The Pre in Pre-Sales – its all about the preparation and discovery process

Preparation – It’s the Pre in Pre-Sales

When you look at sales engagements over a period of time  and study those that are successful and those that arent, the reasons for the successes become very clear and I have found that there are 4 contributing factors that determine the success or failure of any engagement.

The first that I touched on in my last blog post was all about having a methodology and I will talk about my preferred sales engagement methodology in another series of posts but the second relates to the pre-sales engagement, which is my focus for this piece.

The third is based on the sales process and how well it is aligned with the customers purchasing process and the fourth relates to the abilitiy of the sales team to articulate the value of the overall proposal…and again I will drill down in to those topic a little later in my blogs.

So lets go back to the pre-sales engagement and sales people, before you switch off and say, that’s not my responsibility….guess again….as a sales person myself I have seen many a sales engagement run off the rails because of what has happened in the hand off between sales and pre-sales.

Even the best pre-sales person will fail in their role – which is to build a bridge between your prospective customers current situation and pain to your solution and how it will address that pain and simplify the customers life.

If the pre-sales person doesn’t know where the customer is today or the “as is”, what that pain point is and what the “to be” picture looks like then failure is almost guaranteed.

The responsibility for building the picture of where the customer is today and where they want to be tomorrow is a shared responsibility – shared by sales and pre-sales working as a team.

Too many times, I have heard of sales people calling on the pre-sales team with less than 24 hours notice to say “Customer X needs a demo of the software, just go out and do it…here’s the address and the customer name”.

The pre-sales team is now set up to fail unless they can quickly get a picture of the prospective customer and their needs….but the best case scenario is that they can only do their best based on their experience of other customers in that industry and what they wanted and trying to use that as the starting point but again…they will probably end up committing multiple demo crimes (worst practices/mistakes)  – like the Spaghetti Disease, Talking to the Wall or the So What demo crime, all of which come down to a lack of preparation.

Hang on, you might be saying, whats a demo crime…I’ve never hear of that, or talking to the wall – wasn’t that what Shirley Valentine used to do?

Well, Bob Riefstahl talks about this subject in his book Demonstrating to Win, which I recommend should be in every presenters library…whether you are  doing software demonstrations, demonstrating complex equipment or presenting complex topics to an audience.

Bob’s book explains these Demo Crimes in detail, the symptoms and more importantly, the cure…and in this case the cure is preparation.

At the bare minimum you need a check list to follow to help you prepare for the demonstration, with a series of key questions that you need to have answers to in order to do your best…and the process of collecting this information is funnily enough, called discovery because that’s what its all about.

Discovering the 2 or 3 key things that you can show to the prospective customer that will ensure your solution moves forward in the selection process rather than ending up as another victim of the “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” sales engagement.

Collect this information and you’ll be 2% better in your demonstration….and sometimes – as Bob, Pat, Ross and the 2WinGlobal team point out in their excellent training sessions (which I also deliver) 2% is all it takes to win.