Pre-sales refers to the technical personnel who serve customers and sales staff when developing the market. The following is an analysis of the responsibilities and capacity requirements of pre-sales technical support that I have compiled for you. Welcome to read!

In the IT field, the successful completion of a project requires the close cooperation of sales personnel, pre-sales personnel, project implementers (developers) and after-sales service personnel. This paper expounds the process of pre-sales technical support from the perspective of pre-sales technical support personnel, and puts forward some points that should be paid attention to in each link according to the author's experience in pre-sales, hoping to help pre-sales personnel.

1. The qualities that pre-sales personnel need.

Pre-sales personnel should be the bridge between project developers and business sales personnel. In the eyes of business sales personnel, pre-sales personnel play the role of technicians or technical experts, while in the process of project implementation, in the eyes of developers, pre-sales personnel are technical-oriented sales personnel, and in the eyes of users, pre-sales personnel are technical experts representing the company's technical level. In specific pre-sales technical support activities, pre-sales personnel coordinate the relationship among sales staff, users and post-development personnel, show users the company's technical strength, listen to users' initial needs, discuss the preliminary framework of the project system with users, assist sales personnel to recommend the company's products and technical advantages to users, and shield users' unreasonable needs that bring technical risks to project implementation for post-development personnel. They are the original designers of the technical framework of the project.

Pre-sales personnel need to have the qualities of technicians and sales personnel, as shown below:

● Familiar with your own products.

● Have comprehensive technical expertise. Familiar with the current development direction of IT technology.

● Have a clear understanding of the company's development capability, technical advantages and disadvantages.

As the sales of industry software, you must be familiar with the business of this industry, have a certain understanding of the current situation and development direction of informatization in this industry, and understand the basic situation of other professional software in this industry.

Familiar with the technology and product trends of this industry, and understand the situation and characteristics of similar products and their competitors.

● Able to skillfully use text and graphic editors to prepare plans and tenders.

Familiar with the general procedures of project bidding.

Good at communication, good communication skills and skills.

It is usually impossible for a person to have such comprehensive knowledge and skills. Therefore, for large-scale projects, in order to fully communicate with customers and show the strength of the company, the preliminary demonstration and design of the system is often a team. According to the needs of the project, this team may have the roles of industry business experts, database experts, operating system experts, information security experts, network architects, software system analysts, project management experts and so on.

2. Process description of project bidding activities

Projects are tracked and signed from an early stage. As a pre-sales person, you need to work closely with the sales staff. Usually, the initial process of obtaining a project is as follows:

1. Sales staff visit users, get to know the basic situation of users' projects, introduce the company and its products to users, and establish good relations with users.

2. Before the user bids, the salesperson will introduce pre-sales technical support personnel to communicate with the user, understand the user's demand for the project, prefer the technical framework, and guide the user to the company's technical ideas. This process may need to be repeated many times. At least make sure that users are interested in the company and are willing to invite you to bid.

3. The user sends the tender, and the pre-sales personnel prepare the tender according to the requirements of the tender and the communication with the user in the early stage.

4. Attend the bidding meeting, give technical and commercial explanations and answer questions.

5. Participate in commercial and technical negotiations and draft commercial contracts and technical agreements for the project.

6. Signing contracts, project implementation and maintenance.

2. 1. Contact users before bidding

Contact with users before bidding, understand users' real needs and ideas, and understand users' preferences for system framework, platform and new technology through communication, so as to "get their own place" and "hit the nail on the head" in bidding in the future. Introduce the company's technology and products, so that users can have a clear understanding of the company's technology and products before bidding, guide users' needs to the company's technology and product ideas, and let users have certain technical preferences for the company.

