Pre-Sales / Sales Engineer Handbook

I have jotted down certain pointers which are a pivotal part of Pre-sales handbook. This is based on my hands-on experience, lots of reading & learning from few top notch people. While most of you might already be following basic & advanced part of this crucial role, there is lot of scope for improvement and the key is to know that you MUST improve everyday. The moment you start presenting your story effortlessly with confidence similar to how you talk normally with family & friends, you would know that it’s the right path! Anyways, here are few top level insights:

1. Have the in-depth knowledge of your product — both from business and tech standpoint. This is the primary pre-requisite towards becoming a good pre-sales / sales engineer.

2. Articulate the most difficult parts of your product in layman terms for clients and always link the features / concepts with personalised examples in order for them to relate to the same effectively.

3. Make demos extremely relevant by creating custom dashboards where demo accounts are not present. Do more focussed demo after gathering enough relevant information, understanding client problems. For high ticket / enterprise clients, one should do live-demos in order to make the most of the opportunity to present to higher management.

4. Take up a habit of putting together a decent homework before each meeting. Good Presentation is half battle won!

5. Identify the need and intelligently use the pre-created decks, plan of actions, list of use-cases, case studies, etc. to keep the conversation warm with the leads.

6. Adopt a more proactive than re-active approach. Reach out to all your leads more aggressively, make sure they understand what we can do for them, demand more face time, confidently own up problems and deliver results. For clients who are not comfortable nor are sure about the product, push them to try the product, run one or two use-cases for a week or so and generate confidence. This is applicable for mid to large enterprises.

7. Make better relationships with clients, which eventually helps in closures.

8. Map multiple stakeholders especially in Large deals. While it’s Sales guy job to enable this , however, a good pre-sales shares the load and assist sales in the same and talks to multiple people in an organisation from product / expectation standpoint.

9. Adopt a more solution driven approach. Start owning up clients problems and suggest solutions.

10. Have in-depth competitor knowledge, however, always make sure to focus on your own differentiators. Be it technical, solution specific or in-depth capabilities, it’s your job to make the client understand in the most efficient and productive way.

Happy Reading :) Just wanted to share my mantras, thought it might just help you all.

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