B2B technology sales have shifted. Deals don’t typically get done on the golf course anymore; instead, they are hard-won through technical evaluations, and value must be proven to discerning, well-informed buyers. They want to know how your product works before they buy it, and they demand technical expertise in the sales process. In this new Buyer-Led purchasing paradigm, PreSales teams are indispensable.

Industry leaders are investing in this essential department at exponential rates. In the course of a year, Snowflake and Zoom grew their teams more than 6X, and Atlassian, who is famous for their low touch sales model, went from 0 to 60 PreSales hires in half a year. Clearly, this department is growing for a reason. Is filling the headcount enough?

Growth ≠ Scale

Throwing humans at a business need is a natural thing to do–especially when your company is rapidly expanding, but hiring alone is not the answer. 

The winners in B2B tech are those who automate low-value tasks, align their product strategy with the voice of the market, and use data to make better decisions. This is a tall order. If a shiny, new (and expensive) PreSales team is left with typical solutions (or lack thereof), they probably have a few custom fields in Salesforce, a dumping ground for product feedback tickets in Jira, and a slew of spreadsheets and collaboration tools. No two team members do the job alike. Managers lack visibility in where their teams spend time, let alone how to drive repeatable outcomes. 

This is why you hired a team of can-do specialists, right? They can “figure it out” for themselves, right? The problem is that this doesn’t scale. When a PreSales team is stuck with the standard tools, the results are grim. Revenue is lost, time is wasted, and your Product team build is probably building the wrong things.

PSIOps™ is the Future of PreSales

At Vivun, we believe the solution to the PreSales dilemma is PSIOps™–A PreSales Intel and Ops platform to unlock revenue, dominate your market, and enrich your teams. You might be wondering what’s included in this new technology. Let’s dive in.

Enterprise Platform

Vivun provides a central place for PreSales to work deals, run the team, align Sales with Product, and demonstrate impact. Our enterprise platform is built on AWS to scale with our customers. We integrate deeply with the systems that position your world in PreSales at the strategic cross-section of Sales and Product Engineering. We read and write to Salesforce through an easy to set up managed package that arms PreSales leaders with the ability to manage the technical sales process and a net new dataset. For product-field alignment, we connect with systems like GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Jira Software.

Given our co-founders’ backgrounds in PreSales, it’s no wonder that security and data privacy are near and dear to our hearts. It shows in our commitment to GDPR compliance, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 1 certification, and SOC 2 Type 2 audit.

Data and Artificial Intelligence

A modern, integrated data layer is the foundation for making invaluable PreSales insights accessible across your entire company. We use Artificial Intelligence to make the underlying data actionable for smarter decisions and task automation. When it comes to AI, explainability is a core tenet. Unlike other “black box” solutions, our supervised learning system is informed by PreSales expertise and augmented by each customer’s unique and dynamic data inputs. We use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to convey the AI-driven recommendations and rationale, so as the system learns, so does every team member.

What can you do with PSIOps™?

PreSales leaders can prove value and improve the performance of their strategic function through enhanced Team Management. Tribal knowledge is captured and scaled, the right team members are assigned to the right jobs, and winning patterns are identified, communicated, and repeated.

Align your Product Roadmap with your buyers’ needs by delivering real-time insights from the field. Uncover dormant revenue by automatically reviving opportunities stalled by a Product Gap that was since prioritized and shipped. When your product meets market needs, PreSales can focus on delivering value instead of workarounds–although we can help here too.

“Vivun has allowed us to prioritize product enhancements that we could otherwise have missed, including one that affected over $5 million in ACV.” 

Matt Hunter, Vice President of Products at Branch

PreSales team members can work their deals in their context. Finally, you can give your team a place to call home. One that is integrated with your core systems, where they can centralize assets, share notes, and manage their work from the web or on their mobile devices.

The Outcomes

When you adopt a PreSales Intel and Ops platform, PreSales becomes the tip of the spear. This is like putting your buyers and your technology at the center of your business. 

“My metrics go to the CEO and all the way to the board level now–win rate by product line, what resources it takes to get a technical win. I would never have had these capabilities without Vivun.”

David Marsh, Global VP of Sales Engineering, MRI Software

By investing in the future of PreSales, revenue is accelerated, the product is aligned with market needs, and your team will lead the way to Buyer-led Growth. Give us a shout if you’re ready to see PSIOps in action.