Hello

I have over 20 years of Pre-sales support experience delivering Discovery meetings, RFI/RFP, Workshops, Value based Demo, Business Value Case, Proof of Concepts and Board presentations. Business Analysis and Business case/ROI construction. And this has been in enterprise level accounts and projects both in the UK and across Europe articulating value focussed Cloud solutions in Customer Relationship Management (CRM, CX and Service), Human Capital Management (HCM), Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).

To see my more recent specific roles, please take a look at my LinkedIn page.​

​

Rather than me list the roles, companies an activities I thought  a better way might be to share my pre-sales philosophies and learnings with you.

​

​

Value is the most important aspect in all parts of your message and all the way through a sales cycle

 

No matter what you sell Value needs to be the driver behind every slide, every click and every sentence. Only sometimes do you cover things to level set or tick "table stakes" boxes, and if you do you call it out as such. The rest of the time its about implied or explicit value (and the balance of this is different when you compare UK audiences to North American ones). Some of my faourite demos have been ones where we have focussed only on value and as such skipped the transactional elements and largely ended up talking around a few key reports or dashboards. With operational audiences that is harder to do - but the "so what?" challenge in your mind needs to be constant to make sure you don't linger on details that really don't matter.​

 

So it needs constant attention and constant testing and pre-sales can play their part in that for the whole engagement not just their demo...

 

And it needs to be about Value - not values plural. The message should boiled down to 2 - 4 key value propositions that run through presentations, demonstrations and follow ups like the words through a stick of rock. My rule of thumb when engaging in a new opportunity from a business development rep or sales exec was to ask why they are going to buy us and look for 2 - 3 reasons. If they started listing more and more aspects I knew that almost certainly they hadn't qualified it. They hadn't understood the way that potential customer's business made money, and they hadn't framed our product against that to know how we were going to impact their bottom line.

​

​

Its about the big picture - the entire sales team being "on message"

 

A tricky one to navigate politically, but ultimately sales teams that work as teams perform better and retain talent more easily because they are enjoyable to work in. This needs designing in and watching at all stages of a sales cycle. The most obvious sign is the "demo" stage where the sales guy delivers a few slides and then hands it over to pre-sales to "do a demo" and the tie up between these two pieces is adhoc and loose.​

 

Far more effective is looking at the sales cycle from the Business Development contact through to discovery and then demo and make sure there is a unified message across all of this. And then make sure its present within multi disciplinary sessions (e.g. the demo where the sales person starts the meeting off and sets the scene).

​

​

You need to tell stories, and you need to tell them together

 

Pre-sales sessions which become "harbour tours" of features are hard to watch, lack engagement​ and almost always fail to address value. Far more compelling is to design a session around value and then have the sales and pre-sales person deliver the message using a story arch or story framework to bring it to life.

​

There are differing levels to story telling in demo sessions. At a high level you might have the sales person deliver the scene setting slides to cover the typical setting and challenge stages of a story with the presales person taking up the thread as the customer (the hero) resolving the problem and winning through in the end.

 

At a step by step stage there may be sub stories such as an illustration of how a customer used our product. Again these need to adhere to standard story telling structures (protaganist, challenge, resolution etc).

 

It doesn't mean that your slides or demo steps change radically - its how you frame them and how you deliver them that will create the story...

​

​

Its not just about the features, but you do need to know what you are selling​​

 

This is subtle one - its about the style of different pre-sales people in your team. I have seen both ends of the spectrum, where at one end you have the "techy" who knows the ins and outs of the product, but forgets to focus on value. And at the other end you have the pre-sales person that really wants to be a sales exec and skims over detail, often using force of personality to railroad their points across.

 

Both can harm sales cycles. The techies typically need coaching so they start putting their love of features into perspective and put themselves in their customer's shoes. The sales pre-sales people often need balancing (adding in a tech session to the engagement plan with a customer) or moving to the right role...

