Without a doubt, the people in the revenue organization that have the greatest impact on closing and expanding business (other than account executives) are in PreSales. 

Behind every won deal, there’s an amazing technical seller—in this post, we’ll dive into a few examples of how PreSales elevates and empowers their partners in Sales, from individual sales reps all the way to the CRO. 

Technical sellers build trust with buyers like no one else can

We sat down with Scott Bleczinski early last year to get his perspective on how PreSales could get more buy-in from their CROs for the resources and support they needed, and he explained that SEs were always positioned to have an outsized impact on revenue because of their ability to win buyers’ trust. 

He told us the story of Ryan Warren, then a Solutions Consultant during Scott’s tenure as the CRO of ExactTarget: 

“Ryan’s name was aligned with every big deal that closed, and it occurred to me that I didn’t need to hire more sales reps. I needed more Ryans—people who were technical but also highly collaborative and great with customers.” For Scott, providing potential customers with access to experts that could connect their business problems with real solutions was critical to moving the revenue needle. 

Technical sellers are motivated just as much by business as they are by technologies 

While some organizations believe that the role of PreSales and other technical selling teams is simply to understand and showcase technology and solutions, we believe that PreSales is meant to do more than demo—and a growing number of revenue leaders share this view as well. 

During his time as the CRO of Harness, Jason Eubanks explained that his partnership with Field CTO and VP of Field Engineering Nick Durkin was incredibly fruitful because they were both aligned around growing revenue efficiently and eliminating guesswork from the sales process. 

“Capacity planning for headcount and bottoms-up activity tracking is an important aspect [of the job] that most SEs hate putting time into, and most SE leaders try to protect their teams from that,” said Jason. “If more SE leaders were proficient in that process, it would drastically help their CROs, and really—the CRO’s conversation with the CEO and CFO.” 

“The other thing that is really important in a company with multiple approaches to customer acquisition,” he continued, “is that the SE team is proactive and constantly testing not just sales efficiency, but the effectiveness of their technical validation process, based on where they are in the customer journey. That helps take a lot of guesswork out of the CRO’s job.” 

Technical sellers are incredible storytellers 

For Seismic CRO Hayden Stafford, PreSales brings the value and story of Seismic to life for buyers and act as revenue partners to Sales, not just demo jockeys. To Hayden, an important quality of technical sellers is that they can have conversations about customer outcomes, rather than getting mired in features and functions—and Seismic’s PreSales team leads the rest of the company in adopting this approach. 

“As we evolve from a product to a platform company, our stories have moved from feature function to value-driven. The Storytelling Labs initiative that [PreSales] is spearheading has ensured that we tell the most impactful, value-driven, and personalized story to every buyer, every time.” 

The ability to communicate critical insights to the entire business has also paid dividends elsewhere, especially in the way that Seismic responds to customer feedback. “[PreSales] has led the charge in aligning the product and go-to-market teams with the Voice of the Field program, capturing all the product gaps that customers have identified within our roadmap,” Hayden explained. “They’ve shifted our thinking towards the outcomes [our products] deliver, instead of focusing on features and functions.” 

“The PreSales team is the group that buyers trust,” he concluded. “And as I often say, a great Sales Engineer can make a poor [Account Exec] good, and an average AE great.”