Why You Are Not Too Early for a Presales Tool
Homerun Presales’ Co-Founder and CRO, Brian Lewis, recently posted on LinkedIn about ‘why you are not too early for a presales tool’. The post got such a great reaction that we are re-posting it here on the Homerun Presales blog.
Presales leader: “We are too early for a presales tool.”
Me: “No you are not, and here’s why…”
I talk to a lot of presales people.
Some lead presales teams of 100+ sales engineers. Some are a presales team of one. Some have very mature presales processes. Some have no formal process whatsoever.
Regardless of the size of your team, and regardless of your maturity, you are not ‘too early’ for a purpose-built presales tool.
CLARIFICATION: You are not too early for a presales tool that ENABLES your sales engineers to do the things they need to do every day:
Remember what needs to get done today
Take notes during a technical discovery call
Prep for an upcoming demo
Deliver a tailored demo
Make a plan for an upcoming POC or POV
Answer lots of status questions about deals for you and their Account Executives.
As sales engineers, we LOVE our role in the sales process.
We love being helpful to our customers, guiding them to be better, collaborating to solve their problems.
We love that we are the key to winning a deal: You cannot get the deal win without getting the technical win!
And yes, we LOVE the win itself.
Hearing “Congratulations, you are our preferred vendor!” is oh so satisfying.
(And the commission check is really nice too!)
But…
As sales engineers, our daily life SUCKS.
Our calendars are packed… no time for bio-breaks!
There is an endless stream of tasks and activities day after day… SO MANY TASKS!
We have a BAZILLION deals to juggle… it’s hard to know what I’m working on at any given time and hard to keep everything straight.
We don’t mean to, but we miss things… we didn’t write down an action item during meeting and therefore we forget all about it and our deal stalls out.
We can’t remember a technical detail… and our prospect is annoyed that we are asking about it for 10th time.
We forgot to click ‘Save’ and POOF, there are no notes from a call… and now no one remembers the important topics that were covered.
We use 5 different tools to try and manage it all, from our CRM to spreadsheets to notes tools to task tools… the ‘switching costs’ of moving between tools and the amount of copying-and-pasting between them is crazy!
Sadly, almost all the discussion around purpose-built presales tools has been about Activity Tracking and Reporting.
Definitely important for presales leaders! We agree, and Homerun Presales has Activity Tracking and Reporting capabilities (although our Embedded Activity Tracking eliminates manual logging of activities!).
But…
More important than TRACKING activities… is ENABLING your team to DO the activities more efficiently and effectively.
Your team does not want another admin task added to their busy day.
Your team wants a better day.
Give it to them.
You are not too early.
Want to give your presales team a 'better day'? Talk to one of our presales experts about about how Homerun can help. Click here to get started!
