PreSales Needs a More Holistic Approach to Workflows: Here’s how AI can Help

By Matt Darrow, CEO, Vivun

Guest AuthorsArtificial Intelligence (AI)Product Management

By Matt Darrow On Jan 11, 2024

B2B is Evolving

B2B selling looks entirely different than it did just a few years ago. The market is changing faster than ever; buyers are more attuned to their technical needs, and software evaluations are becoming more hands-on. Today’s buyer not only seeks a product that solves their problems and meets their unique needs; they also expect a seamless, hands-on experience throughout the entire product evaluation cycle. The bottom line? B2B buyers and consumers want a very different buying experience than they had in previous years, which has significant implications for sales engineers and PreSales teams

The role of sales engineers (SE) in particular, has evolved. In response to the increasing complexity of products and services and ever-changing customer demands, SEs now provide more value than ever and serve as an integral part of company success. Part of the PreSales team, sales engineers are at the epicenter of technical prowess and sales knowledge.

However, this new opportunity brings a new set of responsibilities for PreSales teams. With a historical lack of investment in tooling specifically designed to support them, sales engineers have not been equipped to fully step into these new roles or provide maximum value.

PreSales Does More than Demo

Today’s PreSales teams play a pivotal role that extends far beyond simply demonstrating software. They are often tasked with understanding intricate and multifaceted technologies, complex integrations, and addressing diverse customer needs. Their responsibilities can encompass solution design, technical consulting, troubleshooting and even project management. Because of this, it is becoming increasingly difficult for sales engineers to capture and contextualize their findings.

Further, although they may be the team best positioned to provide value and reach revenue goals, PreSales is often overlooked and underfunded. It’s about time that this narrative is challenged.

Historically, sales engineers have compiled insights in spreadsheets and notebooks with no actionable way to contextualize and share these with the greater team. As technical experts with a deep understanding of their customers and market, PreSales are great at evaluating the product-buyer fit to uncover new opportunities. These key insights can have a tremendous impact on the product roadmap. However, a lack of data means that these insights are often overlooked.

But why are these insights so critical to overall company success? Priorities in today’s organizations are incredibly disjointed. For instance, product and sales teams have historically found it challenging to find common ground. With half technical/half sales expertise, there’s no better persona than the Sales Engineer to bring these teams together with a shared purpose of building a more effective product roadmap. This is because PreSales fosters better communication between sales and product teams through seamlessly collecting product feedback from buyers and tying this into the broader product roadmap. In turn, this allows PreSales teams to become the system of record for customers’ product gaps.

However, this opportunity has yet to be fully realized. While other revenue-driving functions have a surplus of tools to support their day-to-day responsibilities, PreSales has maintained a flat level of investment. As a result, the processes sales engineers currently have in place are outdated and can no longer support the increasing complexity of their roles.

AI’s Promise in PreSales

The emergence of generative AI offers a solution. Like many other industries, AI is transforming the way we compute, interact and experience the world. Since PreSales teams are best suited to connect the product vision with customer use cases and desired outcomes, their ability to leverage key insights from AI and machine learning can have a significant impact on the broader go to market strategy.

With the right AI-powered tools, PreSales can capture and utilize unique data and insights to drive revenue growth, optimize mundane tasks and help teams gain a more holistic look into their workflows. AI-empowered PreSales teams can confidently tie these insights to business impact to more revenue-centric roadmaps.

PreSales operations: Sales engineers can increase their ability to close sales; identity insights; and develop a framework for growth and behavior repetition via AI summarizations of PreSales activities.
Product alignment: The R&D team can maximize their ROI via AI that examines, categorizes and organizes product requests, which can then be merged and aligned with team priorities.
Demo automation: Sales engineers can further their reach and gain support from stakeholders via demos that are both customizable and scalable. This enables SEs to boost their capabilities and win over those stakeholders.
Smart resource assignment: Millions of operational data points enable AI to recommend the most appropriate person or team for a specific task as well as make suggestions for resource allocation.

AI and machine learning can also uncover insights into core work-related questions that can foster deeper collaboration and increase efficiencies:

Will we close the deal? Why/why not? How can I improve my odds of closing it?
Are the most appropriate tasks getting the right attention?
What’s hindering deals from being closed? Can we identify product gaps as the reason, and how?

In addition, AI has the ability to handle routine and time-consuming activities like data entry and document generation. It also frees up time for technical selling teams to focus on higher-value tasks, which can include customer interactions, strategy development and solution customization.

Today’s PreSales teams have an opportunity that has not been available to them – until now. Buyers increasingly demand a seamless experience and sales engineers are critical to delivering on this. By leveraging AI to automate routine, everyday tasks and transform data into actionable insights, PreSales teams will be able to redefine the value they provide and revolutionize product strategy to positively impact the bottom line.

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