While kickstarting presales within your organization is the goal, many presales professionals have noticed a disconnect between their teams and the enablement teams. In our recent webinar with Consensus, Hub CEO Freddy Mangum spoke with Consensus CEO Garin Hess, The Second Derivative Principal Peter Cohan, and The Access Group’s Head of Presales Adam Freeman on what can be done to lead a strong presales transformation that your entire organization can rally behind. Through conversations with other leaders, Peter Cohan discovered that “the Head of Enablement could not explain what presales did and its impact on the organization. Conversely, the presales leaders were unable to articulate their value to the organization.” This only furthers the need for a well-executed presales transformation. Keep reading for some of our highlights from this webinar.

Identifying the Presales Vision

The starting point for a presales transformation can articulate where you want to get to. Spending some time with your current practices and strategies and being honest about what works and what doesn’t helps to lay out the groundwork for where you as a presales professional want to take your organization. Consensus CEO Garin Hess took this one step further by saying, “if you don’t understand the vision or can’t communicate the vision, you can’t effect change.” That vision serves as the foundation for both your presales strategy and the value presales brings to the organization as a whole. One issue with this is finding the time to take that deep dive into how presales operates and what you, as the presales leader and expert for your organization, feel can be accomplished. Carving out that time to truly understand where you’re coming from and where you can go next will help to articulate that vision even more. With the uncertainty of this last year and its continual ripple effects into our businesses and our lives, now is the best time to look beyond what we feel is possible and instead expand to what we want to achieve. Marginal gains are not what the organization needs right now. When identifying the presales vision, use the current times to your advantage; refine existing best practices and develop new best practices to take your organization to new heights.

Where Presales and Automation Meet

“Necessity is the mother of invention” couldn’t be more true for presales. As with any new idea or strategy, resistance to change will be one of the first roadblocks to greet you. Any strong presales leader knows that being able to quantify the value presales brings to the sales funnel and the organization can make all the difference to C-Suite executives and board members. Once the conversation goes to that level, topics like efficiency, automation, and presales ROI become the pressing issues at hand. Freddy Mangum addressed this by saying, “there’s a tremendous amount of leverage from presales and presales is the key to optimizing middle-of-the-funnel conversion metrics.” Most aspects of sales fall into that middle-of-the-funnel category, so when we’re looking at things like technical discovery, demos, showing value, managing evaluations, and more, leveraging optimizations and automation is undoubtedly the best way for presales leaders to quickly and efficiently navigate that section. Having resources in your back pocket as you start these conversations with the board and executives will help only further to communicate the value presales can bring to your organization.

Investing in Relationships in Presales

Each buyer will come with their own unique set of obstacles to face before they can commit to buying your product. As a result, having a strong understanding of the different roles and relationships needed to carry through a purchase is necessary. Having this information will allow you to understand the types of conversations better that you’ll encounter on the buyer’s journey and improve the approach you take to make your buyer, their stakeholders, and your organization happy in the end. Invest in and leverage the relationships with your vendors and your target demographic to get a better understanding of not only who key decision-makers are but what their role is and why they’re involved in the process to better tailor your offering to their needs. Adam Freeman highlighted a great approach to this: “I ask them, ‘what do you want to get out of this? How does this fit your vision?’ so we can align. The technology is a means to an end, and it’s sometimes not about the technology.” Understanding the buyer’s intent allows you to support their needs in a more holistic way while increasing the likelihood of moving them further down the funnel.

This is only skimming the surface. Hear more from these presales leaders by watching the full webinar here.