New Presales Buyer’s Guide Published by Presales Thought Leaders
In recognition of the growing presales software category, two of the world’s leading sales engineering and presales thought leaders, trainers, and coaches released the first edition of the Presales Buyer’s Guide, which includes a vendor profile on Homerun.
The C-level suite is slowly but surely recognizing the value and importance of the Presales function to their organization’s success. As we say, you can’t get the ‘deal win’ without the ‘technical win’! Since 2018 Homerun has been a ‘category builder’ in the presales software space. More importantly, we have helped companies like AppViewX, Graylog, and INKY Technologies achieve exceptional presales results with our Homerun Presales platform.
In recognition of the growing presales software category, two of the world’s leading sales engineering and presales thought leaders, trainers, and coaches released the first edition of the Presales Buyer’s Guide, which includes a vendor profile on Homerun. Kerry Sokalsky of Presales Mastery and Chris White of Tech Sales Advisors spent the last 8 months interviewing vendors, reviewing technologies, and assembling all of their learnings in the guide. Note, their Presales Buyer’s Guide is not ‘pay to play’.
Read on to learn more about how they defined the presales software landscape and what they wrote about Homerun.
The Presales Buyer's Guide includes the following categories:
Presales Oversight & Management – This focus area encompasses the responsibilities, challenges, and concerns of the typical presales leader – from pipeline visibility and opportunity oversight to process implementation and team management. The capabilities in this area are designed to enable presales leaders to run their organization like a business.
Presales Opportunity Execution – This focus area enables presales professionals (aka individual contributors) to work at speed and scale. Capabilities in this area are designed to give ICs a unified workspace to access, record, and manage all the information and activities involved in executing a presales opportunity.
Demo Automation – As the name suggests, this focus area is all about automating and scaling demo creation, delivery, and consumption, whether in the context of top-of-funnel, self-service demos, live demos delivered by individuals, or product trials (aka sandbox demo environments). The tools in this space are used to create “safe” usable, shareable demo assets that can be analyzed to determine customer interest and intent.
Response & Knowledge Management – This focus area represents the automation of the cross-team coordination, collaboration, and effort that goes into responding to formal RFx requests. It also includes the collection, curation, and dissemination of company and product information commonly used to answer questions and respond to questionnaires during the sales and presales process.
Presentation & Data Solutions – As the name suggests, this focus area encompasses the tools in the market explicitly designed to help presales professionals give better, more compelling live demonstrations, tell better stories, facilitate better meetings, show more relevant information, and manage heavy demo data workloads.
As a unified presales platform, Homerun is part of the Presales Oversight and Management and Presales Opportunity Execution categories. Homerun supports, compliments, and integrates with solutions in all of the other categories.
Chris and Kerry wrote the following Overview about Homerun:
The founders of Homerun built the first version of the platform as a tool for themselves, based on a presales process that increased efficiency and effectiveness, and enabled them to close more deals with less effort. In their own words, “We were managing multiple presales evaluations at any given time, jumping from customer calls to demos to POCs and back. We were using multiple tools: our CRM, notepad, docs, spreadsheets, etc. You name it, we were using it. One day, we had enough and started coding. The result was Homerun.”
The solution has since evolved with features that add value to the rest of the business – sales, product, marketing, post-sales – and elevate presales within the company. Homerun opens the presales “black box”, providing visibility into pipeline, team performance, product gaps, and activity tracking, so Presales leaders know what is going on and how to win.
For the individual contributor (IC), Homerun is designed to be “exactly the tool you need, without getting in the way”. Their goal is to empower ICs to leverage best practices used by top sales engineers to stay organized and be a fast, efficient, and effective closer. Homerun’s design mantra is what they call the “Goldilocks rule” – not too much, not too little. Thus, their goal is to provide a presales platform that empowers the entire presales team, from ICs to managers, without getting in the way.
Regarding Notable Features & Capabilities, Kerry and Chris wrote:
A key feature for presales leaders is the Presales Pipeline – a Kanban board of current evaluations by presales stage and driven by a flexible filtering mechanism. Leaders can see deals in progress organized by virtually any attribute and drill into trouble areas.
For individual contributors, the Evaluation Plan page is a powerful, all-in-one “home page” that enables them to track and manage everything related to a presales engagement, including tasks, notes, feature requests, activities, sentiment, test cases, alerts and notifications, etc. Two of the more unique aspects of the Evaluation Plan page are “Action Items” and “Highlights”. Action items are designed to track those key follow up actions that customers are waiting for. Highlights are designed to capture key notes that otherwise might get buried in the minutia of the engagement.
Homerun also offers a customer collaboration capability; whereby specific elements of the Evaluation Plan can be shared with prospects in the context of a Customer Portal. Prospects can then mark items as In Progress, Completed, or Blocked, upload files, and engage in back-and-forth messaging with the presales team.
Want to learn more? Talk to one of our presales experts about about how Homerun can help. Click here to get started!
