PreSales is the Voice of the Buyer

Sam Wortman Avatar photo

PreSales is the eyes and ears of the Field. 

They’re uniquely positioned to identify a buyer’s product fit, understand the competitive landscape, and uncover leading-edge needs and use cases. These insights are immediate, actionable, and directly tied to revenue, and if not capitalized on will go to waste. 

Customer feedback is abundant and needs to be captured

PreSales gets incredible feedback from prospects in the field that they then can funnel back to Product. They also continue to after the deal and checks are signed, gaining insights into the mechanics of their product and how that changes and evolves with different types of companies and users and use cases. 

In our latest podcast episode with Katie Barends, Senior Solutions Consultant at Iterable, she echoes this, saying, “Because we’re working so many deals and with so many customers, we really are the voice of the customer, oftentimes before they even become customers.”  

The sheer amount of feedback PreSales receives is astonishing, but it’s not surprising as they’re the experts that support and guide buyers during their entire evaluation, from trial to pilot to purchase and beyond. It’s at each distinct part of the buyer’s journey that feedback unique to those moments informs PreSales orgs how to position themselves and their products successfully in the future. It’s the voice of the market—the buyer—that powers innovation.

The buyer can be a giant blindspot

There’s no debate that Product teams have a good handle on how customers feel about their products and how they use them. To measure product usage and engagement, they have platforms like Amplitude, Pendo, Google Analytics, and the list goes on. They dedicate copious amounts of time to surveying and measuring customer satisfaction, and get to know key customers personally from interviews and getting their feedback early and often. 

This is all useful, but it doesn’t necessarily represent the revenue opportunities that are being missed in the products. Sure, every customer has a wish list. They have important asks that will lead to high adoption and retention. But would they actually pay more for them? Are the gaps you focus on and close backed by data-driven decision-making? 

PreSales has an in-depth perspective on this blindspot

Because of their close proximity to the buyer, PreSales is perhaps more in touch with the needs of the market than any department in an org. 

In a recent webinar with Martyn Storey, VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering at Puppet, he described how his PreSales teams use Hero to power customer feedback loops. 

To start, PreSales captures real-time product feedback in Hero where it is analyzed to identify, consolidate, and measure your dynamic market needs. Capturing and sharing data needs to be seamless and efficient for Product teams to consume. That’s why data inputs are mapped to known product gaps using AI that is backed by Natural Language Processing (NLP). Net new requests are submitted for review, and Hero’s AI will make recommendations. 

Next, to help with prioritization and justification for product investment, Vivun provides business metrics for Product Gaps. At your fingertips, you have the frequency, value, and status of the feature requests coming from prospects and customers. The product gap data is tracked and visualized over time, so the entire team can see what the business needs to do to close in-process opportunities and drive more revenue.

Then, Hero ties product releases to financial impact with the granularity you need to show the value of your work with confidence. In cases where customers and prospects have multiple product requests, Yield Metrics distribute the dollar value evenly across each gap. You can even get more customized with Weighted Yield Metrics that let you use your own business logic. For example, you may want to attribute higher value for “Deal Breakers” over “Nice to Haves,” or perhaps you want to modify the distribution for new business versus existing customers.

The outcome is a faster, more actionable, and profitable feedback loop. Product teams save time and resources that used to be spent manually processing feature requests filled with duplicated asks from disparate systems and disconnected people. The world’s best companies are leveraging PreSales teams to get the market insights that shape their products and drive growth. 

With Vivun, Product and the Field are most tightly aligned

When a company knows the buyer and the product inside and out, PreSales can relay critical feedback to Product and help them prioritize the most valuable features, never leaving revenue on the table or missing a growth-driving market opportunity. It’s critical to build a seamless interlock between Product and PreSales to ensure the key insights from your buyers and customers don’t fall through the cracks. 

Learn how to capture market share with the voice of the buyer in our latest webinar, Building a PreSales-Powered Customer Feedback Loop.

Sam Wortman Avatar photo January 27, 2022