Presales Enablement Guide: Must-have tools, tactics & assets

Your presales team can’t be everywhere—but they’re expected to be.

Sales reps keep pulling them into calls. Prospects demand deep technical answers before making a decision. And with only so many solutions engineers to go around, it’s impossible to be on every deal that needs them.

The result? Sales cycles stall because reps don’t have the technical expertise to handle objections. Buyers lose interest while waiting for follow-up. And your presales team is stretched so thin that when they do join calls, they’re scrambling to keep up.

Without the right presales enablement strategy, you’re not just burning out your team—you’re losing deals.

In this guide, we’ll break down how to enable your presales team to scale their impact, reduce time wasted in unnecessary meetings, and help your sales org close more deals—without overloading your best technical experts.

What is presales enablement?

Presales enablement ensures your technical sales team—whether solutions engineers, sales engineers, or CS leaders—has the tools, training, and processes to support sales, overcome objections, and close more deals.

But to understand presales enablement, you first need to understand presales itself.

What does Presales actually do?

Presales is the bridge between sales and product, helping prospects understand how your solution fits their needs before they buy. It’s crudely referred to as “presales” because it refers to customer success activities that get pulled forward into the sales process (before the deal is closed). 

“Who” is responsible for presales depends on your company size. Presales might be:

• A dedicated sales engineering team
• A responsibility split among customer success managers (CSMs)
• A single solution architect or technical expert supporting multiple sales reps

Key components of presales enablement

Presales enablement is about helping these team members do their best work without burning out. Common presales enablement activities include things like:

• Product training: Solutions engineers need deep product knowledge, including technical details that go beyond what sales reps require. Presales enablement ensures they’re up to speed on product updates and new features.
• Content creation & management: Prospects ask tough, detailed questions. Presales teams need quick access to technical whitepapers, use cases, competitive comparisons, and security documentation. Presales enablement ensures these resources exist and are easy to find.
• Presales playbooks: When should presales get involved? What’s the handoff process? Presales enablement defines workflows, builds best practices, and standardizes processes like proof-of-concept (POC) creation.
• Tooling & automation: Great presales motions rely on the right tech stack. Presales enablement helps evaluate, implement, and optimize tools that improve efficiency (more on this below).

Incorporating effective presales enablement strategies can significantly boost win rates. According to a McKinsey study, organizations with strong presales capabilities achieve win rates of 40-50% for new business and 80-90% for renewal.

If you’re a presales or customer success leader building out a presales strategy for your org, your decisions can make a huge impact on business growth. 

Must-have presales enablement software

What tools, processes, and assets does a great presales team need to thrive? 

Let’s start with the tech stuff. There is tons of great presales software your team can benefit from, but a few categories are especially valuable.

1. Digital sales rooms

One of the biggest challenges for presales teams is bandwidth. Sales reps constantly need technical support, but your team can’t join every call or manually walk every prospect through a POC.

A digital sales room like Dock solves this by creating a centralized workspace where presales, sales, and buyers can collaborate asynchronously. 

Instead of working reactively, your presales team can set up scalable, structured, and trackable buying experiences—without needing to be in every conversation.

Dock helps presales teams work smarter:

✅ Run scalable POCs and demo environments

• Embed interactive demos, sandbox access, and guided walkthroughs so prospects can explore your product at their own pace—without requiring a live demo every time.
• Standardize your POC process with pre-built templates, making it easy to customize technical evaluations for each buyer.

✅ Share all presales resources in one place

• Upload technical whitepapers, security documentation, implementation guides, and competitive comparisons—so sales reps don’t have to rely on presales for every question.
• Ensure prospects always have the most up-to-date materials without digging through emails or shared drives.

✅ Track buyer engagement and prioritize high-intent deals

• See which documents, demos, and POC materials buyers engage with most, helping presales focus on the deals with real momentum.
• Identify gaps in understanding and proactively provide additional resources before prospects even ask.

✅ Ensure a seamless handoff from presales to implementation

• No more lost details—Dock workspaces transition smoothly from presales to onboarding, ensuring customer success teams have access to technical requirements, security approvals, and POC insights.
• Sales engineers can document key findings in real time, keeping everyone aligned on customer expectations and success criteria.

