What is pre-sales and pre-sales personnel have many names, such as pre-sales engineer, solution expert, pre-sales consulting engineer, technical consultant, pre-sales technical support engineer and so on.
In fact, pre-sales is a broad term for participants in the pre-sales stage.
What is the pre-sales stage?
The life cycle of an IT project can be roughly divided into three stages: pre-sale, sale and after-sale.
Pre-sale refers to the stage before signing a contract with a customer. Generally, it includes the processes of obtaining clues, communicating with customers, providing technical solutions, bidding and signing contracts.
Sales refers to the stage after signing the bill with the customer. It usually includes the process of requirements review, design, development and implementation.
After-sales refers to the stage after project delivery. Generally including maintenance, use training, technical support, etc.
Pre-sales personnel mainly provide technical support in the pre-sales stage, but continuity is usually considered in an IT project, so pre-sales personnel will also participate in sales and after-sales work.
Relationship between pre-sales and other IT personnel Pre-sales and sales
Sales (account manager) undertakes business for the company and needs to engage in business activities such as finding clues, visiting customers and maintaining customer emotions.
However, in the process of signing the project, a lot of technical and documentation work is needed. For example, technical communication with customers, writing technical documents and so on. These tasks are usually done by pre-sales personnel.
Therefore, some people say: account managers are business-oriented sales, and pre-sales engineers are technical sales.
Pre-sales and R&D
Why not let R&D support sales? Because, although R&D knows technology, it doesn't know business.
For a software developer, he may know java language, C language, Oracle database and Hadoop architecture, but he may not know the customer's business, such as financial business, medical business, and even monetary theory and medical technology. These are all businesses, and technology is based on business.
Pre-sales are a group of people who know the customer's business best in IT companies. Pre-sales staff translate the customer's business requirements into a language that technicians can understand.
Pre-sales and product manager
It sounds like pre-sales is very similar to the concept of product manager of Internet companies. In fact, in IT companies, there is also the role of product manager. What's the difference between presales and product managers?
* * * The same point is that both of them should communicate with customers, investigate requirements and write requirements documents.
The difference is that the pre-sales task is to sign the bill, and the product manager's task is to build the product. Think more about how to open the market and sign more projects before sale. Product managers are more concerned with how to create better and more marketable products.
Types of Pre-sale When answering to do pre-sale, you should first understand the types of pre-sale. Pre-sales can be divided into four categories according to whether there are products and whether they belong to headquarters or regions.
Product-oriented pre-sales &; Scheme pre-sale
The easiest thing to understand before the sale of products is that after the company has the products, it helps the sales to sell the products to customers. Hardware companies, such as server and switch manufacturers, mainly focus on product pre-sales.
Many enterprises and institutions want products that are not available in the market. What manufacturers need to do is to provide solutions. This kind of pre-sale is based on the scheme. For example, in integrated manufacturers, it is mainly scheme-based pre-sale.
Pre-sales of product line &; Regional pre-sale
Many large IT suppliers have multiple R&D product lines and set up many regional centers all over the country. So the classification of product line pre-sale and regional pre-sale appeared.
Pre-sale of product lines is usually aimed at a certain industry or even a certain kind of business, and the products are considered and laid out in a forward-looking way, facing the national market.
Regional pre-sales are closer to customers and better understand customer needs. Regional pre-sales need to face multiple customers and even multiple industries in the region, and the depth of business understanding is not as deep as that of product line pre-sales, but the breadth is more than the latter.
In such companies, product pre-sales and regional pre-sales often need to learn from each other and go out at the same time.
Job responsibilities before sales: The basic responsibility before sales is to assist sales to complete the project signing, and the work before sales mainly revolves around the project life cycle.
Pre-sale stage
Solution planning: before the sale, it is necessary to tap the industry needs, problems and pain points, sort out industry solutions and best practices, and plan and design solutions;
Technical communication: assist sales in technical communication with target customers, explain the company's existing solutions and cases, and understand customer needs through communication;
Prepare solutions: prepare solutions according to customer needs.
Scheme explanation: responsible for explaining and demonstrating the scheme for customers and guiding users to agree with the technical scheme;
Preparation of technical documents: if the scheme is accepted by users, there are still many links to provide technical documents before bidding, such as technical specifications, feasibility study data, workload evaluation data, etc.
Bidding support: responsible for assisting sales to complete the bidding work, mainly responsible for the preparation of technical fascicles and commercial fascicles, and going to the bidding site for bidding presentation and defense.
