Pre-Sales Team

One of the key goals of Pre-Sales in a Software Development Company is winning new clients together with Sales. It includes creation & enforcement of relationships with Client, making an attractive proposal which can be successfully completed with the resources of Delivery. 

I’ve spent a significant amount of time as Head of Pre-Sales teams in different companies, and also processed multiple requests as Pre-Sales Engineer by myself. In each role, I’ve worked to reach the goal and increase our success rate. For me, it was 12%, but I saw that it can be more.

In this post, I want to summarize challenges I met on my way and describe solutions I found, how Pre-Sales success can be increased (I’ll share them in a separate post).

Let’s start. I’ve decided to describe key challenges/causes as an answer to these questions:

• Why do Clients decide to proceed with another competitor?
• Why a Proposal we made was not doable, and a Client was finally dissatisfied? 

The list is not prioritized:

• Big price. Price is usually estimated for generic team including high risks to complete this project. Adding of any modern/unusual practices or less-qualified employees increased risks and price as well. Finally, it was pretty big for Client and not competitive with others. Lack of bootstrappers which can speed up/reduce price of development. Big price is typically not a root cause, but a consequence of causes described below. It’s the top of the iceberg.
• Proposal with lack of options with different price ranges. If the proposal provides options in the same pricing ranges – it creates a dead end: the client should select one or none.
• Subjectivism of the Pre-Sales team. Typically, there are limited groups of employees involved in Pre-Sales—it generates Proposal from one perspective and avoid entirely different approaches and dev stacks. It affects pricing for sure. Experience of company Delivery also limits the proposal and avoid out of the box thinking. This conservatism is understandable – it minimizes risks and related costs. It’s just an easier way then compare of these savings with benefits from applying of new stack and dev approaches.
• Existing tech/domain experience was not applied well. Past experience was difficult to find and reuse. Knowledge was just spread across the company.
• Low value of Proposed solution. This is one of the biggest and hardest root problems to solve. To bring the highest value to the potential client, it should be a combination of understanding the business goals of the client, market landscape, product management skills. Sometimes, Proposal made by Delivery focused on experience concentrated inside the Delivery, without broader vision outside. Value is not about functionality and technical solution – it’s just a top of the iceberg.
• Low motivation of Pre-Sales team and involved experts. The Pre-Sales process is pretty stressful and urgent. It is challenging to find tech experts who can help with the request and be motivated to do all the best. Motivation by salary or overtimes was not working well. It should be something else.
• Low capacity of Pre-Sales team and involved experts. Incoming requests overload Pre-Sales teams, since the Pre-Sales process is not scalable. It has a negative impact on quality and process duration.
• Long duration of the process. The process is pretty long due to availability of experts and training of them during the request itself. 
• Extra efforts spent on the low-priority requests. The process was not effective and didn’t correlate with real needs.
• Gap between Sales and Pre-Sales.  To win Clients, Presales, and Sales should work as a single team which supports each other. Occasionally, it’s another story. Sales didn’t understand the proposal including options, added risks etc. As a result, it’s hard for him to make a right decision while working with a client. Different prioritization of requests creates misunderstanding. The Pre-Sales & Sales team was not spending time educating each other.  
• Gap between Presales and Delivery. That means that the delivery team is typically not involved in Pre-Sales, since doesn’t exist at the moment when requests in processing. All agreements and architecture created during this work are challenging to transfer to the new team and especially implement it. It creates risks and creates inconvenience and dissatisfaction for the Client.