Best Presales Software: 7 tools every presales team needs

Building a dedicated presales team—often called solutions architects or sales engineers—requires finding tools that fit the bill. 

Get your tools wrong, and it can translate to a massive loss in momentum, killing your sales velocity and making revenue targets impossible to hit.

But presales brings unique challenges that make building a solid tech stack hard:

• The technical requirements of presales are complex. You need to be able to dive deep into your product, while also customizing everything to your prospect’s needs. Doing this at scale is tough.
• Presales requires seamless collaboration across multiple teams. At a minimum, most companies have the sales rep, the solutions consultant, and a CSM working together. That’s a lot of moving parts, and many tools struggle to facilitate this teamwork.

To help you find the best presales software for scaling your sales function and speeding up your deal velocity, we’ve split common presales tools into seven key categories, with examples of tools that are perfectly suited for tackling the unique challenges of the presales world.

1. Digital sales rooms

Digital sales rooms (also known as sales deal rooms) are customizable workspaces that allow sales and presales teams to collaborate with prospects in a structured and centralized environment. 

You can think of them as a virtual collaboration hub. 

They house all necessary information in one place, presented in a format that’s easy for the buying team to consume—so you can share product information, sales collateral, demos, and other relevant content seamlessly.

For presales professionals, sales rooms are a great way to manage the often complex and multi-faceted sales proof of concept (POC). Delivering a great POC requires gathering critical info from the customer, building your POC, and ensuring the customer can see the value in your product. 

A sales room makes this whole journey smooth for the prospect while also enabling a clean handoff to the implementation team once the deal is won. Everything lives in the same virtual space.

Sales rooms help:

• Share data and resources to show the value your solution will provide a prospective customer
• Keep everyone—internally and externally—on the same page and collaborating in the same space.
• Track buyer activity and engagement to see exactly how far the customer has made it through your sales or onboarding process.
• Seamlessly transition to onboarding and implementation, since you’ll document things like buyer requirements throughout the sales process, after which your implementation team can get busy. 

Whether you’re managing a complex enterprise sales process with a long sales cycle or a fast-growing product-led growth company, a digital sales room makes the entire presales process easier. 

Dock: Win sales and onboard customers in one shared space

Dock provides a centralized, white-label workspace where sales and presales professionals can collaborate to drive new sales. Once a deal closes, your CSMs can jump in to tackle implementation, onboarding, and ensuring long-term customer success.

With Dock, you can: 

• Create shared client workspaces that serve as a single source of truth for all relevant sales, technical, and implementation information.
• Easily upload and organize product demos, presentations, and other sales content.
• Manage access permissions and security profiles to ensure sensitive information is only accessible to authorized stakeholders.

Dock enables scalability in your presales process by allowing you to create workspace templates, repeatable action plans, and sign-able order forms. At the same time, it enables easy customization on a customer-by-customer basis. 

And since everything happens within one sales room, you’ll never lose any info once the customer transitions into onboarding. 

Compared to other deal rooms, Dock has stronger project management capabilities, which leads to powerful mutual action plans that streamline the process and keep everyone on the same page. For example you can template your action plans and then pre-assign tasks and automate due dates.

2. Presales management platforms

Presales management platforms are all-encompassing presales tools for solutions architects. They typically include features like: 

• Interactive questionnaires and diagnostic tools to capture customer requirements.
• Guided workflows for solution design and proposal generation.
• Centralized dashboard to monitor the status of active opportunities.
• Customizable deal stages and workflows to align with the organization's sales process.

Many companies use these tools to manage the presales part of the sales process, usually in conjunction with their CRM or other sales software. 

These tools primarily exist to enable scalability and faster deal cycles. They’re most valuable for companies selling high-value, enterprise-grade solutions, since these often have lengthy, multi-stakeholder sales cycles that require extensive technical discovery, scoping, and collaboration. 

Presales management platforms can also be a good option for companies that have complex product portfolios who need to quickly assemble tailored offerings based on customer needs. 

Vivun: For managing presales operations

Vivun, for example, is especially designed to streamline presales operations. 

It provides modules for deal tracking, resource management, and performance analytics, so presales teams can monitor the status of active opportunities, allocate the right technical resources to each deal, and generate detailed reports on team productivity and pipeline health.

It’s easy to see how this experience mimics the experience of managing a typical sales pipeline. 

Homerun: For automating workflows

Another example of a presales management tool is Homerun. Homerun largely focuses on automating key presales workflows, from technical discovery to solution design. 

