Presales departments are critical to progressing sales deals. They help ensure prospects understand the benefits of the product and address any technical concerns. But for years, presales leaders have been confined to spreadsheets and custom-built solutions to manage their department and personnel. Often, sales engineers are brought into deals on an ad hoc basis, with no formal structure for allocating resources, tracking activities, and assessing their impact on revenue.

G2’s new category, PreSales Management, encompasses solutions that address these challenges. These tools help establish best practices, formalize processes, provide visibility into presales activities, reporting, and effectively allocate resources. 

Presales management: bringing oversight to critical teams

Features of preSales management solutions that help improve efficiency:

• Activity capture 
• Streamlined product feedback
• Analytics on utilization, efficiency, and win-rates
• Resource allocation
• KPIs tracking and reporting
• Integrations with CRM and product management software

Formalizing resource allocation

Inefficient resource allocation directly influences presales departments’ impact on revenue. PreSales management tools allow businesses to formalize the process for allocating sales engineers to deals by structuring the requests for presales support, approvals, and most importantly, resource assignments. 

Built-in analytics features

Analytics capabilities of preSales management solutions, derived from the activity capture, help gauge performance such as win-rates, utilization, efficiency, and revenue leakage. These analytics enable businesses to make data-driven decisions, understand the effectiveness of sales engineers, and identify process gaps. 

Capturing product feedback

Businesses are increasingly focusing on customer-led growth and putting customer desires at the forefront of product development. PreSales management tools integrate with product management software to relay feedback received from buyers as it relates to product enhancements. This enables organizations to better capture and prioritize product gaps based on customer desires, which can lead to more competitive positioning and increased sales. This supports the growing emphasis on customer-centric product development, and can help quantify the value of product enhancements.

G2 users review PreSales Management products  

G2’s PreSales Management category is early in its inception, however, reviewers are clearly realizing benefits from utilizing this type of software. 

A reviewer of Homerun Presales Platform said: 

“It integrates seamlessly with our other tooling so we can keep track of things like Feature Requests and attach an ROI per FR to present to leadership. Lastly, as our team grows and scales, we have fantastic reporting mechanisms within Homerun to show leadership where/how we spend our time.”

A reviewer of Hero by Vivun said: 

“This is the first tool that gives our Presales team the ability to track Presales activity and then provide robust reporting of the data. Hero is providing the most value by allowing our team to easily track activity so that management can report on various statistics e.g. time spent on deals, time spent on certain activities in the sales cycle, utilization by user, justification for additional headcount, keep track of gaps impact by lost revenue.” 

A reviewer of PreSkale said: 

“With reporting, we can access deeper insights into our meeting outcomes which helps us optimize the solution delivery rates. This also helps us determine the validity of SE involvement across incoming opportunities.”

The future of presales management 

Presales management solutions will gain traction and likely increase in adoption as continued enhancements and expanded integrations are made, such as  with demo automation solutions, additional CRM, and product management software. Although this space is early in its inception, the cross-department collaboration and reporting capabilities it provides, will likely resonate with the market and continue to grow in popularity.

Edited by Sinchana Mistry