Pre-sales now or later?

Presales is a forgotten tool. A priceless ingredient in your sales and marketing enablement process. So how do you power it? Is there a method? Some kind of cheat sheet which you fill in step by step? Or is it plain common sense that you need to be talking to your marketplace much before the sales process kicks in?

Presales in our opinion is a canvas on which you could state and test your proposition, your communication and check out the way you would want potential customers to perceive your business.

Presales has actually changed. Metamorphosed into consultative conversations, learning about the prospect, sharing solutions and then trying to design the customer journey with specifics. So it is no longer pitching and selling. Ask us why and the answer is obvious. Today buyers do a lot of research about their impending purchase/engagement. The solution is more or less arrived at before they begin the conversation.

This new and altered situation in presales means there is a much stated emphasis on research. Know everything possible on the customer – their operating environment, stage in the growth cycle, pain points and gain areas, the competition, current state of mind, personas, customer experiences articulated in social media and the larger plans for their business. Simply put, a well-qualified overview of the prospect is an essential input in devising the presales moves.

The imperatives are that knowledge, empathy and curiosity about the prospect and their business are the professional traits that are needed for the members in the presales teams. There is of course no easy recipe for qualifying a lead or delivering a listening- ready prospect to the sales and marketing teams. Hard work, ingenious methods have to be embedded into a method that can be institutionalized and followed as a framework.

We will attempt to share some of our leanings on this as you keep reading…

1. First steps – know your business, know your brand, know yourself

Your own story is your first step in the prospect discovery journey. The way you have approached a business, provided the solution and serviced the relationship is the virtual screenplay of your presales narratives. From the successes you need to reflect upon your learnings, the right levers you pushed and the analysis you brought to the table. Your methodologies of how you diagnosed the customer’s pain points and gain areas. The manner in which you answered the customers’ needs, mitigated the pain points. Play back to yourself all the arguments that you marshalled to convey the feeling of trust and confidence – a crucial element in signing you up as a provider.

The past is not merely about success and proud credentials. It also carries within the causes for failure and the many challenges you faced and how you could get around them. What you couldn’t do is as important as what you have done. The couldn’t dos are the ones that will inspire you to turn the odds in your favor. The already achieved ones will set the pace. So let your teams get a grasp of the success and failure as two sides of the presales coin. Then actually take notes, find the patterns, codify and train the teams.

Crucial to all of these efforts is the awareness of your very own brand. Ask yourselves, do you have one in the first place?  A cohesive perception about your business and how it delivers solutions in a well differentiated manner. Highlight the tools and practices that define your business. Audit the customer experiences that distinguish your brand from the others.

As an aside, remember, ‘brand’ is what people think of your business when you are not in the room. Arrive at a seamless articulation of your brand and communicate that as a first step in your presales journey.

Pointers:

• Why do I succeed?
• Why did I fail?
• What does my business stand for?
• What do customers think of me?
• Is there an identifiable way that I do business?

2. First move – know you prospect

‘So much to know and so much ground to cover.’ That ought to be the philosophy of prospect discovery. Keep learning about their business.

There are many frameworks that aid in arriving at this understanding. One that we have found of immense help is the GPCT framework.  Created by the legendary Mark Roberge, it can consistently nourish the growth mind set.

GPCT stands for Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline.

Goals

Quantifiable goals hold the key. You could help the prospect qualify loosely articulated wish lists and things they believe have to be assigned priority.

• Top most goal
• Other business goals
• Personal goals
• Goals in numbers 

Plans

Find out if the plans have been outlined by the prospect. Do homework on what has worked for them and what hasn’t. Do they have intent in meeting their business growth in a different way? Try and gather as much information as possible from published sources, disguised market intelligence and other sources. Goals and plans need to sound logical and as seamless extensions.

Challenges

This is the difficult part. Grasping the barriers and the factors that can stop the prospect from achieving their gaols. What do they see as the hurdles/barriers that can hinder the growth mind set? There could be several of them – some articulated, and many as silent pokes that tend to deflate the enthusiasm in your prospect’s business. One could gain some understanding on this – by reading up previous annual reports, interviews of leadership with media, category changes and competitive activity. Specific challenges can aid your prospect discovery process.

Timeline

Self explanatory to a large extent. Achievements have to be done in a fixed time period. The important aspect is not merely knowing the timelines but viewing it in the context of the challenges and what are those actions that will help sticking the course. How is the prospect possibly viewing your business as an able partner to meet the goals, mitigate the challenges and do it all within a timeline.

3. Prep your resources

When you document the presales flow into a cadence – an arrangement or sequence you will get to know two things. The decision making points and the interventions necessary. The decision making points are self explanatory. The interventions are the content related inputs. Once you know the sequence and get all the touch points you could plan the resources and the forms of content. Corporate presentations, slideshares, white papers, case studies, emails and more. But you have to do a role play and simulate the yes / no decisions to ensure the lead is qualified and till you hand over the lead to the sales/marketing teams.

Source: Callbox

A resources checklist:

• Qualification questions
• Prewritten emails
• Presentations
• Demos
• Personas/profiles
• Customer references
• Case studies
• How to guides
• Website
• White papers
• Blog articles
• Infographics
• Videos
• Newsletters
• Testimonials and reviews
• Offline Marketing Collateral
• Company/Product/Service Fact Sheet
• Company folder

4. Develop a brand voice

In an earlier section we had touched upon the need to know yourself and your brand. Brand voice is a logical extension of this aspect. Brand voice in simple terms is the personality behind the brand. Some identifiable, consistent characteristics. These have to be clear and relevant to your audience. In fact, brand voice has the power to translate your brand into feelings. There is enough and more research that audiences at times forget what has been said – content and facts, but remember and recall the feelings the communicator left behind.

“People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.”

B2B brands have to adopt a brand voice. They could choose to build trust by being authentic, transparent and simple. And so on…

5. Method helps

In every presale move you make, the cardinal thought is method. Have a method. Not be driven by impulse and knee jerk behaviour. After thoroughly understanding your prospect and figuring out all your arguments that will help in qualifying the prospect as a lead, put down a cadence. A sequence that will highlight the necessary intervention points and the decision moments. This has to be obviously aligned to the consumer decision journey.  Cadences are fashionable in the presales space. But used smartly they give you a method of thoughts and actions. More importantly they enable planning keeping your tools ready.

6. Evolve familiarity into coded learnings

Oft forgotten aspect is codification of the learnings. One team comes, does its job and the wheel is reinvented all over again. To avoid these pitfalls and delays in the learning curve, codify all the successes and failures. This is a part of creating the essential artefacts that will enable the growth mind-set. It will also add to the culture of the organization. The perception of the employees will be crucially influenced in the direction of being a learning organization with shared responsibility.

7. Ask for feedback after closure or failure

Once the presales loop is closed, seek feedback. You will discover what worked and what did not. This will help in revisiting all the interventions you had planned, customising them in a much more efficient manner and also highlight the specific challenges. The more cases you have of success and failure the better equipped you are.

KNOW

PLAN

METHODISE

READY

EXECUTE

MODIFY

CODIFY

SEEK FEEDBACK

REPEAT

Author : Raj Mohan Tella. August 24, 2021