It also offers comprehensive analytics, giving presales leaders visibility into team capacity, deal velocity, and other vital KPIs.

Other presales management platforms include:

• Preskale
• Aviso

3. Sales enablement tools

Sales enablement software usually offers a mixture of sales training, content management, and buyer enablement. 

These tools are fundamentally about empowering the sales (or in this case, presales) team to provide a better buyer experience and to work more efficiently:

• They consolidate assets, such as product demos, solution overviews, and customer case studies, to ensure your team has the information they need when engaging with customers
• They provide onboarding and product education to help presales teams pitch the product, run and design customized demos, and understand how to position your product’s strengths against your competitors. 

They also enable faster ramp-up and onboarding, which results in increased rep capacity and a more scalable sales process.

Highspot & Seismic: For sales training

Highspot and Seismic are both well-established sales enablement platforms. They both take a traditional approach of focusing primarily on sales content management and sales training. 

Highspot is a more general-purpose platform focusing on content organization, personalization, and analytics. Presales teams can use it to access materials for customer engagements, track content performance, and gain insights to optimize their selling strategies.

Seismic is very similar, offering content management, automation, and sales coaching functionality. 

Dock: For buyer enablement

The downside to classic sales enablement tools like Highspot and Seismic is that they’re entirely focused on empowering sales reps—but most of the B2B buying cycle happens internally, within the buyer’s organization. 

Dock takes a different approach by prioritizing buyer enablement.

Dock simplifies the sales process by providing a single, shared workspace where the buyer can access all the necessary sales content, resources, and collaboration tools, rather than forcing the sales champion in the organization to carry that burden and pass info along to other stakeholders.

Dock can also be used for content management and to track customer engagement, making it a multi-purpose presales tool that can be used across the entire buyer journey.

4. Product demo platforms

Product demo platforms make it easy to create, customize, and deliver engaging and interactive product demos. A sales rep may take the lead on creating product demos, but a solutions engineer often partners with them to ensure the demo is adequately customized to meet all buyer requirements. 

The goal is to illustrate how a solution can address a customer’s specific needs and pain points, ultimately driving increased interest and, ideally, purchase intent.

What they’re especially good at is helping sales teams move away from a one-size-fits-all demo towards crafting tailored experiences for each customer—all in a way that’s still scalable and efficient.

Walnut: For creating interactive product demos

Walnut allows sales and presales teams to build interactive, customizable product demos that can be easily shared with prospects. It has a drag-and-drop interface, so you can incorporate product walkthroughs, embedded content, and even simulated user interactions. 

With just a few quick clicks, you’re able to personalize each demo to every prospect. 

Storylane: For guiding prospects through key product features

Storylane takes a more narrative-driven approach to product demos. It aims to enable users to construct immersive, story-based experiences that guide prospects through the key features and benefits of the solution. 

It does this by capturing your screen while you click through your product.

If your sales team has done a good job of capturing buyer requirements and the specific problems your prospect needs to solve, then Storylane makes it easy for you to focus on those areas of your product. 

Navattic: For highly customizable product demos

Navattic offers a slightly more comprehensive suite of features for creating, managing, and delivering product demos, with some integration features that make it a little more versatile. It also includes advanced analytics and reporting to measure the impact and effectiveness of these demo experiences.

5. Virtual environments for technical demos and POCs

If you want buyers to get hands-on with your product (and you’re not a product-led growth company with a freemium model), then your presales team probably needs virtual environment software. 

These tools help presales teams create virtual environments or sandboxes, often with data from the prospect, to closely mimic the actual software experience. 

Demo automation tools automate the creation and deployment of these virtual sandboxes, allowing customers to explore your product's functionality in a hands-on, interactive manner. 

This level of customization and control over the demo environment is particularly crucial for enterprise-grade software solutions, where customers often require a deep technical understanding of the product's capabilities and integration points before purchasing.

Setting up virtual environments requires deep technical expertise, which is why presales teams often get involved. Sales engineers help configure and provision these sandboxes, ensuring a smooth experience. They also might maintain a library of pre-built scenarios and use cases.

TestBox: Offer a live proof of concept

TestBox can build customized demo instances using a live and integrated version of your product, that’s automatically populated with AI-generated data. It can also be used to create multiple demo environments, which you can use for selling into different verticals or segments.

If offering proof-of-concepts is a critical part of your sales process, TestBox can automate the operational aspects of building those POCs, while still enabling you to personalize demo environments to specific customers. 