With Dock, presales teams don’t have to drop everything every time a sales rep needs help. Instead, they can enable self-service, run structured POCs at scale, and focus their energy on the highest-value opportunities—without getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.

And because Dock transitions seamlessly from sales to customer success, your implementation team is never starting from scratch.

Here’s Noah Massucci, Director of Sales Engineering and Customer Onboarding at Robin, explaining the impact Dock had on their presales process:

2. Presales management platforms

Dedicated presales management platforms like Vivun and Homerun help presales teams stay organized, prioritize high-impact deals, and measure their impact on revenue. Without a structured system, presales engineers often get overwhelmed by last-minute demo requests, unclear priorities, and scattered deal insights.

These platforms streamline deal tracking, resource management, and performance analytics, ensuring presales efforts are aligned with the sales team’s most critical opportunities. 

By automating workflows and centralizing data, they help presales teams focus on what they do best—delivering technical expertise that moves deals forward.

3. Product demo & virtual sandbox software

For creating engaging product demos, interactive product demo platforms like Walnut, Storylane, and Navattic are worth considering. They allow your team to build interactive, customizable presentations tailored to each prospect’s needs.

Walnut CRO Catie Ivey joined our Grow & Tell podcast to explain how sales teams can get the most out of interactive demos:

If your prospects want to get even more hands-on virtual sandbox environments for technical demos and POCs are what you need. 

Tools like TestBox and Reprise let you create sandbox environments for live proof of concepts (without risking something going wrong in your actual production software).

4. Sales proposal and quoting tools

A strong POC can win over your prospect, but a slow, complicated quoting process can just as easily kill the deal. 

Buyers expect speed and transparency when it comes to price quotes, and any friction at this stage can delay or derail a decision.

That’s where sales proposal and CPQ (configure, price, quote) tools come in. 

Solutions like DealHub and Salesforce CPQ can automate the quote-to-cash process, making it easier to generate accurate, professional, and customized proposals without back-and-forth emails or manual calculations.

If you're already using Dock’s digital sales rooms, you can create and share quotes, proposals, and order forms directly within the same workspace where your presales team has already engaged the buyer. 

This keeps everything organized, ensures pricing discussions happen in context, and eliminates the hassle of switching between multiple tools.

A seamless, well-structured proposal process doesn’t just make life easier for your team—it removes buying friction, accelerates approvals, and increases your chances of closing the deal.

5. Product documentation software 

Presales teams deal with tough, technical questions and complex customer use cases all the time. 

Great product documentation makes fielding those challenges a whole lot easier:

• An internal knowledge base provides a comprehensive, well-organized library of product specs, technical details, and troubleshooting guides. It can also hold things like your presales playbook and process docs.
  
  Tools like Confluence or Notion and Tettra work well for this, ensuring your team can quickly find answers to technical questions.
  
  
• An external knowledge base allows customers and prospects to self-serve. This customer-facing resource addresses common questions and provides detailed product information, serving both your team and prospects.
  
  You can create a great knowledge base with something like Document360 or KnowledgeOwl. You can also embed specific assets or links within Dock to make them easy for prospects to find. 

Essential content for presales enablement

Presales teams are constantly fielding complex technical questions, overcoming objections, and proving your product’s value. To do this effectively—without slowing down deals—they need instant access to the right content at the right time.

That’s where a strong sales enablement content strategy comes in. Instead of searching through scattered files or outdated materials, your presales team should have a centralized, easily accessible library of key resources.

Here are the enablement assets every presales team needs:

✅ Use case & customer story library

• Showcase real-world applications of your product across different industries and challenges.
• Quickly pull relevant examples to address a prospect’s specific needs.
• Store and organize these stories in Dock’s content management system, so presales teams can surface them instantly when needed.

✅ Competitive comparison matrix

• Provide a clear breakdown of how your product stacks up against competitors.
• Equip presales teams with talking points to address common objections.
• Share a customer-friendly version within your Dock sales room, ensuring buyers see your differentiators in a digestible format.

