Four Steps of Sales: Presales

 

From our previous step, marketing, it is good to continue to the presales process as they usually work hand in hand in different organizations. Presales is basically the phase between marketing actions and sales meetings or negotiations. The main goal of the presales process is to open opportunities for sales.

Presales can be done for example by same salespeople that handles the closing or there can be own experts for that. The presales process can be very specific depending on the company, but in this post, we will go through the basic tasks that usually occur in the presales process.

Marketing assistance

Usually, the people who are handling presales are working closely with marketing people. Working together can produce better results for example in planning different campaigns: marketing will target advertising to a particular sector or people in a particular job title, for example, and then presales can call prospects so that they are likely to already have some idea of the product or company. This way it is also easier to see what kind of marketing works and what kind of don’t.

Prospecting

Prospecting is mainly about finding new potential customers. It can be done from many different angles. You can search directly for a specific person, companies in a certain field, certain professional titles or e.g., jobs. Companies often use different tools for prospecting, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Vainu or Clearbit.

Contacting

Contacting can be divided into two types: so-called cold and warm or outbound and inbound depending on the situation.

Cold contacting is often thought of as cold calling even though it involves much more. For example, emails and LinkedIn mails are also ways of contacting the cold prospect. The main purpose is to get prospect’s attention, to get him/her interested and possibly map out the need at this stage.

In inbound and warm contacting, we often talk about leads instead of prospects. This is because the lead is already interested in the product or service itself and is, in principle, also willing to facilitate the process itself. Warm leads are often the result of successful marketing and good customer references.

Need identification

In order to sell a product to a customer you need to understand the customer’s needs properly. It is good to identify the need at an early stage to see if the situation can deliver the desired value to the customer. The most important thing is to see the customer’s needs as a whole: their requirements, motivation, and pain points.

Product demonstration

Especially in B2B sales product demonstration is often required. Product demonstration can be for example a practical example of how a machine works or how new software integrates with existing software. It is important for the customer to see with their own eyes the value that the product brings and at this point at the latest, the customer will know whether the product is really what they expected.

Booking sales meetings

At a certain point in the presales process it becomes time to schedule a sales meeting. Often a sales meeting is scheduled at the point where the need has been identified and the customer is already somehow familiar with the product. This is to optimize the use of time and to keep the closing rate of the appointment at the desired level.

In the next post, we will go through the sales negotiations and how they were conducted, thanks to the successful presales process that opened up opportunities!