Reprise: Create sandbox environments

Reprise offers several different solutions for presales teams, effectively functioning as both a demo platform and a virtual sandbox tool. 

It creates a demo environment that operates completely separate from your production environment, but which is still an exact copy of your front and back-end code. You can then inject data into the demo environment, giving prospects a fully-functional sandbox experience that they can safely test out. 

Other virtual environment tools include:

• Demostack
• Demoboost

6. Data platforms for product-led growth companies

Data platforms help software companies leverage user behavior and product usage data to inform their sales strategies. 

Free trials are a critical part of a product-led growth sales motion. By tracking key metrics during those trials—such as feature adoption and user engagement—these tools equip presales teams with valuable insights to guide their approach to product demonstrations, discovery calls, and solution customization. 

They enable your presales team to: 

• Develop a deeper understanding of their prospects' needs and pain points, so they can craft more accurate sales quotes and personalized solution proposals.
• Easily identify opportunities for upsells and expansions
• Improve the overall customer experience and drive faster, more successful sales outcomes by making decisions easier. 

Pocus: Track buyer signals

Pocus helps your team members redirect outbound efforts by capturing users who exhibit buying intent in your product. It also makes proactive, AI-powered recommendations based on customer behavior to highlight opportunities to re-engage customers and trial users.

UserMotion: Predictive lead scoring to uncover intent

When you have thousands of free trial users, it’s tough to figure out where your presales team should focus.

UserMotion helps solve that problem by leveraging predictive lead scoring. Unlike traditional lead scoring—where software scores leads based on things like demographics and company data—UserMotion also leverages product usage data from your trial users.

This helps you identify which prospects are most likely to buy and where your presales team should focus their efforts.

Other PLG data platforms include:

• MadKudu
• Breadcrumbs
• HeadsUp
• Endgame

7. Sales proposal and CPQ tools

The final set of tools that can help pre-sale are sales proposals and CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software. 

It’s likely that your sales team is already using proposal or CPQ software, but presales teams have a unique need here. 

Because they’re working to remove objections and validate solutions for technical buyers, presales teams need to be able to combine lots of different information, technical specifications, and commercial details into a polished, professional document that effectively communicates the value a prospective customer will get.

CPQ tools have a higher range of complexity, and certain solutions are more suitable for enterprise-grade software than for simpler product offerings, since they allow for different levels of customization. Most of these tools offer integrations with top CRMs, so it’s easy to consolidate your workflows. 

PandaDoc: Generate dynamic proposals

PandaDoc lets you generate proposals, incorporate dynamic pricing and product configurations, and collect electronic signatures. 

Since PandaDoc integrates with all of the major sales and CRM tools—like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce—you’re able to easily pull in relevant customer data to generate tailored proposals. This drives significant efficiencies for presales teams, especially when they’re working with many prospects simultaneously.

Salesforce CPQ: Build a lean sales process

Salesforce also has its own native CPQ solution. Like most Salesforce tools, it’s packed with potential—but it requires significant effort to set it up and optimize. 

If your sales organization is already deeply embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem, your sales and presales teams can use Salesforce CPQ to reduce wasted time, deliver dynamic quotes, and enable easier upselling.  

Dock: Deliver a truly seamless buyer experience

You can also share pricing quotes and generate order forms directly within Dock.

If you’re already using Dock as a sales room to remove friction from the buyer journey, it’s a no-brainer to also use it to empower your presales or sales team to deliver proposals. 

Within Dock, you can build out a product library, so your sales reps or solution architects can start with an existing template, pull in relevant products, and personalize the quote to each customer. 

You’re able to build out approval rules for discounts and custom contract terms, as well as preloading the legal documents required for every deal. When it’s time to collect signatures, your customers can securely (and easily) sign electronically.

And since Dock integrates with tools like Salesforce and HubSpot, everything gets synced right back to your CRM. 

Unlock high-velocity sales with a great tech stack using Dock

Choosing the right tools to work with can have a massive impact on your sales success: improved scalability, enhanced buyer experiences, increased win rates, and accelerated deal velocity. 

Presales tools are especially helpful for improving scalability and velocity. Building POCs and validating solutions to overcome objections can be time-consuming, but choosing the right presales tools removes friction and unlocks high-velocity sales. 

Dock is a versatile tool that can help you solve many common presales bottlenecks at the same time. 

From simplifying the enterprise B2B sales process, to empowering product-led growth companies to expand their footprint within an organization, to companies looking for a smooth process for selling to and onboarding SMBs—Dock does it all.

Try Dock today—your first five workspaces are absolutely free!