A robust pre-sales process can help you build a strong sales pipeline by allocating the right resources to the right places at the right time. As an experienced Solutions Architect, that's what I love to do: optimization is my mantra. I'm sure yours would be the same.
While sales often get the attention for closing deals, a pre-sales process is critical to the success of each opportunity and the overall sales organization. Pre-sales understands the prospect’s precise business requirements and maps them to the organization’s offerings.
In this article, we'll explain how to improve the technical part of the pre-sales cycle from the perspective of a Solutions Architect.
Pre-sales, what's that?
I don't want to deeply dive into details in this area. I'm not a sales expert. I'm a Solutions Architect working at pre-sales. However, setting the foundations of a pre-sales definition is of paramount importance to understanding the discussions below. You'll find more information in the References section of this article.
Briefly speaking, the pre-sales process covers all the activities that take place before closing the sale, including the following:
As Solutions Architect you'll probably be part of a team and most of these tasks will be performed by highly prepared teammates. If this is not your case, good luck!
The role of a Solutions Architect at pre-sales
A recent study from Harvard Business Review found that companies with strongpre-sales capabilities consistently achieve 40-50% win ratesin new business and 80-90% in renewal business. Wow! This is challenging and one of the reasons making me loving pre-sales. The possibility of contributing to my company's conquest of the market really makes me passionate.
Providing technical expertise required to increase win ratios and shorten sales cycles. This will explain why having a master Solutions Architect is an important active for the company as this role brings the technical expertise required in the sales cycle. Depending on the prospect, Solution Architects with good soft skills can lead the discovery process while conducting business process and gap analysis.
But don't forget that a Solutions Architect is an IT position. So, besides these sales skills, you'll have to configure and architect the right solution fitting your customer's requirements and demonstrate why the proposed solution is competitive and helps meet those requirements.
Figure 1 Pre-sales Solutions Architect Skills (source: MarketingMoves)
This proximity to the customer involves that you'll have to stay up-to-date on technology trends in the customer’s vertical of the industry.
Note that any proposal is normally presented in two parts: a technical part and a commercial/financial part. So, as an IT guy, you'll always have a piece of the cake there.
The value of using workflows
As an architect, you know quite well that abusiness processcomprises a sequence of steps that flow in a specific order to achieve the desired outcome. You'd also have studied that a business process implementation won’t work without a clear process.
So, as your architect role is tattooed deep into your mind, you'd try to organize and depict any process on a workflow or diagram not only because you need to take profit from the vast number of hours you spent studying frameworks such as TOGAF or BPM, but also because you feel comfortable and powerful when you can understand the whole landscape. Believe me, if you want to understand your (potential) customer's needs and goals and propose to him a solution able to meet them, this is a have-to.
Figure 2 Pre-sales Workflow Example
But using workflows during an exploratory call at pre-sales has other benefits beyond that. To name a few:
Thus, workflows help having deep calls with business and technical team helps us to come up with the solution which customer requires. Finally, they are also very useful for on-boarding of new team members.
Conclusions
Good planning and anticipation are key factors for a successful pre-sales discussion and a solid pre-sales process can help to sell to customers the way they want. So, when possible (that is, always 😉) use workflows to prepare your pre-sales meetings and during them.
References