Communication and need to know usually include:

1. User organization, informatization status, existing hardware and equipment, network situation, and software system in use;

2. Planning, objectives, scale and requirements of the new system, including users' requirements for the safety, reliability, availability and expansibility of the system;

3. Business content, business process system status and software function requirements;

4. Selection of platform and database;

5. Information security and storage requirements;

6. Understand the software development mechanism;

7. Hot technologies that users are interested in;

Communication should be extensive and not limited to the specific person in charge of the project. If possible, you can visit the superior users and the principal responsible persons or technical authorities of various departments, try your best to understand the users' understanding and ideas about the project, be good at identifying users' identities in communication and visits, and master the ideas of users who have decision-making power and great influence on the project. At the same time, we can preliminarily analyze which users may be future bid evaluation judges and pay attention to their interest in the project. In order to be targeted in bidding.

Guide users to understand the technical route and product characteristics that the company is good at. You can tell the user about past projects and their functional features, preferably with the help of demonstrations, which will tell you what he is interested in, what he is not interested in, and what other competitors' products are like. This is convenient for in-depth communication with users and finding mutual resonance points with users.

It is a long-term accumulation process to track and understand the opponent's situation and the current situation of similar products, analyze the possible characteristics of opponent's products and solutions, and find or propose new system highlights that are more innovative and attractive to users than opponents. Of course, these highlights should first consider their own technical strength and the investment scale of the project.

2.2. Bidding and preparation of bidding documents

2.2. 1 Establish a bidding team.

To set up a project bidding team, the core of the bidding team should be the project legal representative. According to the scale of the project, technical difficulty and the requirements of bidding time, make a bidding plan, decompose the plan into everyone, determine everyone's work content and plan, and determine the supervisor of the plan implementation.

The bidding time is generally fixed and short, which also tests the response speed of a company and team. The bidding must be completed within this limited time, otherwise the bidding will fail due to insufficient preparation. This requires the usual technical accumulation, industry knowledge accumulation, tender accumulation, if there are similar tenders or templates, as well as good team spirit and atmosphere.

As an industrial application project, the technical part may involve network planners, hardware product managers, software architects, industry experts, data planning experts or database experts, information security experts and other experts in other professional fields. The establishment of this team needs to integrate relevant resources inside and outside the company. For example, the pre-sales support of professional companies (HP, IBM, etc.). ), you can temporarily invite experts from related industries and university professors from related majors to play relevant roles.

You can even consider other companies related to joint bid.

In the bidding team, it is best to establish a confidentiality system, especially for super-large projects, and discuss and determine the quotation and core technology in a small scope.

If necessary, closed development can be adopted.

2.2.2. Preparation of tender

User's bidding documents usually include: invitation to bid, business requirements, technical requirements, attachments and drawings, which are the basis for compiling bidding documents. Before writing the tender, members of the bidding team should carefully and repeatedly read the tender, especially the qualification requirements for bidders. The bidding team will discuss the tender, find out the ambiguous description in the tender, ask the tenderer to explain according to the situation, and determine the project qualification, bidding and implementation risks, opponents' situation, advantages and disadvantages of bidding, etc. Formulate bidding strategy; Determine the contents and methods of bidding; Preliminary preparation of bidding outline.

In the process of bidding preparation, the following points should be noted:

1. The commercial tender shall be answered in strict accordance with the requirements of the tender, and the order and format of the reply shall be strictly followed.

2. For the contents not required in the tender, especially the commercial tender, it is best not to gild the lily. If you want to increase the qualifications that are helpful to project bidding, it is best to consider carefully to ensure that there are no loopholes. The main purpose of the commercial part is to show the strength of the bidding company and ensure the qualification to participate in the bidding. The first thing is to ensure that the bid is valid. Note that some things can be said, but not all things that can be said are suitable for writing.

3. Treatment of variance table: The tenderee usually requires that the variance between the bidding documents and the bidding documents be indicated in the variance table. When preparing the bidding scheme, we should find out the differences and describe them as clearly as possible. But you need to be very careful when you finally sort out and submit the variance table. Not every difference is suitable to be put forward in this formal field, and some things need to be kept vague to improve the possibility of winning the bid. At the same time,

4. Handling of quotation: After the quotation is filled in, stamped and stamped according to the formal requirements, it is best to have one or two blank copies. The format of the quotation is the same as the formal quotation, but the price is not filled in. Because during the period from the formal quotation package to the submission of the quotation, the salesperson is likely to find out the price of the opponent or the user's view on the overall price of the project. This is because the price needs to be adjusted according to the project, market, competitors and users before the backup quotation can be used. Especially when the company bids in different places, time is basically not allowed if you want to redo the quotation.

