Studies prove that a company attains about 50 per cent of the new business and 80 per cent of the repeat business if it has a strong pre-selling objective. This necessitates the importance of the presales process. So how much time is your team spending on presales? Are they doing it right? Let’s dive in to understand the importance of pre-sales process and how to implement it effectively.

What Makes a Pre-Sales Process Important?

To put it simply, a presales process involves several activities that help you identify and make contact with your prospect or target audience. This asks for the sales team to plan by collecting appropriate information about the prospective customer and prepare by developing strategies. The reasons given below will give insight into why it is essential to have a presales process:

Identifying and Generating Leads

Advancement in technology has helped businesses find new prospects using various methods of gathering information. Nevertheless, as a salesperson, you need to ensure that all the prospects you find are worth pursuing. Using business analytics helps you get a better qualification rate of prospective customers and categorize them as highly desirable ones. This helps the sales team save time by not hanging on to those who are likely to be uninterested in your product. 

You require an informed approach to focus and generate high-quality leads. Identify the sources of leads, which are the marketing channels such as Google, social media and pay-per-click (PPC), and use analytics to convert them into opportunities. With the predictive analytics like a propensity-to-buy model, you can predict the likelihood of customers’ buying behaviour; for instance, whether the prospective customer visiting your website is likely to come back or buy your product. 

The opportunity assessment is another technique to generate effective leads. The tool is maintained internally, wherein specific actions of the customers are evaluated at various stages like recognizing a problem, determining needs, evaluating options, resolving concerns and making a purchase. This can help the presales team identify prospective customers who are likely to buy your products.

Presenting the Proposal

Attending the leads by presenting the proposal directs to much faster conversion than not allocating technical resources to attend or answer leads. Your presales team has to explain the service that will be provided, as well as the resources that will be employed for the service. To be effective and successful, both the presales team and sales team should agree on the terms given in the proposal. Failure to do so will result in losing good sales leads. 

With a presales process, you can segment and reduce the time required for processing and converting each lead. It further helps in the appropriate allocation of resources for better productivity and turnaround time.

Closing Deals

The presales process does not end with the identification of the customer and submission of the proposal; it extends beyond that of closing the deal. To do so, the presales team need to have a good understanding of the target customers to gain better insights of their environment and future product requirements and then, offer solutions to them in line with the organization’s vision. In a way, your team has to be equipped enough to create content regularly to the targeted audience to give a complete content experience. 

After-Sales Deals

If you have an active presales team, then their job does not end with the closure of sales; instead, they go beyond that by anticipating their future needs and identifying new requirements and preparing to meet them. Thus, they become successful in retaining the customers by moving ahead from anticipation to prediction with greater accurateness.

How Do You Know that Your Presales Process Is High-Performing? 

It is essential to evaluate whether your presales process is high-performing or not. By using sophisticated measurements, you can check:

• Whether it is positive or negative, it looks positive if your presales team is engaged in highly personalized, as well as configured, demo building to meet customers’ particular needs. However, if the team is involved in justifying the need to invest much in any line of business or standardized products, the presales process is viewed as negative.
• Whether the utilization rate is good enough to show high-performance presales, this is when your presales team puts in more than 85 per cent of the hours to support sales.
• Whether your presales team is effective to get precious opportunities to perform a demonstration to customers in person or online, having a good ratio shows high performance.W

To conclude, a presales process is essential for any business to identify, win and retain customers. The respective team is completely engaged from the time when the new prospect is first identified and goes on to close the sale and beyond that to predict the future buying behaviour and requirement. If a company is not able to close a sale, then it is considered that its presales department is ineffective in spending time in the process, as well as working closely with the sales department.