Chief Executive Officer at Hub.Inc, We help presales, sales engineers and technical sales professionals win more business.

Every go-to-market department — from marketing, sales development, account management and customer success — has a plethora of tooling at its disposal. These tools range from point products to platforms intended to help professionals do their daily work. Historically, however, presales — also referred to as the sales engineer and/or solution consultant professional — have been grossly underserved with commercial tooling.

These presales professionals who drive middle-of-the-funnel conversions within the sales funnel have been stuck with general-purpose productivity tools and customer relationship management (CRM) systems that do a better job of capturing data than helping professionals with their daily work. Fortunately, this is changing, and presales tools have become a hot topic among executives such as the chief revenue officers (CROs) and chief customer officers (CCOs).

The emergence of presales tooling stems from three key drivers:

• Digital transformation of traditional in-person selling and buying due to the Covid-19 pandemic

• Proliferation of software as a service (SaaS) and subscription packaging of products

• Increasing technical complexity that relies on more presales expertise to map technology value to the buyer

These macro trends don't seem to be slowing down. In fact, they will continue to accentuate the importance of presales and usher in more tooling focused on helping the sales engineer professional.

Should you add presales tooling for your organization? It depends on what your company is trying to achieve. Here are two extreme scenarios:

1. Don’t do anything and survive. You probably don't need to up your game in presales tooling if:

• Your market is contracting.

• The current in-house tooling is good enough.

• Your presales teams comply in entering data into your CRM on a regular basis.

• You are OK to run the presales business based on gut feel.

• You are in a market where your competition does not use sales tooling to get a competitive edge.

As the old saying goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

2. Evolve and thrive. Now is the time to evaluate presales tools if:

• Your shareholders expect more top-line growth and measurement of the business.

• Your product packages are evolving to a SaaS offering.

• Your go-to-market playbooks are impacted by product-led sales.

• Your buyers expect a better digital buying experience.

• You want to run the presales business with more visibility and make data-driven decisions.

• You see an opportunity to arm your presales team with better tooling to beat the competition in a highly competitive environment.

Essentially, as former GE chairman and CEO Jack Welch once framed it: "Change, before you have to."

Given these two options, do you know where your company sits on the spectrum? Do you know how investments in presales tooling align with the company's position between surviving or thriving?

Presales tools aren't the holy grail despite what some vendors might claim. However, if used correctly under the right circumstances, these specialized tools should deliver value quickly, be easy to use, coexist with your current tech stack, complement your workflow and support presales jobs that need to be performed on a daily basis. They also must save time, automate mundane tasks and — at the end of the day — help deliver more growth.

If you want your company to evolve and thrive, one approach is to examine the tooling in terms of which jobs need to be done and which ones require the greatest amount of improvement by your presales organization. For example, take a look at common jobs performed by presales managers and individual contributors and the tasks each one is responsible for:

Presales Managers

• Analysis: Get a continuous view of your business.

• Insights: Learn about the things you know you don't know. 

• Gaps: Effectively manage technical gaps blocking business.

• Forecast: Contribute your own technical sales view on opportunities.

• Investment: Make data-driven decisions on where to invest.

• Action: Take corrective actions based on leading indicators.

Presales Individual Contributors

• Discovery: Enhance your ability to identify the right technical prospect.

• Present: Adjust your technical narrative based on the opportunity.

• Demo: More effectively map your technology to value.

• Solution: Develop the right solution mix to get the technical win.

• Services: Scope the right services required to meet the prospect's needs.

• Evaluations: Effectively manage POCs/POVs and guided trials.

Once you assess which jobs are most critical to your presales organization and company's growth, it should be easier to make a decision on the presales tooling that is right for your organization. You can also look for additional outside guidance.

Presales tooling has been the missing element of the overall go-to-market tech stack for quite some time. Depending on your company's business environment, now may very well be the time for you to explore presales tooling to fuel your company's growth and thrive in today's digital economy.

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