In Presales, These 6 Presentation Habits are Critical to Success.

The role of presales in B2B SaaS is changing. Buying processes are becoming more buyer-centric. Product-led growth, free trials, entry level paid plans, and automated demos are the new ways to help buyers learn about products on their own.

By the time you speak with a prospect, they've already engaged with your product, content, or colleagues. They're knowledgeable about your solutions - they may already be a paying customer - and you need to know a lot more about them before each call in order to offer any value. You need to tailor your approach according to how a prospect has already engaged with your company — and your product.

This can be difficult when working in a presales role such as a sales engineer, solutions consultant, or product specialist because you are often juggling multiple meetings with different prospects every day. Completely switching contexts between prospects — and getting up to speed each time — can be a scramble.

However not being prepared with contextual knowledge about your prospects when you meet with them is expensive. Buyers won’t trust the solutions you’re proposing if they feel you don’t know enough about them and what they’re actually trying to accomplish in their business. Instead they’ll buy from someone else.

Here are six ways to be more prepared and stop leaving money on the table.?

1) Block out dedicated meeting preparation time?

Be intentional and schedule focused preparation time ahead of each prospect meeting. Depending on the deal size, product you sell, meeting goals, and customer, you should block fifteen minutes to two hours of dedicated prep time for every one hour of meeting time. Obviously this can vary but the important thing is to recognize the need to have focused time blocks for preparation work.?

In LinkedIn’s recent 2022 state of sales report, 14,000 sellers and buyers were surveyed and data showed that top performing sellers spend less time selling than average performers. This is counterintuitive - the data revealed that high performing sellers spend more time researching buyers to prepare for sales calls.

Lost deals are often a result of inadequate preparation and research.?

Block the time you need.?

2) Establish a minimum qualification standard before a Sales Engineer (SE) gets involved.

SEs are helpful people by nature and their job is to help their Account Executive (AE) colleagues - this makes it easy for them to become overwhelmed by multiple requests to help on deals that may not be well qualified yet. You don’t want to be too rigid but there does need to be some boundaries and qualification standards before an SE is brought in.?

Even if you want SEs on discovery calls, qualify the discovery call first. Use product engagement metrics, marketing engagement metrics, or have a sales qualification call first.? This is especially important in a shared service model where many AEs request time from a shared pool of SEs or co-selling rhythms aren’t well established.?

Make sure you focus the majority of your — or your team’s — SE time on opportunities that have a relatively high chance of closing. SEs can appear expensive on your P&L, but if used wisely they are extremely valuable and will directly improve win rates, time to close, ACV, and renewals.?

3) Prepare an internal and external agenda with your AE at least 24 hrs before the prospect call.

Get aligned with your AE on every deal you work. Collaborate with your AE to prepare an external and internal agenda for each prospect meeting.?

The external agenda should include:

• The goal of the call?
• Each attendee, their title, and their role in the call?
• Topics to be be covered
• Relevant links or documents needed for the call
• The ability for external attendees to contribute to the agenda, ensuring the call helps them in their buying process

The internal agenda is the meeting playbook your AE and any other colleagues joining the call will use. Like any good playbook, it should cover your goals and how you’re going to work together to get there.

For your internal agenda, go into more detail and get really clear on the goals, roles, and agenda for you and your colleagues.?

Goals

• What outcome do you want to achieve from this call?
• What questions or concerns do you think need addressing?

Roles

• Who from your team is on the call, what questions should they ask or answer, what part are they presenting, what prospect concerns should be addressed by whom???
• Who from the prospect side is on the call, what’s their role in the buying process, where do they sit on their org chart?
• Who needs to say yes for this deal to happen, who can say no and kill the deal?
• What does each attendee from the prospect side care about most and who still has unresolved concerns or questions?

Agenda

• What talking points do you want to cover?
• What questions do you have?
• What is the structure of the meeting??
• Who is going to be the leader of the meeting to keep things on track?

