Have Your Presale Process Set Up Right
Presale is the first and major process to win the new business or keep the existing one. An organization with the presale process set up right will not only benefit from winning new prospects but will be able to facilitate the growth of the company in general, which is the main goal of many businesses.
However, many companies make a lot of mistakes at this stage that costs them financial and reputational losses. I would like to share a couple of observations that might help any company to improve the presale process or at least improve some of the business approaches.
1. Set up clear goals and remuneration guidelines for the sales managers. Every sales manager should understand what a typical presale process looks like, what contracts the company is interested in, what the selection criteria for the prospects are, are there any additional approvals needed for the lead to be qualified, and finally how the sales effort will be compensated. A good practice would be to have it all documented in one of the storage tools that the company might be using, including GDrive, Confluence, Dropbox, etc.
2. Identify clear responsibilities between all parties that are involved in the presale process. Every team member should understand the set of responsibilities to take care of and be solely responsible for that scope of work. When there are no responsible people assigned, the lead might be lost forever. The first impression is usually too hard to change. A well-documented responsibility matrix might come in handy in this case. Have you ever heard of the RACI matrix? This is a simple, yet amazing practice to balance responsibilities between workers that provides transparency and reduces confusion and finger-pointing. Try it out.
3. If you want your presale process to work, make sure there is a single point of reference for all the closed and ongoing deals with the prospects and current clients. There are multiple CRM systems on the market available nowadays. Just choose the one that fits the company’s needs best and use it properly. Among the most popular ones are Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce CRM, Copper, Zendesk Sell, etc.
4. Set up the engagement team to help lead the presale process inside the organization. While the sales manager is responsible for coordinating the communication with the potential prospects, the engagement team will be responsible for coordinating activities within the internal team that has been assigned to help the sales manager to win the lead. Make sure to use this role properly, otherwise it might turn out to be useless. Engagement managers should take the responsibility of leading the process and pushing the team to provide proper documentation that will be shown to the potential client. Among other responsibilities of the engagement manager should be the following: internal presale meetings facilitation, contacting specific professionals that are required to work on the presentations and other presale materials, getting in touch with the delivery team to check on the potential human resources availability and budgeting, providing and filling in the contract templates based on the inputs the team produces, helping the sales manager to negotiate with the client according to the company’s policies. If there is no engagement team created within the organization the same role can be performed by one of the project managers based on their general availability. However, usually, it makes sense to engage the project manager into the presale process only partially to make sure that the manager is not overloaded and the presale pipeline activities do not override any important delivery operations, like conflicting meetings or unmet expectations.
5. Make sure the delivery team documents the presale pipeline within the organization or unit to create a single place of reference for the delivery professionals, including project managers that can be assigned to execute the won lead or delivery managers and directors that might want to review the pipeline and supported documentation locally. Confluence or Google Drive might be a good place to start with. The documentation might include the list of prospects that the company has been working on, general overview of the prospects and expected solutions, links to major documents that might be stored in different tools which makes it easier to access and review.
Hopefully, some of the tips above will help to structure the presale process and avoid the most typical mistakes during the first stages. I wish you to have your presale process set up right and improve it with time based on new findings.