Mid-sale
Demand research: After signing the project bill (often before signing the bill), we should first conduct demand research and analysis, prepare the top-level design and demand specification, and manage the demand;
Requirements disclosure: responsible for the requirements disclosure of the project from pre-sale to sale, assisting the delivery team to confirm the requirements, and providing documents and knowledge transfer related to project implementation;
Cooperate with delivery: cooperate with the delivery manager to complete the delivery of the overall project; Because in the company, I am good at writing pre-sales materials, so I often help delivery managers or customers write work reports, work summaries, technical innovations and other materials;
After-sales stage
After-sales service: such as product technical training and material support;
Demand collection: in the after-sales stage (often in the sales process), users need to collect new demand before sales, and when there is more demand, they should try to urge customers to set up another project;
For large IT companies, these responsibilities are usually assigned to different types of pre-sales personnel, such as solution experts, pre-sales supervisors, product line pre-sales and regional pre-sales.
Pre-sales capability system
(This section is not detailed. Interested readers can pay attention to other articles in "IT Pre-sales Circle". )
Pre-sales skills
Know the product: Before selling, you must be very familiar with your company's products and solutions, especially the products and projects you are responsible for; And have an understanding of friends' products and programs;
Understand the business: familiar with the pre-sale signing and bidding process; Understand the organizational structure, decision-making process and key personnel of customer units;
Know the business: before selling, you should know the industry you are responsible for and be very familiar with the customer business of specific services;
Understand technology: before selling, you should master basic knowledge such as hardware, network, software development and database; And often learn new technologies that may be involved, such as cloud computing, blockchain, AI, AR, 5G and so on.
Understand the demand: demand work is the basic skill of pre-sales, and pre-sales need to master the skills of demand investigation, demand analysis, demand scheme preparation, demand audit, demand disclosure and demand mining.
Understand the trend: before selling, understand the latest progress and development direction of the industry, and understand the pain points and demands of the industry; Strong insight and sensitivity to the industry.
Planning: senior presales, solution experts, solution architects, etc. , need to be able to plan products and do top-level design;
Can write: the main job before sales is to write materials. Therefore, we should have the ability to express words and be able to write various types of documents;
Will say: before selling, you should be able to talk about the plan, and have good communication skills, and be able to communicate effectively with customers and teams;
Pre-sale ability
In addition to the skills mentioned above, pre-sales also need to have the following abilities:
Learning ability: as for the pre-sales skills mentioned above, it takes a long time to learn before selling, constantly improve yourself and update your knowledge;
Anti-pressure ability: before the sale, sometimes I have to travel to many cities a week to meet multiple customers and prepare multiple tenders at the same time; Must have good pressure resistance.
Coordination ability: in the face of arduous tasks, it is necessary to coordinate leaders, colleagues, home front, partners, etc. Before sale;
Resilience: in the process of communicating with customers and in other pre-sales work, you should have resilience;
Guidance ability: pre-sales need to have consulting and guidance ability, which can be supported and recognized by customers.
Common pre-sales software tools
There are no professional software tools before sales, but mastering some commonly used software is very helpful for pre-sales work:
Word: Probably only pre-sales copywriting can appreciate the profoundness of Word;
Excel: mainly used to manage clues and requirements; Before it was sold here, this software was overqualified;
PPT: The higher the pre-sale, the easier PPT will be (speaking).
Visio: it is often used to draw flowcharts and network architecture diagrams;
PS: it will be used suddenly, so I won't elaborate here;
Mindmanager, such as MindMaster: helps to organize ideas for work and materials;
Axure: mainly used for software pre-sale and interface design;
Notes: such as cloud notes, OneNote, etc. Used to take notes, take study notes and collect data.
Other issues about pre-sale.
The following are the pre-sales questions that some netizens care about. Let's answer them briefly:
Is the salary high? Please refer to "IT Pre-sales Circle" and "What is the salary level of pre-sales engineers".
Hard work is not hard: many companies' pre-sales work is quite saturated, especially in the first two years, and there are many things to learn; If you are satisfied with the status quo, you can work and relax; But no pains, no gains, especially in IT companies;
Whether to travel: it depends on the market scope of the company. Generally speaking, it is necessary to travel, and it is basically not necessary to travel before regional sales;
Do you have to know how to drink? Before the sale, you are neither an account manager nor a delivery manager, and you have no responsibility to "fix" the customer. You are basically dealing with customers in the workplace, and it doesn't matter whether you can drink or not.
Is pre-sale a "fudge"? After learning so much hard work before sales, is it "flickering"? Unless the company has no products, it will give you a lot of money.