4) Research the people you’re talking to, how they’ve engaged with your company, and learn how their business works.

This might sound obvious but is extremely important and often overlooked.? If you’re a sales engineer, you are meeting with people already interested in buying a product or service like yours. It’s worth spending the time to genuinely learn about the people on the call and their business, as well as build personal rapport. Think of yourself as an investigative journalist learning about the people and company you’re meeting with. Here’s what you need to figure out:

• The career path of each person on the call and how that might influence their perspectives.
• How the business makes money.
• Their top three objectives this year.
• How each department contributes to these objectives.?
• How each person on this call contributes to these objectives.
• The personal motivations of each person on this call.
• Recent news about the company that might be top of mind.

This helps you connect potential solutions you can offer to value outcomes that they actually care about. Remember, there are three types of value outcomes that everyone cares about: personal value, job value, and corporate value. You need to know which value outcomes matter most to the people you’re working with.?

In addition to researching public information about a company, part of being prepared for a presales meeting is knowing if your prospects have used your product, are currently in a trial, have watched demos online, or have talked to people in your company. For prospects, having to keep explaining your needs and going through the same conversation over and over again is incredibly frustrating.

Take the time to know what people did or didn’t do in your product, what outcomes they were trying to achieve, where they got stuck, and what demos they watched. This is critical information.

Prospects are more likely to trust you and buy from you if you show up with deep situational awareness and make people feel known, understood, and heard.?

5) Do a debrief after every meeting

This can be an easy step to miss but is really valuable. Spend 15 minutes with your AE right after the call to debrief on two areas:?

1. The deal?
2. Feedback for each other

The Deal:?

Debriefing about the deal helps you update your understanding of where this deal is at. Use this debrief to reassess what you think the prospect cares about, what questions or concerns they have that still need addressing, when you think the deal will close, and what needs to be done next.??

Feedback:

A feedback debrief helps you improve with every meeting. Ask the AE to share their thoughts on what you did well and what you could improve. For example, did you have a good answer to questions, did you position certain value props in ways that created or eliminated objections, was it obvious that you knew what the customer was trying to accomplish and focused on the most important solutions.?

Also give feedback to the AE if they are open to it. For example, let them know if they did a good job in discovery and sharing knowledge with you, or if they didn’t do a great job and you felt like you didn’t understand what the customer was trying to accomplish.?

So much learning and improvement happens as a result of reflecting on each meeting you have. Be sure to carve out time for this after every call and be open to any feedback you get. Reminder, you don’t have to agree with the feedback. Your job is to reflect on the feedback and find the nuggets you can use to improve.?

6) Invest in presales enablement and training

Presales is different from sales. A dedicated person or team focused on observing, training, and enabling the presales team helps you iterate on processes, get the right tools, and learn from successes and failures more quickly. If you can, invest in dedicated presales enablement people to help optimize the presales function and serve its unique needs.?

If you aren’t able to have dedicated people, spend time talking to peers, join groups like the presales collective, or read books like Mastering Technical Sales to help improve how you and your team operate.?

The role of presales in B2B buying is changing but also becoming more important. Presales is a keystone that sits between sales, marketing, product, and customer success. Optimizing and scaling this function can grow revenue, expansions, and renewals.??

I’d love to hear your learnings and thoughts in the comments:?

• What parts do you agree with or disagree with in this article??
• What have you seen work well or not work well with AE-SE collaboration?

PS - I want to specifically thank Stuart Walters , Cristian Gomez - MBA , Liam Mahoney , Vandana Mehta, CHRP, PSM , Paul Dionne , Bonnie Alexander , Pradeep Rajashekaran , Heather Blackwell , JR Wymer , Adam Blair , Todd Henderson , Jay Mulakala , Diane Owens , and Sa?a M. . Multiple great conversations with these thoughtful and talented people about presales best practices influenced my thinking and ultimately helped me write this article.