 

Ultimately a good pre-sales person knows enough detail to go at least one layer deeper than they are presenting/demoing/talking about, and it needs to be about the delivery of that product or service, not just the features of it. So in software terms its about aspects such as the implementation, support, security etc. I recall feedback from one potential client where they bemoaned the fact the previous team's pre-sales person took nearly all the questions away.

​

​

Its not just about your product or service

​

I learnt a valuable lesson early on in my pre-sales career when we were contacted by a large company looking for a product to meet a set of criteria, an important one of which we couldn't do, and we told them that nobody could (which is what we believed to be true). Things went well until the final negotiating phase where they pulled us in to a dingy side room (previously we had always been in the board room) and were told one of our competitors had coverage for that important feature and as such they were not going to sign with us. To cut a long story short our sales exec managed the situation perfectly and after further meetings they went with us after all. The thing I took from this is the thing we hear all the time - people buy from people. We had built a really good relationship over the course of their evaluation so they were willing to work around our one major product gap to their original requirements.​

 

The lesson is an old one - but the real power is keeping it front of mind when you think about your sales process at both strategy and execution levels, especially when you have sales teams in front of customers rather than a lone sales person.​

​

​

Don't focus on the competition - they are the least of your worries

 

This is a bit of a personal bugbear of mine. Let me say up front that I am a very competitive person, and I don't simply say "ignore your competition", but I really want pre-sales leaders to "ignore their competition". Its a difficult one to put into words on a page in generic terms because specifics for each business make a huge difference. Its more from a philosophical approach - I believe sales teams worry and obsess about competitors too much. It leads to endless questions from sales execs about "leaving landmines" and them looking for lists of differences that will help win a sale by default. All that energy can be spent getting your focus on value right and being able to deliver that message really well. Excellence in execution and constant work on relationship building will win over feature function differences any day.

 

I believe competitive analysis should be owned and cared for by the product function - product management and product marketing. It all helps guide emphasis for the sales team in its messaging and it helps guide qualification. But its simply too distracting and misses the point in far too many sales situations for the pre-sales person to be worrying about covering landmines in their demo along with the value.

 

So having said all of that​, of course you will look to design demo flows to include major areas you know a competitor is weak on or a USP for your own product. My view is keep this high level and don't design your whole flow around it - just consider it as a factor which is lower in importance to value and lower than story telling.

​

​

Excellent delivery and finding your voice and style take time, but tips can help

 

Sometimes good presenters can still learn techniques to elevate their delivery. In coaching terms this can be harder without direct observation and is even more important where meetings are face to face.

 

A few ideas from my past experience...​​

​

• I'm never worried by one thing going wrong in a demo - I will tell people I'm OK with it as this isn't a show, its a conversation. You can see this is real - when do things in life ever go "perfectly".
   

• I like to take a question or two away with me - its a good chance to make sure I can get back in touch with them. If there are no difficult questions I will pick something that I have an excuse to take away and add some more detail. It also shows I'm not perfect - if you do a really good delivery I worry it might all look a bit too slick and by saying yes to everything I might just be saying yes to everything, so I lie to make sure I give at least one "no" (with mitigation of why its hopefully not a big problem for other customers).
   

• Words really matter. I like to run a parallel track in my brain that is constantly listening to my words and wondering if they could take a negative meaning from them and then interjecting to clarify if ever that is the case (and hopefully avoiding that turn of phrase next time!). An obvious example is catching wishy washy adjectives like "mostly" or "usually" which leave doubt in your audiencence's minds.​​
   

• And on the subject of words I always try to be careful when I want to talk facts that are potentially open for challenge. An example might be "our software is the easiest to use" which is open to the awkward (and fair) challenge by an audience member who has used a competitor prouct and tells you that that is easier... You've stated a fact which is your opinion so its open to direct challenge. Better to use a phrase like "Our customers tell us that after evaluating various options ours was the easiest to use". Your position might still be challenged, but the facts of your words are not. There are other situations wher I use this phrase when I am on tricky ground and rather than expose myself to being shot down, I will say "one of my customers told me..." - again, nobody can dispute the truth of this, so even if it is wrong you have plausible deniability!

​​