Let's Talk - About Presales and Analytics Enabler

What exactly Presales is?

At a time when leaders are in a constant quest for growth, there is a promising but often overlooked opportunity available close to home: presales. Distinct from marketing and sales operations, presales provides a specific set of activities that lead to qualifying, bidding on, winning, and renewing a deal. In our work with leading companies around the globe, we have found that companies with strong presales capabilities consistently achieve win rates of 40–50% in new business and 80–90% in renewal business - well above average rates.

What is the role of a Presales Consultant?

Imagine that you are the presales consultant of a multi-million dollar software vendor. Your main role is to sell your software product to corporate customers. Will you tailor your presentation to the customer’s needs and wants? Absolutely, you will. If you are in the A-league, you will go beyond the current problem at hand the customer is looking to solve to truly understand the customer’s goals. Then, you will paint the perfect picture of how your software product will help the corporate customer solve the problem at hand and achieve customer’s broader goals.

Now, let’s transition to reality. You are no longer the presales consultant who is going to receive a large bonus at the end of the sales cycle meeting up with C-level executive. You are the good old data scientist working closely with an operational team. Come and done your presales hat on!

Presales Consultant Mission #1: Sell the product

You need to sell how your project can solve the customer’s problems and you need to go on a discovery journey with the customer. Here are some questions to get you started.

• What does success look like for the stakeholder? What does the future look like for the stakeholder?
• What is the impact of the problem we are solving?
• What is the metric that is crucial to understand that we are solving the problem correctly?
• Is there any chance the problem will go away on its own (sometimes it can happen that we are solving a systemic constraint, but the systemic constraint will disappear because we are replacing the system)

At the end of the dreaming phase with the customer, the presales consultant in you needs to come up with a plan. The plan needs to have a quick path to a minimum viable product that will validate the feasibility of the solution. It also needs to focus on the iteration aspect, where the next level of tweaks happens to the solution.

Presales Consultant Mission #2: Build Trust

Trust equals consistency over time. There’s no shortcut for either. - Jeff Weiner, Linkedin

As a presales consultant, your second and more important mission is to build trust. For delivering consistently over time, of course, you need the best scientist and best engineer you could ever get. Being able to listen to feedback from the customer, to address the feedback, and to measure how your machine learning solution is performing will go a long way.

Deep dive into the importance of Presales in Data Science

The analytical world around us is growing and growing drastically. It's high time for us to grab the opportunities flowing around us. Here presales can play a big role. Presales requires a dedicated team of experts split into roughly two-thirds for technical activities (crafting solutions to customers’ problems) and one-third for commercial activities (managing deal qualification and bid).

Here the biggest challenge is to bring the technical and commercial activity together for data science. These activities have two to three times more impact on revenue generation than generating leads. Souping up the presales engine can yield a five-point improvement in conversion rates, a 6–13% improvement in revenue, and a 10–20% improvement in the speed of moving prospects through the sales process. Despite this level of potential impact, presales doesn’t get much airtime in the C-suite—even though it gets a significant chunk of company resources, typically accounting for 30–50% of overall commercial headcount.

This activities will be slightly different for the analytics world. If you’d like your organization to take better advantage of presales and reap the advantages that result, here’s how to do so - at each stage of the sales journey:

Identifying Leads

Opportunities have exponentially increased for salespeople, thanks to digital innovations, more systematic RFPs, and the pervasive use of inside sales for lead generation. But more does not equal better. To achieve the ideal qualification rate of roughly 50%, today’s best-practice organizations rely on advanced analytics to identify opportunities early in the sales cycle and prioritize the most desirable ones. They use techniques such as propensity-to-buy modeling, micro-market targeting, account-level opportunity assessment, and churn prediction to separate the high-quality, high-probability opportunities from the rest.

One presales team helped a building materials supplier improve its qualification rate by using order histories of existing customers and analyses of prospective markets. From this data, they developed a list of prospective “ideal customers” most likely to buy the company’s products. Identifying which customers to pursue helped increase bid and bid conversion rates, resulting in a 3–5% improvement in win rates.

Submitting Bids

The root cause was inadequate presales allocation. The company’s technical presales experts were not assigned to the highest-opportunity bids, and there were frequent disruptions to their assignments.

To turn things around, the company developed a staffing approach that gave an at-a-glance picture of the availability and skill sets of presales staff a quarter out. This new approach helped the company staff 15 percent more deals with presales resources and anticipate 30 percent more “must win” deals (for the same number of total presales resources). Sales reps’ time on proposal development was cut in half.

Closing Deals

The key to closing deals is presales’ ability to shape conversations with the client to position the company’s solution as the ideal one. This approach is not about developing a “smoke and mirrors” pitch, but rather investing the time to have a deep understanding of the client’s needs (met and unmet) and then highlighting those elements of the solution that can address them.

Renewing Deals

While “presales” might imply that their work is finished once a sale is made, the best companies have presales teams that are active after the sale as well. Great sales reps have always tried to anticipate customer needs and to deliver on them consistently. But top-notch presales teams can help advance from anticipating customer needs to predicting them with greater precision, recommending what the sales force should sell to specific customers, and providing expertise.

Presales can also accelerate sales pipeline velocity by anticipating what will trigger a renewal, standardizing tools to ensure best practices across the sales team, and automating processes to send alerts and recommendations in advance of a contract’s renewal date. Companies that do this well can recommend special offers and promotional deals that will encourage a quick renewal - and even close the deal before an RFP is open to competitors.

When it comes to driving sales growth, quality trumps quantity. And that requires companies to improve the quality of their presales engine. And the improvement of presales engine requires analytics. So concluding the topic with the thought of having analytics with presales which results in growth to business.

Let's talk about the topic and have a discussion.