The brand new B2B era

Over the past decade, the landscape of product development and go-to-market strategies has undergone a profound transformation. Ten years ago, your product and go-to-market model were characterised by simplicity and ease. The product roadmap followed a periodic update approach to deal with the evolving needs of the target market. Meanwhile, the marketing team worked diligently to articulate unique value propositions and generate leads, and the sales team skillfully qualified these leads, fostering customer loyalty.

Today, nonetheless, the client has taken center stage in shaping the trajectory of growth strategy. The fashionable buyer not only seeks a product that meets their needs; in addition they demand a seamless, hands-on experience that substantiates the worth of the product from the beginning.

So how can corporations adapt to this latest sales environment? The primary – and most important – step is to try how their sales and product teams are currently operating. Many corporations have very disjointed priorities, with these teams often working in silos. The sales team is heads down, focused on closing deals. Product teams are working to ship revolutionary product updates.

Bridging the gap between sales and product 

Organizations that can see essentially the most success on this latest era are people who recognize the importance of staying attuned to customer dynamics and are adept at integrating these insights into their product development processes. By fostering a culture of innovation and responsiveness, these organizations can’t only meet – but exceed – customer expectations, thereby securing a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving marketplace.

A critical and infrequently underestimated asset is doing this effectively. Your PreSales team, which incorporates sales engineers (solutions engineers, solutions architects, solutions consultants, systems engineers, customer engineers, pre-sales consultants, technical account managers, applications engineers or field applications engineers) are positioned on the nexus of technical expertise and sales acumen. This team plays a pivotal role in fostering collaboration throughout the sales team and bringing indispensable technical insights to the broader go-to-market team.

The contribution of the PreSales team extends beyond the confines of the sales department. Because the linchpin between sales and product teams, the PreSales team ensures that product features align seamlessly with ever-evolving customer needs. Their unique position allows them to bridge the gap between product offering intricacies and customers’ practical requirements.

Within the eyes of your buyers, the PreSales team emerges as a useful resource, with Sales Engineers emerging as the popular conduit for in-depth understanding of your services and products. 

Unlocking PreSales’ Superpowers with AI 

Today’s PreSales teams have a singular opportunity to expand their roles beyond what they was. Buyers wish to work with solution experts who understand their business needs, and firms are rapidly growing their PreSales organizations in response. With the best AI-powered tools, PreSales can capture and utilize unique data and insights to drive revenue growth, optimize mundane tasks and encourage corporations to align their product roadmaps with the market’s needs.

Tools with AI and machine learning capabilities can efficiently uncover insights into core work-related questions:

Will the deal close? Why/why not? What’s going to improve my closing odds?

• By recommending one of the best PreSales team members to pursue sales opportunities based on availability, experience and skill set, AI improves resource management and team performance. Further, natural language context provides reasoning for the distribution of resources, and the requestor can further assess an assignee’s skills or ask for alternative recommendations.

Am I specializing in essentially the most appropriate tasks?

• By seamlessly handling routine and time-consuming activities, like data entry, scheduling and document generation, AI empowers technical selling teams to deal with higher-value tasks, including customer interactions, strategy development and solution customization. 

What product gaps prevent deals from being closed, and the way can we prove that?

• By bundling feature requests, AI analyzes, classifies and creates groupings of product feature requests from prospects and customers to deliver priceless prioritization insights; this supports product teams in delivering a roadmap that’s revenue-centric.

On this era where speed and agility are paramount, the winners are those that spend money on PreSales. Sales Engineers provide rapid, precise and tailored technical insights that resonate with customers. It’s time we recognize the pivotal role of PreSales and unleash their potential with latest tools purpose-built for this strategic function. 

Capturing and aggregating product feedback

In response to the ever-changing sales environment, a brand new go-to-market strategy will likely be successful only with insights captured by PreSales. As technical experts with deep knowledge of their market, PreSales teams continually analyze the product-buyer fit. These insights can significantly impact the product roadmap to extend revenues. Nevertheless, an absence of knowledge implies that these requests often go unanswered. 

Even in organizations where product-field collaboration prompts customer feedback, the strategy of doing so will be labor intensive and imperfect. The result? Opportunities are missed resulting from disorganized, often duplicate, requests from multiple systems and lack of a transparent vision of a very powerful roadmap items. 

AI tools, nonetheless, enable feedback to be appropriately sorted and presented, and so they can uncover trends previously unnoticed. 

The underside line

Today’s buyers expect the buying process to be seamless, and PreSales teams are critical in delivering it. Solutions leaders who can automate on a regular basis tasks and transform data into actionable insights via AI will give you the chance to higher manage their teams, align sales and product and get creative in developing best practices that will be duplicated for future sales success. 

AI-powered tools can foster this growth, redefine product strategy and positively impact the underside line.