5. Handling of sealing strips: On the basis of sealing strips specified in the bidding documents, you must prepare several spare sealing strips, of course, stamped. Especially when the company bids in different places, the market information is ever-changing, so you can't guarantee not to modify your price and tender before bidding.

6. The qualification in the business tender and the part requiring the company's seal must be checked in strict accordance with the requirements of the tender, and errors and omissions in this part may lead to the rejection of the tender. So it is best to have more than two people to check and check.

7. For a group company, there may be several legal entities sharing qualifications. At this time, we should pay attention to check which qualifications are not the qualifications of the bidding legal person. If the bidding legal person is qualified, we should ask the qualified legal person to sign the authorization statement. Otherwise, the bidding may result in "cheating the bidding unit with the qualification of a third-party company" and become invalid.

2.3. Participate in bidding

For a relatively large project, it is very important to rationally allocate the personnel of the bidding team. According to the specific circumstances of the project, bidders can be divided into business personnel and technical personnel according to the division of labor when preparing tenders. Continue to be subdivided into business contacts, business bidders, technical parts, and then subdivided into people responsible for network parts, architecture, and application system functions.

Bidders should wear uniform clothing, uniform professional clothing and company logo, be confident and natural, and give the bidding judges a good overall image. Strictly abide by the bidding discipline.

Don't communicate too much with the familiar judges. Although I had full contact with users in the early stage, I may be familiar with some judges and have a good relationship. However, in formal bidding places, it is generally polite to say hello, and it is not easy to have too much communication and intimate conversation with users. These actions may cause misunderstanding by other judges, and may also give opponents an opportunity. Unless you are specialized and have a special purpose, for example, in some cases, showing a close relationship with the best leaders or core personnel in bidding will mislead other judges and cause greater psychological pressure and burden to opponents. But there are many risks in this way. Caution.

Before bidding, prepare corresponding slides for each part of the tender. Slides have two functions. One is to convey information to the judges intuitively through words, pictures, animations, etc., so that the judges can understand the content of the explanation. The second is to help bidders standardize their thinking through slides and not deviate from the theme. Therefore, slide production should aim at these two functions. You should know what to say and how long to speak on each slide.

It is best to have actual demonstrations and talk about standards in combination with demonstrations. As users of industrial application software, they pay more attention to the performance of similar systems of bidders in the past. If we can show similar application systems to users and illustrate the system architecture and functional characteristics with examples, we will usually achieve better results. However, when showing the previous system, we should pay attention to foster strengths and avoid weaknesses, shield some weaknesses and defects of the system, and pay attention to the time control of demonstration.

The equipment used in bidding should be protected. After installing the demo system and slides, the notebook computer used for bidding should be used carefully to prevent the equipment from being accidentally damaged, such as antivirus and accidental damage. Don't use a laptop to surf the Internet in Internet cafes during the bidding business trip, prevent computers from being flooded in hotels, and don't easily sort out files of computer systems. Due to the accidental deletion of files, the system may not start normally. Before bidding for business trip, it is best to back up the installation disk of the system and the installation disk of the application system. If possible, two sets of laptops can be used for installation.

Have a good talk with the competitors who participate in the bidding. Maybe we will meet face to face in another bidding next time. Maybe next time he will fight with you. You can also get some useful information by accident through conversation.

2.3. 1. bidding demonstration

Bidding should highlight key points, cover all contents, highlight the company's characteristics and advantages, and highlight technical advantages and characteristics. The content should try to take care of every judge.

There is usually a time limit for bidding. During this period, how to reasonably allocate the time for company introduction, business introduction, technology introduction, project implementation, technical support and service needs to be carefully considered before bidding. The allocation of time and content is mainly adjusted according to the following conditions:

● Advantages and characteristics of our company and technology.

