How to increase the Presales success: Part 2 – Solutions

In the past article, I’ve described challenges & issues I met in Presales.

Now I want to describe solutions which, I think, can help to solve them and increase the success of Presales.

Let’s go.

1. Involvement of potential Teams & Managers. The Team and Manager which have a chance to implement the project should be involved in Presales as soon as possible. It should reduce the gap between Delivery and Presale with continuity of agreements, involved employees, accountability of team, reducing useless risks used for generic team. 
2. Internal Presales Competition. Involvement of multiple Teams & Managers should be organized as competition by the Presales team (e.g., in the format of Hackathon). Results from all teams, should be combined into the proposal with the best options identified by different teams. The winner ideally should start the project and continue to be accountable for what was estimated. The winner also should be got a recognition/compensation as in competition.
3. Presales-related Education of Senior Developers & Delivery Management & Sales.  They should be educated before request. If an employee goes on the Bench, it’s the best time to be trained for Pre Sale. Education should include: a) Estimation technics & practice. It’s the minimum. b) Solutions (including blueprints and bootstrappers) education. The goal of it to apply best practices and also make a better offer. c) Upsell technics & Practice. d) Cross-sell technics & Practice. Ideally, education should be continuing and started, not just on the bench. For this purpose, it should be LMS involved (like TalentLMS)
4. Make the Price attractive. It should be an additional Process of Presale team to optimize and adopt Assumptions, Risks and prepare multiple pricing approaches based on customer profile and needs. It should stimulate Delivery to apply new practices to increase value, reduce price and time of development. Not only that, but it should be a strong collaboration of Presales with the R&D department which will manage Solutions, Blueprints, Bootstrappers and also Engineering who will.  Furthermore, it should also be a review and trying to apply 3rd party solutions which can reduce cost.
5. Have at least 3 pricing options for ANY kind of request: it can be named Minimal (or Startup-like), Standard, Advanced. Each option should have pretty different price. Each proposed solution can be presented in different dimensions which are differently covered for options (e.g., Expendability, Reliability, Scalability, UX/UI, Rich Functionality, Duration, Price, Support costs, Env costs and more). The next step is to decide how dimensions are covered for different options (which output will be expected by the customer) and definitely it should impact on the price. Here it requires from Presales to think about totally different stack/platform. As a result, such options can be presented as a map to the client with pricing below and key facts/output/numbers for each dimension for each option. It’s natural, since close to what we see when selecting options for a car, compare products in store. You will be surprised after the client’s feedback: selected option are pretty different from their initial requirements!
6. Motivation of Pre Sale team & experts to win. It should be done by Achievement-based bonuses/valuable gifts, significant recognition across the company and outside. They should feel themselves as heroes! Employees & Teams on the bench will be motivated by getting a new project.
7. Competence Accumulation for quick find and reuse it for similar requests. It includes knowledge, solutions which is done in collaborations with other departments. It can be done by creation and support of such company storage) Teams Portfolio database b) Employees profile database c) Project Showcase Library d) RFI Q&A e) Solutions library f) Business & Tech Domain knowledge g) Useful Contacts (like external or internal experts in the area)  All of these I call Competence DB, which should be a part of company system.
8. Product Mindset & Management in Presales. The Presales team should apply approaches from Product Management across Presales. The key goal is to bring maximum value and satisfaction to the customer in the context of proposal for the product they want.
9. Accountability of Pre Sale until the project completion. The Presales team involved not just on Presale, but also responsible for transferring correct guidelines/vision/agreements/practices to the Delivery team. Result of the completed project should also take in account of Presales team performance review.
10. Tracking of Market Demand based on incoming requests. That means that Presale should track Market needs and inform other departments (especially Delivery) about changes or needs. Pre Sales can be a driver of changes in Delivery.
11. Increasing types of proposed Offerings. In general, Presales should support and increase offerings. Additionally, to standard offerings it can be Selling of Teams, Consulting, Audit etc. Definitely, the offering should be implemented by other Delivery.
12. Deep collaboration with the Sales & Delivery department. It includes:> Presales Process should be transparent and confirmed for Sales and Delivery. Updates to the process should also be shared with them.> Education of Sales & Delivery Management is important (mentioned above)
13. Iteratively improved Winning Process of Presales. It should generate less stress for participants, more wins at the end, lower efforts from the Presales team. It can be solved by creation of useful tools described above. Ideally, each middle/large request should be ended by retrospective and improvement action items in backlog, which should be managed on regular basis. As a part of it should be a careful accumulation, tracking regular review and improvement of Process results including: a) Pre Sale Success. Later I’ll share metric I suggest to use for Pre Sales b) Reject reasons. It’s important and should be carefully got from the customer with the help of Sales. c) For requests, we won: Project completion results VS our proposal. It should regularly connect with Delivery Management to track changes. e) Accumulation of empiric data in context of the exact employees and teams, f) Efforts spent on requests … and more.
14. Quality of Artifacts. Our quality can be extended and more recognized by the customer if we will deliver more quality and flexible list of artifacts to describe our proposal and the advantages it brings. It can be POC, Attractive Visual materials etc. It can be done in deep collaboration with Marketing. As a result, all templates should be ready.
15. Involvement of domain expertise to increase in proposal. In-depth knowledge of the domain and the ability to communicate in the same language with the customer gives as advantages in comparison to competitors. We should find a way how to involve domain expertise into proposal to bring bigger value to the customer and demonstrate our competence. Involvement of experts with specific domain knowledge is part of the solution (usually it’s close to the development area, not the domain itself). Another way is to involve external expert exactly from the domain.
16. Efficient process for different classes of request. Process flow should be different for different classes of requests based on criteria: a) Perspective to win request, b) Customer profile. How valuable this customer for our portfolio. c) Size of the project, d) Urgency of request. It also requires classification approach together with Sales. Class of request should influence on deliverables provided by Pre Sales team, involvement of experts, approaches related to pricing approach. It should be the map which can help with decisions. Furthermore, an SLA for each class.
17. Detailed team proposal. That means that Presales team should be focused not just on proposal functionality implementation but clarification of customer team requirements to make a better proposal / be able to form/find the right team. It should be done with the support of the PMO.
18. Preparations Process to be ready for speaking in the same language with client. For clients/projects which can bring big value now or in the future, it makes sense to spend some time on preparation before first call: that means to be aware about pains for the market, domain knowledge in general etc. It will have a good effect if the team demonstrates expertise starting from the first session.
19. Presales Automation. As far I see, the Presales process has a pretty similar flow for similar types of requests. Thus, flow can be automated by tools provided inside CRM which are pretty useful (for example as project templates in Pipedrive) or by a simple process automation tool like Checkflow.io. I also see the need to automate data gathering to measure/analyze/improve Presales process.