The ability to bridge technical know-how with business acumen is what makes PreSales the group that software buyers want to speak with most, but the best PreSales leaders and team members harness the power of storytelling to go beyond giving great demos, and drive changes that fundamentally transform their companies. Here are three things you can do to level up your PreSales storytelling. 

Always show up with an opinion 

Your buyers have a specific point of view (on what they need), your company has a point of view (on why they exist, and why the product is valuable), and you should have one too. Finding a way to balance personal perspective with your company’s value proposition goes a long way towards establishing credibility and telling more compelling stories.

This isn’t new thinking—one of the most well-known B2B sales methodologies is the Challenger Sale, which encourages sales reps to challenge their prospects’ existing beliefs and teach them something new in the sales process, rather than retread discussions on features and capabilities that buyers might have already researched in advance. 

At Vivun, our Solutions Consultants have mentioned that while it can be intimidating giving demos of a PreSales platform to other sales engineering professionals, the ability to weave in examples and anecdotes from personal experience makes calls far more engaging, and the potential benefits of the Vivun platform far more believable. 

This is equally applicable when trying to drive discussions internally—having a hypothesis even if you’re still in the process of gathering the data to fully support it can go a long way towards building trust, and opening the door to change. 

Use everything you have to get the point across 

Is the best format for take-home demos a video, screenshots, or a captured front end application? What if it’s all of them? 

A well-edited video might be better for delivering a concise product overview, or directly address viewers on topics like implementation and onboarding without requiring them to click through pages of documentation. Individual team members within your buyer’s organization might appreciate a demo experience that lets them click through UI elements of your application to get a sense of what using your product is actually like. 

Demo automation solutions are increasingly allowing for the creation of what we’ve decided to call hybrid demos — a mix of captured application screens, videos, and images to create product stories that are highly engaging and interactive, while also communicating information as efficiently as possible. 

The best PreSales professionals are able to convey critical information to prospects and customers by blending different formats and channels, in the same way that the most successful media franchises are able to tell connected stories across movies, television, comic books, and more. 

Go big or go home 

Not every question needs a mind-blowing answer, but the best stories always point to some broader truth or bigger picture, and the best PreSales teams take ownership across the entire business, rather than simply sticking to demos.

At UNXPCTD 2023, Seismic SVP of Sales Engineering Brian Cotter explains that the mandate he received from CRO Hayden Stafford was to “not just manage the business but change the business”, and to deploy programs that could align product with sales, drive value consulting, run PreSales in a data-driven manner, and standardize how the company told its story to prospects and customers. 

Positioning PreSales as the company’s chief storyteller and avoiding isolated, deal-by-deal thinking allows Brian and his team to drive far more impactful outcomes at Seismic than they otherwise would have. 

The Best PreSales Teams Tell Incredible Stories

Whether it’s by helping sales engineers easily build personalized demos or enabling PreSales leaders to bring new insights to the business, one of the ways we help PreSales do more than demo at Vivun is by empowering them to tell more compelling stories. Learn more about how we help PreSales level up with demo automation here, or check out our Essential Guide to PreSales KPIs.