In bidding, especially when the bidding order is behind, the judges are already very clear about some common things and are not interested in hearing you repeat them. What they care about is your characteristics compared with other competitors.

Composition and characteristics of bid evaluation experts.

Try your best to analyze the composition of the bidding judges, the composition and number of personnel in the roles of senior leaders, technical experts and departmental business experts. Usually, senior leaders are unfamiliar with IT technology, and his judgment is mainly based on non-technical indicators such as company size, qualification, strength, after-sales service and price. Technical experts mainly judge the system architecture, new technologies adopted, security, expansibility and software development and management mechanism, while departmental business experts pay more attention to software functions, ease of use and interfaces with existing systems.

Pay attention to the expression and attitude of the judges during the bidding process, and adjust the depth of the content in time.

● The opponent's situation and weakness after bidding.

For example, the judges think that the security of the system and the standardization of project development are very important, but other contestants who said the target did not pay attention to it. At this time, you need to adjust the content in time and focus on security and project development mechanism.

In addition, don't attack your opponent easily. Some judges may have a crush on your opponent. Your direct attack on your opponent will arouse his disgust and deliberately suppress you. The way to attack your opponent is to highlight your own advantages.

Several people may have different division of labor and different contents in bidding, but we should pay attention to the overall logical rigor. First of all, one can sort out all the contents of the lecture and make an introduction. Then, after everyone has finished their own part, briefly introduce the next part and introduce the next lecturer. Make the whole lecture coherent and unified.

Adjust your state and mentality before bidding, relax when bidding, and don't report the mentality of "taking the exam in the examination room" or "being audited", which will make you fall into a state of tension and fear. When you go to the podium and see many people bidding, you will be more nervous and prone to mistakes. You should have confidence in your plans and products. You are an expert and report "Cough! I will introduce our good things to you, which will definitely solve your current problem! " Mentally, you should have an impulse to show your proud works to outsiders. The more people there are, the more proud and excited you are. At this time, your best state has come!

2.3.2 Answer questions

When answering bids and questions, the principle is: it doesn't matter if you are unclear (ambiguous), but you must never make a mistake!

You can't argue with the judges

You can't show contempt for the judges' questions.

Answers to unanswerable questions should cooperate with each other. When you find your partner confused, if you can help him answer the best question you can't answer, then try to answer this question from another angle quickly, so as to gradually lead the topic away and avoid embarrassment.

2.4. Commercial and technical negotiations

After winning the bid in advance, business and technical negotiations will be held, and pre-sales technical support personnel will mainly participate in the negotiation and drafting of technical agreements.

The negotiation of technical agreement is the key process to reduce the project risk. Technical agreement is the result of negotiation, usually as an annex to the contract, which directly affects the difficulty and risk of project implementation. Therefore, we must be patient and meticulous, not just eager to sign the contract as soon as possible.

The purpose of technical agreement is to define the functional boundary and depth. Especially for industrial application software, a "degree" is usually ignored in bidding documents and bids. Such as the depth of the application system, the specific boundary of functions, the adoption degree of new technologies, etc. , are often vague, it is very likely that there are great differences between the two sides in these aspects, which will bring risks to the subsequent project implementation. The negotiation of technical agreement is to control these "degrees", communicate sensitive issues and technical difficulties and reach a consensus. Pay attention to the vague terms such as "completely solve some problems" and "completely solve" in the technical agreement. This vague definition will bring great risks to the project development, and it is necessary to discuss clearly the depth of completion and the technical means adopted in the technical agreement, so that the project risks can be fully displayed and controlled before the project implementation.

3. Preparation of bidding documents

The core point of tender preparation is to respond to the tender item by item, without omission.

As a large company or group, it is necessary and necessary to formulate unified norms and guidelines for the preparation of bidding documents, and establish a template library of bidding documents through accumulation to ensure the quality of bidding documents and shorten the preparation period of bidding documents.

There are many articles about the specific writing of bidding documents, which are well described. I won't repeat it here.

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