9 Critical Components for Every PreSales Software

Sam Wortman Avatar photo

If you work in PreSales, you already know there’s a lack of PreSales-specific software. 

Managing and leading a PreSales team without a native platform that provides visibility into ICs day-to-day activities and deals is extremely difficult. 

So we get it—the game needs to change. 

PreSales deserves the same quality software that their product, sales, customer success, and engineering peers use. 

Wondering what to look for in your hunt for the ultimate PreSales software for your team? 

We got you covered. 

We believe that every PreSales software should have the nine critical components listed below. 

1. A platform—a home—built specifically for PreSales

PreSales professionals know the grind—working within software like Salesforce and Jira to manage their workload is cluttered, confusing, and inefficient. 

Every PreSales software needs to have a platform that is built specifically for PreSales to efficiently manage teams, get deals done, and increase speed and repeatability. 

This helps PreSales focus within a clean ecosystem, so they can work faster to win opportunities and provide greater SE visibility to management.

2. Powerful product gap metrics that make you rethink opportunities

Product gap metrics help teams weigh product gaps based on severity, get more granularity, and tap into numerous industries and their subsequent trends.

Using time-series analytics, PreSales can understand which product gaps are persistent and in which industries. This helps teams strategize and customize their sales and demo approaches to different stakeholders in various fields, so the organization can win more. 

Also, when teams can identify specific product gaps that reoccur over time, they can determine where their focus needs to be and what information needs to be relayed back to product teams to ultimately influence the product roadmap and the features that are built. 

3. PreSales metrics that tell you why you win

With analytics, PreSales can uncover patterns behind high-performing teams and use their strengths and strategies to win deals for the entire organization. 

Not only that, performance metrics can also help justify AE/SE ratios to C-level executives, spot skills gaps, and promote key players. 

And analytics are the key to prioritizing product roadmaps intelligently based on the business impact of market demands. 

Arguably, in the quest to reduce cost of sale and accelerate sales, metrics matter the most.

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools designed for PreSales

To turn a PreSales software into a data processing powerhouse, you need AI to cluster and categorize customer and product feedback at scale and ultimately tie it back to revenue. 

Insights from the field must automatically be identified and clustered with similar feedback by AI to help PreSales recognize consistent product and opportunity gaps. 

Then AI can enable teams to remedy risky deals and bolster opportunities in flight by recommending strategies. 

AI can also quantify the technical merit of a sales opportunity and receive recommendations to increase the chance of deal closure—allowing teams to say goodbye to gut feelings and decisions made in a vacuum. 

But most importantly, AI must be explainable; sharing its insights via advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, so teams can make sense of the feedback and decide where they should take action. 

5. Fort Knox style security

PreSales teams work with highly sensitive information incoming from prospects and customers. 

Your PreSales teams and clients need to feel as comfortable as possible relaying particulars to your organization. 

To ensure that every stakeholder involved in the deal has the highest level of security, confidentiality, and availability, information security practices, policies, procedures, and operations need to meet the rigors of the SOC 2 and ISO 27001 Trust Principles.

6. Integrations that are pre-built to work with the tools you already use

Most modern fast-growth software companies use systems such as Product Life Management (PLM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to organize and push forward business initiatives. 

Bridging PLM and CRM systems is a requisite to delivering what buyers need and creating undeniable customer value, and it is absolutely essential to a PreSales platform’s success. 

Having these integrations is critical, because it establishes a multi-directional flow of information between PreSales, product, engineering, marketing, and customer success teams. 

This enables constant collaboration throughout the entire organization, so PreSales can champion the buyer journey, from evaluation to value realization.

7. Calendar intelligence 

PreSales teams are wildly busy—no one will argue with that. 

Having a calendar feature within a PreSales software is salient to the productivity of team members, as they can plan out their days, weeks, and months, as well as track and tie time spent to opportunities.

However, having just a typical calendar is not enough; using Machine Learning (ML) to make your calendar intelligent is crucial. With ML, calendars can automatically make recommendations to tie time spent on opportunities and will learn over time, becoming smarter and more powerful the more team members feed it with information. 

8. Collaborative note-keeping 

To keep teams on the same page, a native PreSales software must encourage collaborative note-keeping. 

This ensures that even when team members are working apart, everyone is in the loop. 

Creating templates for note-keeping that establish consistency across the team will help bake best practices into the PreSales software. 

9. The ability to work wherever you are

In today’s world, PreSales teams need to be able to work anywhere, whether that’s at home, in the office, or on the go. 

This means having web and mobile apps, web integrations, and browser extensions to make using a PreSales platform as easy as breathing. 

Looking for a product that does all this?

Vivun has created the world’s first PreSales platform powered by AI with all nine of these critical components baked in. 

Our platform—Hero by Vivun—allows PreSales to scale their team, beat competition to product-market fit, nail forecasts, revive dormant opportunities, and unlock vital sales intelligence to close deals faster.

Ready to take the next step in your transformation? 

Sign up for a Vivun Demo and we’ll show you more!

Sam Wortman Avatar photo June 26, 2021