Pre-Sales Team

While working in several companies, we’ve noticed several common mistakes on Pre-Sales level. To be honest, we have made them as well.

Here we’ll mention the most significant ones with a short explanation why we think it’s a mistake. I hope it will help you to avoid it in the future. Let’s start.

1 No pricing options

Do you really think that you know a real needs and budget limitations of a new potential client? I think you should be a magician to guess what is hidden in the client’s brain, if you’re not — let’s make a proposal which has options for the client.

The usual proposal which was rejected looks like this: it describes only a single vision on solution and one price or related range. Finally, clients which had other expectations or have budget limitation reject the proposal and the company loses them. The company, looses the whole group of such clients!

But if you make a step to be flexible, you will realize that almost every solution can be done in different ways, with different options, design, functions, quality, tech stack, team etc. NOTE (!): it’s not about making proposal cheaper, but it’s about regrouping of features, scope, team etc. in consistent logical package which have different price. And then allow the client to select what it’s important, what can be reduced. I think you will be surprised what client will choose!

Finally, such a new proposal with options will create an environment like in a “shop” and you will attract more clients with “products” in different price ranges.

It’s not a mistake just of Pre-Sales, but mostly Sales because it’s their responsibility to choice the right pricing strategy. The problem is that Sales doesn’t even know that options exist. In this case, the goal of Pre-Sales is to make such possibilities visible for them.

Note: the Single-price approach also works if you do a proposal for already known clients: in this case, you can simplify choice based on your knowledge.

2 No Education of Pre-Sales Team

Despite the fact, that Pre-Sales team success directly influences on company revenue, many companies don’t invest in Pre-Sales team education. As a result, Pre-Sales doesn’t use best practices in Sales and Pre-Sales, makes mistakes and, finally, the company looses new potential projects even if their Sales are perfect.

We see several reasons why it’s happens:

1. Work of Pre-Sales teams is hidden under Sales. They work as an invisible black horse. Sales fully responsible for success. They also motivated by different compensation approach. Finally, the work of the Pre-Sales team is devalued, and high management invests just in Sales.
2. Lack of well-known and trusted training in Pre-Sales available on well-known platforms like Coursera or Udemy.
3. Small education budget in the company at all.

In our opinion, a Pre-Sales team should pass training for Sales at least. Even this can significantly increase the success of the full Sales process.

Specialized Pre-Sales trainings will be perfect.

3 Middle-level engineers & managers on Pre-Sales

Another mistake which has a direct impact on success rate is involvement in Pre-Sales of mid-level engineers and managers instead of senior. There are several key reasons why companies loose opportunities doing this:

1. Client with technical expertise detects lack of expertise and rejects such a vendor. They expect many more skills from the future dev partner.
2. Engineers & Managers with low expertise cannot perform fast adaptation of created solutions to changing clients needs. We saw many success stories when a strong Pre-Sales team can feel the client’s idea and find the perfect solution right on the call with the client.
3. Less skilled Pre-Sales team have just less experience. Skills the Pre-Sales team can easily re-use for a potential client. It can be knowledge in domain or just similar case or deep tech specific. It significantly increases the client’s trust in the vendor.
4. Middle-level team cares just on estimates, tech stack and forgets about the business value. Skilled Pre-Sales engineers & Managers know that the future solution is a part of business. They care not just about costs, tech stack, quality, but business value and even emotions the future solution will bring to the client and end users.

The Pre-Sales team, interpreted by clients as a “face” of the whole company. Show your best.

4 No Retrospective

This point is usually consists of two connected mistakes:

1. The Pre-Sales team has no historical data about success and fails to detect what can be improved and what works well. Usually, needed data spread between Sales, PMO and Pre-Sales departments, but not assembled to be analyzed holistically. Later I’ll share an example of the report which can be used for such analysis.
2. Sales, Pre-Sales and PMO develop their processes pretty standalone and don’t have a common retrospective where they can improve the collaboration, apply new approaches, instruments consistently.

Finally, the Pre-Sales doesn’t learn on their mistakes and the entire Sales process has a low success rate.

The companies where it’s solved create spectacular synergy inside the Sales process.

5 No knowledge about knowledge =)

There are several common questions are behind most Pre-Sales request:

1. Do we have similar cases which can present our expertise?
2. Do we have similar technical experience/solutions we can reuse
3. Can we apply this experience to minimize costs, increase the value of our proposal?

To get quick answers on these questions with good quality requires good preparations and instruments behind. Some companies just don’t spend time on it. In this case, every incoming request handled as the first one. They spend much more time managing it, and final results can answer just on 1st question from 3 above.

This mistake cannot be solved just in Pre-Sales side, it requires help from Delivery, Marketing, and Sales as well. But definitely, Pre-Sales can lead/push these efforts since it’s critical for them.

Furthermore, Delivery itself is not interested in reducing costs of solutions and increasing its value. Pre-Sales can be such a balance, who will care about it and will push Delivery to do this.

Each of these mistakes has their solutions. Fill free to contact us to know our experience how they can be fixed.us to know our experience how they can be fixed.