sale
• Sales leadership recognizes that low close rates are caused not by a lack of selling skills, but by a lack of technical knowledge to address customer concerns.
• Customer Success start seeing a growing percentage of bad-fit customers who churn relatively quickly because they were promised a solution you can’t deliver.

These are all situations that could benefit from a more targeted approach focusing on the presale experience.

Typical presales activities

Since the presales process mainly involves showing customers how a product or service will meet their needs and fit within their existing environment, presales activities are often centered around discovery and solution design.

Presales activities typically include: 

• Creating demo environments that accurately reflect the product’s capabilities and showcase the most relevant features based on the specific needs of an individual customer. 
• Providing custom quotes after scoping the exact specifications and customizations a customer needs.
• Running POCs (proof of concepts) or pilot projects to let customers test the product in their environment. 
• Addressing technical questions and other customer concerns early on in the sales process to ensure customer satisfaction. 
• Previewing the onboarding process for new customers so they know the steps involved in implementing the solution and have the right expectations. 

Common presales roles

While titles can vary from company to company, these are the most common presales roles today.

Sales engineers or solution architects

Sales engineers and solution architects are responsible for providing the technical expertise required during the sales process. They bridge the gap between the product’s technical capabilities and the customer’s business needs.

That means they need deep technical knowledge of the product and excellent communication skills to handle demos, discovery, run POCs, and provide presales support. 

Their KPIs are typically closed revenue and qualitative feedback from sales.

Presales consultants

A presales consultant is very similar to a solutions architect or sales engineer. They also bring technical expertise and use business acumen to guide customers through the discovery and solution design stages. 

The difference is that where a sales engineer is primarily focused on your product, a presales consultant functions more like a business consultant. 

They engage with potential customers to really understand their business challenges and goals, although the hoped-for outcome is still identifying ways your product can solve those business challenges.

Presales enablement

Presales enablement focuses on equipping the presales team with the tools and training needed to perform their roles effectively. They ensure that the presales team has up-to-date knowledge and skills to engage customers successfully.

Presales enablement roles lead the implementation of new presales tools or software, conduct roleplay and training exercises to upskill solutions consultants, and create resources and documentation to make the presales team more efficient. 

In some organizations, presales enablement is either part of the Sales Enablement or Customer Success Enablement team.

Customer success managers

Customer success managers (CSMs) typically focus on customer onboarding and ongoing customer retention. However, companies that don’t have dedicated sales engineers might bring in their CSMs during the sales process to fill a function similar to a presales role. 

These CSMs might demo the product, demonstrate technical expertise by answering questions, and walk the customer through what the implementation or onboarding process will look like. 

8 presales process best practices

A strong presales process has a massive impact on bottom-line metrics. 

Harvard Business Review found that companies with good presales consistently achieve win rates of 40–50% in new business and 80–90% in renewal business.

Whether you have a dedicated presales engineering team or you’re simply looking to improve the presales stage of your customer journey, these best practices will help. 

1. Establish the right reporting structure 

The correct reporting lines are a way to enable Sales-CS collaboration and establish influence where it matters. 

Typically, presales will sit within one of the following two: 

• Sales, which should ensure great alignment with the sales team, their processes, and their metrics. This could limit collaboration with CS teams or lead to presales becoming too focused on immediate sales outcomes, rather than long-term technical solutions and great customer fit. 
• Customer Success or Professional Services, which ensures a holistic view of the customer lifecycle, from pre-sales through post-implementation but could lead to a misalignment with Sales.

More recently, a third structure option has emerged where Presales sits as part of a centralized RevOps team.

2. Use presales to show off your customer experience

The way your CS team presents itself during the presales process can be the “it” factor that lands you more deals. 

For example, having a CSM join the sales call is an opportunity to sell the post-sales experience as well. 

Joseph Schmitt, VP of Success at UpKeep, made exactly this point on our Grow & Tell podcast: 

“We very much rely on the value that CS and professional services provide in the selling side of the house. When we go into these new sales calls, and we're pitching, we're essentially going in with the conversation that UpKeep is not just a software. The value that you get is the people and the process behind it.”

