Sales and Fulfillment
Pre-Sales strategies - The key to driving early sales success
Pre-sales teams spend considerable time understanding the client’s needs, tailoring a solution, developing a value proposition, and nurturing the client before making the actual sale. Experts believe that this cumulative effort lays the groundwork for a successful sale.
According to Harvard Business Review, businesses with solid pre-sales processes convert 40-50% of new business leads and retain 80-90% of the existing ones. The strength of your pre-sales process directly impacts sales results and the bottom line.
This article discusses the differences between sales and pre-sales, the need for a robust pre-sales process, and best practices.
Differences between sales and pre-sales
Pre-sales activities occur at the top of the sales funnel and involve investigating and planning to solve a client’s problem. Sales activities occur somewhere in the middle or at the bottom of the funnel. It includes activities such as product demos, contract drafting and negotiations, and so on. The main activities within pre-sales are –
- Understand the client – To understand a new client, compare them with your current ones whose data is already in your CRM. Augment this knowledge with what you receive from customer service calls, testimonials, reviews, and surveys. At this stage, you are just trying to understand the client before you move on to their product/service requirement.
- Research the market competition – Read press announcements, industry reports, websites, and product documentation, and visit trade shows to understand how your competitors are placed to serve the customer. Observe the online reviews and social media posts of your ideal clients to know their experience.
- Make discovery calls – At this stage, you talk to the client to understand their specific problem and objectives. At the end of this stage, you decide whether it is a qualified lead. If it is, you proceed to design customized solutions.
- Design customised solutions – Create and present customized solutions through presentations and product demos, utilizing technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
- Prepare and present the proposal – Once you have sufficient knowledge of the client’s requirements, you finalise a solution and present a proposal for approval.
The last point above overlaps with and transitions into the sales process, where the team does follow-ups, negotiates contracts, closes the deal, and builds a long-term relationship.
Why do you need a solid pre-sales process?
A robust pre-sales process leads to a direct increase in sales and revenue and referral lead generation. The reasons to have a solid pre-sales process are –
- Higher number of qualified leads for the sales team.
- Shorter lead cycle.
- Lower churn of existing clients.
- Higher ROI by filtering out high-quality leads.
- Better client satisfaction rate.
- Strong sales pipeline.
- Identify opportunities for growth before your competition does.
- Leverage high-quality data and customer insights for growth.
Top pre-sales strategies
Pre-sales requires a strategic approach with robust processes which makes the job of the sales team easy. Our list of top pre-sales strategies is –
Sale is a natural outcome of knowing the customer’s problem
The customer is sold before the actual sale happens. The pre-sales team must prioritise knowing the customer’s preferences, buying behaviour, and pain points. This helps the sales manage objections. By integrating real-time customer feedback with tracking and analytics, you can optimise the pre-sales approach and deliver targeted messaging.
Get an early executive buy-in
For B2B sales, you may need top executive buy-in at every stage. Ensure that you get it early before you commit something to the client. Make sure that everyone in the value chain knows what the client wants. Promising something that you cannot deliver can be embarrassing for both parties.
Showcase the genuine worth of the product/service
A detailed examination of customer persona and behaviour allows you to showcase the actual value of your product/service. This may also require examining competitor’s services, industry trends, and surveys. It will enable you to draft a proposal that the client truly appreciates and sees value in.
Prepare hard for the negotiation
Understand that the client has limited time and wants clear answers to their problems. The pre-sales team must do the groundwork and set timelines for the process before the sales team arrives at the negotiating table.
Use a powerful sales opportunity management software
A pre-sales team armed with advanced sales opportunity planning and execution software can leverage data-backed workflows, move opportunities strategically, and optimise sales efficiency. You must ensure that the software integrates with the CRM, offers analytics, sets role-based permissions, unifies the data across systems, and is highly secure.
How can Infosys BPM help with pre-sales managed services?
The pre-sales management services at Infosys BPM focus on targeted marketing, proposal management, administrative support, customer management, and campaign management for positive business outcomes.
Read about the pre-sales managed services at Infosys BPM.