✅ Technical & security documentation

• House security reviews, compliance documents, and detailed product specs in Dock, making them easy to find and share with technical buyers.
• Prevent sales teams from sending outdated information by keeping all materials updated in a single, controlled environment.

✅ Presales playbooks & battlecards

• Standardize responses to common technical objections.
• Create internal guides on when to engage presales and how to navigate technical discussions.
• Store and manage these assets in Dock, ensuring alignment between sales and presales teams.

By storing and organizing all presales content in Dock, your team can reduce back-and-forth requests, ensure messaging consistency, and enable faster, more informed sales conversations—helping presales focus on winning deals, not chasing down documents.

Best practices for presales enablement

The right tech stack and content assets create a great foundation for scaling your presales team. But presales enablement involves a lot more than that.

Here are five things every great enablement team should be doing to build out a presales function: 

1. Facilitate discovery time and custom demos

Presales teams, whether dedicated sales engineers or customer success managers splitting time, spend a lot of time asking questions and listening to the needs of each prospect.

They’re trying to confirm if your tools and services are a good match for the prospect’s needs.

An effective enablement program makes this discovery process easier. To do so, you can:

• Provide a list of tailored discovery questions. Equip your team with a set of discovery questions that help uncover each prospect's unique needs. These should guide the conversation toward uncovering how your solution can solve their specific problem.
• Built-out demo accounts. Provide demo environments that mimic real-world scenarios, showing prospects what a successful implementation looks like. Having access to a fully built demo account (resembling a customer with a use case that’s similar to the prospect) allows the presales team to deliver a more realistic and engaging demo.
• Create pre-recorded demo segments and email templates for follow-up. Demos can be powerful, but you won’t always have every stakeholder on the call, so great follow-up is key. Provide your presales team with pre-recorded demos of individual features—you can embed these right into your shared Dock workspace. Creating commonly used email templates that enable efficient personalized follow-up is also a good idea.
• Equip them with a centralized tool. By using a tool like Dock, your presales team can keep all these resources in one centralized place, from demo environments to discovery questions to follow-up materials. This helps ensure smooth handoffs from sales to customer success once the deal closes. 

2. Emphasize buyer enablement

It’s easy to think that presales enablement is solely about helping your presales team sell — but that’s wrong. 

Great presales enablement places just as much emphasis on buyer enablement. At each stage of the buyer journey, you should be trying to make it easier for buyers to buy, reducing friction and proactively eliminating potential objections.

The more personalized and relevant your presales resources — like case studies or use case guides — are, the easier it becomes for prospects to see how your solution addresses their pain points. Taken together, it builds trust and makes the decision-making process easier for the buyer.

To implement an approach focused on buyer enablement, consider the following tactics:

• Foster a buyer-centric mindset. Train your team to always think from the buyer’s perspective. Encourage them to ask questions like, “How can we make this process easier for the buyer?” or “What do they need to feel confident moving forward?” This shifts the focus from pitching the product to truly supporting the buyer’s decision-making journey.
• Develop tailored content and educational resources. Provide your presales team with industry-specific subject matter expertise, or business model-aligned resources. This could include case studies, white papers, and webinars targeted at a prospect’s industry. Embed these in your Dock workspace so your team can easily share them with the prospect. 
• Simplify the decision process. Help your team provide clear, easy-to-understand resources—such as ROI calculators or product comparison sheets—that allow buyers to quickly grasp the value of your product.

3. Promote the use of POCs and trials

Proof of concepts (POCs) are essential tools in the presales process, allowing prospects to test your product in their own environment. It’s their chance for a virtual test drive.

The goal of a POC is to secure a firm commitment to purchase after a successful trial period. When a prospect requests a trial or POC, it’s a clear signal they want to keep the conversation going and have a strong intent to purchase.

Effective presales enablement for POCs involves equipping your team with the right resources and strategies to maximize the value of these trial periods:

• Give permission and guidelines for providing a trial. Under what circumstances and for how long would a team member be allowed to give a trial? Or, if you already offer a standard trial, are there certain times or deal sizes when it would be okay to give a longer one?
• Provide technical access for trial management. Ensure your presales team has the necessary permissions in your admin panel to create, extend, or modify trials without relying on your support or engineering teams.
• Enable proactive customer engagement. Equip your presales team with tools and processes to drive consistent customer interaction during POCs. Provide engagement templates, milestone checklists, and automations to help drive adoption. 
• Get clear on success criteria. Before a POC begins, you should collaborate with the prospect to understand what success looks like. What metrics would mean a great trial period for them? By clarifying these up front (and then delivering on them), it’s far easier for your sales team to get the contract signed.