3. Presales’ biggest value is technical expertise

Technical expertise is a huge selling point for customers, especially when there’s heavy technical implementation or consultation involved post-sale.

Peter Sterkenburg, Revenue Operations Manager at Pleo, says,

“Customers are looking for experts to talk to… From a knowledge perspective, especially when the teams are organized by, for example, industry, it’s good to have an industry expert and a tool expert on hand to help provide additional context on a prospect call. 

This is a great way to set up the CSM as the expert on hand.”

Joseph Schmitt from UpKeep made a similar point on Grow & Tell: 

“Our implementation managers take the role of being prescriptive and consultative so we can go in there and say, ‘This is best practice. We've implemented this for 1,000 people. Based on experience, this is how we recommend that you do it.’”

Investing in industry-specific knowledge means your team can speak the customer’s language, which will build trust and credibility and ensure you can provide advice that really provides value.

4. Be extremely mindful of time spent vs. impact

According to the 2023 Sales Engineering Consensus report, many presales professionals feel that their time is misallocated. 

For instance, they spend significant amounts of time on introductory product demos, where their technical expertise has little impact, and comparatively less time on more impactful work like improving the Sales team’s product knowledge.

The takeaway: presales’ time is best spent on more technical endeavors.

Rather than pulling presales into every demo, that time can be reserved for improving the presales tool stack, helping Sales with discovery calls, and general sales training.

Create a solid and continuous feedback loop with your sales team to ensure your sales engineers are spending their time demoing to the right customers.

5. Demo solutions, not features

While presales is counted on heavily for giving technical demos, you have to avoid going too technical. 

Presales demos should always focus on the value proposition and the solution you’re offering, not on the features you provide (i.e., practice value selling, not feature selling).

Buyers only care about features insofar as they solve problems, improve operations, and deliver tangible benefits that align with their business goals. 

Practical examples of this might be:

• Creating personalized and interactive demo environments that let your prospects experience your product with their own data. 
• Use metrics, case studies, and success stories to provide concrete evidence of value. 
• Tailoring the sales demo to the specific customer’s pain points after an initial discover session.

6. Reduce lag time for demos 

The Consensus report also found that the average lag time between demo request and demo is about 6 days.

That’s a long time—enough time for an inbound lead to, at worst, choose a competitor or, at best, lose their sense of excitement about your product.

Not only does this lag time impact customers, but there’s also a correlation between lower demo wait times and the presales team’s self-reported perception of increased influence in the company. 

Teams that handle demo demands quickly feel valuable, whereas teams that are buried in other work feel stressed and unappreciated, which leads to higher burnout rates. 

7. Blur the handoffs

One way to speed up time-to-demo is to create fewer internal handoffs.

If you have an AE, a presales consultant, and a CSM supporting one customer, the customer shouldn’t feel like they’re being passed off from one person to another. 

Buyers don’t really care about how your teams are structured internally or what each person’s official job description might be. They want a seamless process tailored to their needs. 

In other words, the Sales-to-Success handoff shouldn’t feel like a handoff at all.

This is where using Dock can make a big difference. Dock lets you build customer workspaces that act both as a digital sales room and onboarding workspace.

Everything the customer needs is housed in one place throughout the entire customer lifecycle—from pre-sale to renewal. 

During the sales process, Dock can house Sales decks, demo videos, sandbox links, POC checklists, and more. Post-sale, the workspace can be transitioned to an implementation plan.

It’s a win-win for everyone involved: the customer always knows where to find what they need, and so do your internal teams.

8. Use mutual action plans

One way to significantly reduce the lag time between customer and presales touchpoints is to take a more asynchronous approach to sales.

For example, instead of confining all your presales activities to meetings with the customer, you can give asynchronous “homework” to both sides, which makes your meeting time more efficient.

Mutual action plans are a great way to keep the presales process moving forward with consistency. You can assign time-sensitive tasks to your customers (e.g., uploading data or sharing information about their current tech stack) to get that information before you meet.

