The B2B sales landscape is rapidly transforming as digitalization is driving buyers to perform their own research on potential products and services. For your revenue organization, the impact is profound as previously dependable approaches are no longer effective. The buyer's journey has shortened, and sellers are being brought in later to the process. This has created new demands on your salesforce and changed the needs of your team’s pre-sales efforts.
A More Extensive Pre-Sales Strategy is Imperative
For our purposes, pre-sales involves all the activities that enable sales teams to be informed and equipped to sell. The primary activities in the process include:
- Lead nurturing
- Qualifying prospects
- Researching prospects
- Sales team preparation
With the changes in buyer behavior, improving your pre-sales tools and strategies places your organization in a better position to market and sell to warm or hot leads. As a result, your organization is the beneficiary of a more efficient pipeline and increased wins.
Benefits of Elevating Your Pre-Sales Strategy
Investing in pre-sales software is becoming a necessity to compete in competitive markets. Enhancing your pre-sales efforts drives a range of benefits to your revenue team. Ultimately, it helps customers to precisely understand how your product can address their top business priorities. Below are the four most compelling reasons to invest in pre-sales software:
- Simplifying the Capture of Actionable Insights
Effective selling today goes beyond just a sophisticated presentation. It also requires a solid grasp of market trends, the prospect’s business model, biggest challenges, and the ability to craft a value proposition that closely aligns with their top priorities. Gathering key market and company information in one platform can unlock new actionable insights for your customers. Additionally, pre-sales and sales teams can use these tools to better understand prospects and guide their sales strategies and pitches. Entering meetings prepared with this information shows your seriousness and interest in gaining the client’s business.
- Automating Data Gathering and Lead Generation
With the advent of AI technology, businesses can now automate repetitive business processes that used to take much time and resources to complete. An example is the automation of data collection on potential customers. With automation comes an acceleration in building relevant leads at a lower cost and reduced time. In addition, with the use of AI, the software can analyze the data to identify patterns and trends that can result in new leads.
- More Precise Targeting of Customer Personas
Leading businesses create customer personas - illustrative traits of a product's ideal customer - to help their marketing and revenue teams align and focus on target companies and decision-makers. Honing in on the companies and roles most likely to purchase your product or service is vital in tailoring your material and sales pitches to prospects. With powerful AI capabilities, pre-sales software can help you quickly map out and visualize your ideal customer.
- Creating Messaging that Resonates with Your Target Audience
Increasingly B2B prospects expect a B2C-like personalization experience during their journey. To improve close rates and reduce preparation time, sales pitch planning needs to be part of the pre-sales flowchart process. Flowchart solutions can help better define the sales process, including the recommended steps a salesperson should take at each stage. It also serves as a valuable training tool for new salespeople.
Must-have Features of Your Pre-Sales Toolkit
The variety of tools available for pre-sales teams to utilize in improving and streamlining processes has exploded in recent years. Much of this is driven by Generative AI technology and the ability to easily personalize content, accelerate processes, and remove repetitive tasks from teams. There are an increasingly wide variety of niche and general types of pre-sales software available, but some of the most common types include:
- Client Relationship Management (CRM) systems aid in qualifying and tracking leads as they advance through the sales funnel.
- Business Intelligence solutions gather, process, and present relevant insights to build credibility, demonstrate understanding, and drive richer conversations with prospects.
- Lead Nurturing software scrape, nurture, and qualify leads to provide a better-filtered pool of prospects.
- Sales Acceleration software enables more sales conversations and shortened sales cycles by automating administrative tasks and streamlining processes.
Just as the types of pre-sales solutions are expanding, the features available continue to get broader. Below are the five must-have features of pre-sales software to position your salespeople for success:
- Enabling Collaboration
The first feature any pre-sales tool must have is cloud-based access. Cloud-based software provides better collaboration, lower costs, increased flexibility, and a host of other benefits. Teamwork is critical in pre-sales activities, and any software must allow your team to work closely together on developing and updating material.
- Automating Tasks
Your revenue organization is likely being stretched thin and needing resource help. Task automation in pre-sales software reduces preparation time and lowers costs for sales campaign launches. Below are some of the tasks that can be automated:
- Managing pipelines
- Proposal template creation
- Lead information gathering
- Key market and company insights
- Follow-up templates
- Smart Data Gathering
One of the functions that make CRM and business analytics solutions so popular is their ability to crunch data. For instance, lead scraping tools can scour the internet to gather contact data of leads, including emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, and social media usernames. With these pre-sales capabilities in your company’s arsenal, you save time and costs.
- Visualizing Sales Funnels
Sales and marketing teams can also use pre-sales solutions to visually represent the sales funnel. This software can create graphical funnels, so sales teams gain a better visual experience when guiding decision-makers through the customer journey. By design, these tools provide sales teams with more clarity on the necessary process steps and actions to take once a lead or potential customer reaches a milestone in their journey.
- Improving Client Presentations
Sleek presentations are no longer the end-all in sales pitches, as clients seek more substantial information and insights to base their decisions. But compelling presentations will still enhance the delivery of your team’s sales narrative, quantitative benefits, key value propositions, and how they align with the company's priorities.
Advanced presentation solutions can also help to create templatized presentations, so sales teams are equipped to tailor and utilize them with their clients, including:
- Product value propositions
- Target personas
- Product selling points
- Customer journeys
Improve Your Pre-Sales Strategy to Drive Wins
Pre-sales software is getting more advanced and diverse as buyers’ requirements change and demand more personalization and insights from sellers. For selling groups, these solutions are becoming a necessity to create more effective sales channels, efficient use of sales resources, and ultimately improve sales conversion rates. Investing in these systems can also help drive new behaviors in your salesforce as buyers continue to evolve.
Let FinListics help you Generate Insights that Power Conversions
FinListics’ business-insights-as-a-service platform can prepare your sales team to differentiate from the competition and deliver wins. Our ClientIQ tool is the “secret sauce” for demonstrating a deep understanding of your prospect’s business. We can help you uncover the goals, strategies, and critical initiatives motivating their decision-makers and unlock opportunities for your organization. Please contact us today for a short software demo from one of our experts.