4. Empower your team to provide accurate custom quotes

Ask any presales professional the first question they hear in a sales cycle, and chances are you’ll hear the same thing:

"How much is this going to cost?" 

Buyers often don't know where their needs fit within your pricing plans. For enterprises or complex use cases, they’ll often need a custom quote.

Anne-Marie Traas, former head of customer success at TestGorilla, shared a story that highlights the importance of getting this right:

“Our prospects frequently asked about which plan would fit them best. Typically, they were comparing two plans: the higher-tier plan, which often had features they didn't need, versus the lower-tier plan, which didn’t have a high enough limit for their usage. They were stuck between two plans that didn’t seem to fit, and creating a custom quote was the only way to help them move forward.” 

This was a few years ago—before tools like Dock existed—and there was a lot of complicated math involved, so she created a spreadsheet calculator to make the process easy for presales (and customers). 

Modern CPQ software can create custom quotes at scale, but make sure you’re following these best practices regardless of your tool choice:

• Make your guardrails and exception process clear. You probably allow your team to discount up to a certain threshold or to tweak your standard offering in certain ways. These guardrails give your team flexibility to adjust quotes and proposals based on a prospect’s needs. When an exception is needed (like a steep discount or an extended POC), make the process for obtaining approvals quick and easy. 
• Eliminate the math. Providing custom quotes needs to be an easy and repeatable process (or you risk losing deals or hurting your margin) If there are a lot of parameters involved, generating accurate quotes gets complicated quickly. Properly configuring your CPQ tool may be all you need here, but if not, at least provide a trustworthy calculator. Dock lets you build a product library to create customized price quotes, keeping everything organized in one central place.
• Make it easy to deliver professional-looking quotes. Nothing says "start-up" like a sales quote in a Word Doc sent in a long email chain. While we respect the hustle, a scaling presales team should aim for a professional quote that’s easy for a customer to say yes to. Once you build your price quote in Dock, simply send it off to your customer for a signature.

5. Encourage cross-team collaboration

Effective presales enablement extends beyond the presales team itself, fostering collaboration with Sales and Customer Success to ensure a consistent buyer experience and smooth handoffs throughout the entire sales process.

At Robin, using Dock workspaces enabled Sales, Presales, and Customer Success to share technical documentation, deal details, and onboarding materials in one place, resulting in a seamless buyer journey.

To enable this level of collaboration, consider implementing these tactics:

• Centralize your communication tools. Implement a unified platform for all team communications. You should definitely have all customer communications logged in your CRM, but every revenue leader knows how easy it is for important data to get buried in Salesforce or HubSpot. Using a specialized solution like Dock’s digital sales rooms keeps the most important info all in one place, no matter what stage of the buying journey a prospect is in.  
• Create clear handoff processes. Develop standardized templates or checklists that define the exact information to be transferred between Presales, Sales, and Customer Success. This minimizes accidents during transitions and cuts down on information getting lost. 
• Provide access to technical experts. Set up a process where your presales team can escalate particularly complex questions to subject matter experts like your engineering team. Presales supports your sales team during a complex sales motion, but sometimes they need someone to have their back, too.  

Empower your presales team with Dock

Presales enablement is all about giving your team the resources, training, and tools they need to support your sales team and help move prospects closer to purchasing your product. Through discovery and custom demos, great proofs of concept, and ongoing collaboration, a well-enabled presales team can significantly accelerate deal velocity and improve the overall buyer experience.

When you enable your presales team to operate with confidence, transparency, and collaboration, you create an environment where deals move smoothly, customer relationships thrive, and your business can scale effectively.

Ready to take your presales enablement to the next level? 

Start a free trial of Dock today and get started building your first digital sales room. It’ll transform your presales process.