Anchoring those deadlines to the buyer’s internal deadlines (e.g. their target implementation date) maintains a sense of urgency.

Speeding up your sales velocity and freeing up meeting time for your presales engineers can have a lot of cascading positive side effects:

• You can support a higher account executive to sales engineer ratio.
• The number of hours per customer goes down, meaning they can invest more meaningful time in valuable customer interactions.
• Faster sales cycles also correlates with lower burnout rates because it enables the team to focus on high-impact initiatives.  

Best presales tools and software

There’s an enormous range of sales enablement software out there. Here are the tool categories we think stand to benefit presales teams the most.

Digital sales rooms

Digital sales room software makes it much easier to scale your sales process while maintaining an element of personalization. 

Sales rooms offer a secure space for storing and managing all sales materials, presentations, and communication. They act as centralized content hubs, making it easy for sellers to access all the information you want to send them in an organized way. 

You can create personalized workspaces for each customer with Dock. This provides a ton of advantages: 

• These workspaces can also be used to manage onboarding, which means customers always access everything they need from one place–making for a very smooth handoff.
• It’s easy to embed demos, slide decks, videos, and anything else you might need to share with your customers.
• It allows you to standardize your sales content, which makes it much easier to keep things up to date for all customers. 

For example, Loom introduces a Dock sales room during the sales process to preview their customer onboarding process.

Brittany Soinski from Loom found building out a template of content that can be used asynchronously extremely valuable.

“Where you can really see the time savings snowball is by taking the time to build evergreen content that can be reused and resurfaced over and over and over again any time a customer has a question.”

Digital sales rooms make that kind of content much easier to organize and share because it’s always saved in the same place. 

Demo automation software

Demo automation tools help presales teams deliver interactive product demonstrations. 

These allow potential customers to explore product features at their own pace, often through guided, self-service demos. These tools can work in a variety of ways and there’s a massive range in the technical architecture they’re built with.

Some enable you to record a video demo with some more dynamic and interactive elements. Others capture some elements of your product and let you adapt the links and pages to tailor them to a customer–one step closer to a live demo without quite getting there. 

Then there’s software that lets you create and share a live demo, including the backend, closer to creating a sandbox environment.

Examples of these include:

• Consensus automates creating and delivering personalized video demos, allowing prospects to explore the product at their own pace.
• Storylane provides a platform for building interactive product demos that can be easily customized and shared with potential customers.

Presales management tools

Presales management tools are internally focused. They help companies streamline and optimize their presales processes, from initial customer engagement to final proposal delivery. Features include sales pipeline management, analytics and reporting, and workflow automation.

Vivun is a good example of this category. It’s a platform that helps teams track opportunities, manage workflows, and gain insights into presales performance.

CPQ software

CPQ (configure, price, quote) software is designed to help businesses streamline and automate creating accurate and customized sales quotes for their products or services. 

It’s especially valuable for companies with complex product offerings or pricing models. It can:

• Automatically calculate prices based on the configured options, discounts, and applicable rules.
• Generate detailed quotes that can be customized to reflect the specific requirements of the customer.

Dock makes it easy to build a product library that lets you customize and tailor order forms and price quotes, which you can maintain in one place.

Other categories of software that can be used in presales but are more targeted at other teams include tools used for sales enablement—providing resources, training, and tools that help sales teams sell more effectively—and sales proposal software. 

Streamline your presales process for more growth

An effective presales process is fundamental to maximizing sales success, especially when you’re selling a technical product or selling to an enterprise segment. 

It doesn’t have to include dedicated full-time roles to lead to your sales team being fully equipped with the tools they need to engage with prospects effectively.

Leveraging the right combination of people and tools is often enough to empower your sales team to deliver personalized, value-driven interactions at every stage of the customer journey. 

This is why tools like Dock is a game changer for businesses that want to provide those personalized experiences at scale. 

Book a free demo with us today to take your presales process to the next level.