Pre-Sales in IT Industry

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By Ramanooj Dasbasu

Pre-sales in IT Industry

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The global IT market is bursting in its seams with organisations at all scales either computerising their operations or trying to stay ahead of its competitions by adopting the latest IT trends in the industry. This fact is what drives IT based organisations and service providers to extend better, faster, secured and more reliable products, offerings and services to the end consumers.

There is cut throat competition between IT organisations to

have their products and services implemented and thereby gain market share – the basic philosophy of marketing and doing business. In this life cycle of reaching out to end consumers, the phase of pre-sales plays a major role. Most IT organisations have dedicated teams and/or departments

whose sole responsible is to create a ground work for the sales and marketing team for them to present to the end consumer solutions and services that the organisation can provide and start, enhance and maintain a relationship with

them.

This paper examines the basic fundamentals of pre-sales in an IT organisation and along with it the processes and practices that enable pre-sales.


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1

WHAT IS PRE-SALES? 1

Introduction 1

Components of Pre-sales 1

Where does it fit? 3

WHY IS PRE-SALES IMPORTANT? 5

Core Benefits 5

Organisation’s Expectations 6

PRE-SALES: A WORKING PRINCIPLE 6

TOOLS: AN AID TO PRE-SALES 8

CASE STUDY 8


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Executive Summary Prior to a formal proposal with a solution to a requirement is presented to the client,

a vast amount of tasks and activities happen in the background that makes a base

for the proposal to be created and presented. This set of activities and tasks are

typically handled by the pre-sales team. The team would typically be driving the

prospect from various aspects like gathering information about the prospect,

responding to client queries and liaising with various entities within and outside the

organisation in order to give an edge to the proposal.

Having a dedicated pre-sales team is very beneficial for an organisation as is

explained later in the paper. It leads to a significant amount of contribution towards

the goals of the organisation and also for it to capture market share. The pre-sales

team uses various tools for its purpose that may span a knowledge base and

estimation approaches. All these collectively enable the process of pre-sales.

What is Pre-sales?

Introduction

By definition, pre-sales is an exercise that enables an organisation to respond to a

prospective customer where its requirements can be mapped to the products,

offerings and/or services extended by the organisation. In a nut-shell, pre-sales

creates the ground work and extend support to the sales and marketing team of the

organisation in responding to a prospective customer’s requirement mostly through a

formal proposal.

In effect, an organisation’s pre-sales team plays the role of “eyes and ears” in terms

of acquiring business and new engagements. The pre-sales team may get a lead

from various sources – request for proposal (RFP) floated by the customer,

information received by the delivery team currently engaged in another project for

the client, or cold calling just to name a few.

Components of Pre-sales

The pre-sales process includes a vast range of activities, all focused in preparations

towards establishing a suitable engagement with the prospective client and

responding to any information requests that the client may generate. These activities

include but are not limited to:

Responding to a client’s

requirement

This component involves the pre-sales team to respond to

a client’s requirement. The response may be specific as in

a proposal submitted against a RFP floated by the client,

details provided against a RFI or a Statement of Work

(SoW).

Responses can also be informal such as via email, directing

the client towards certain web sites or provisioning of

brochures.


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Visit to client sites It is seen that many organisations make it mandatory for

vendors responding to a RFP to have a visit to the client

site. This approach is very helpful for the vendors to have

a better understanding of the context of the requirements.

Large and complex prospects often requires

representatives of the pre-sales team to visit the client site

and give presentations, conduct meetings and workshops

before they can provide recommendations in the proposal.

This exercise also becomes critical from the perspective of

making a demonstration of a product or conduct a proof of

concept (POC).

Support for client visits

at vendor locations

In many instances, a prospective client might make a visit

to the vendor’s work location(s) prior to awarding the

contract. The primary idea behind this is for the client to

ascertain facts provided by the vendor and also to have an

understanding of how the project will be executed.

Such client visits are very crucial for the organisation from

the standpoint of gaining the contract and its pre-sales

team plays a very important role in this. From preparing

necessary presentations to be given to the client during

their visit to arranging floor walks, the pre-sales team stay

very much involved in the whole process.

Market analysis Typically, when a client requires services, multiple vendors

respond to the requirement. Thus, for an organisation to

stay ahead of its competition, it is imperative for it to have

significant amount of market intelligence in terms of

similar services and/or products that are available

elsewhere, costing information and general market trend.

The pre-sales team is responsible for this and it helps them

in preparing a proposal for the client that will provide

financial and technical benefits to both the client and the

vendor.

Connecting with other

groups and centre of

excellences (COEs)

within the organisation

It is a fact that the pre-sales team may not have all the

information required in order to effectively pursue a

prospect. Furthermore, there may be situations where the

pre-sales team may require specific or highly customized

information to be provided to the client. In other cases,

technical know-how may be required to respond to the

client and the pre-sales team may not have the necessary

expertise.

In these scenarios, it becomes very critical for the pre-

sales team to connect with other groups and centre of

excellences and gather the necessary information.

Supporting sales and

marketing teams

Typically, a large organisation would have partnership

agreements or alliances with other organisations so as to

collectively offer an end-to-end solution to the client. For

instance, a software development firm may partner with a

hardware manufacturer to provide a complete system


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integration solution to a client. The pre-sales team utilizes

these alliances and partnerships to portray extended

capabilities to the client.

Where does it fit?

To understand where pre-sales comes into the picture, an understanding of the end-

to-end life cycle of a prospect materializing into customer is required. Refer Figure 1

below.

Figure 1: Sales Life Cycle

RFP

Internal Lead

Cold Calling

Identify Prospect

Gather Requirements/ Understand Prospect

Create Artefacts

Handover to Sales and Marketing

Team

Engage with the client for the prospect

Sales process

End

Pre-sales team identifies and pursues a prospective lead

The team gathers information/details about the prospect and does the ground work inclusive of site visits, client visits, responding to any query by the client, interfacing with other groups and COEs and market research

Provide support to the sales and marketing teams in terms of providing all necessary information about the prospect

Pre-sales


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In the life cycle of turning a prospect into a customer, the pre-sales phase is at the

very beginning. Although, it will be incorrect to say that once pre-sales completes

the process and hands over the prospect to sales and marketing team, its work is

complete. Pre-sales continues to support the sales and marketing team through out

the process till either the prospect converts to a customer or is awarded to another

organisation. In large organisations, even after this and as a good practice,

knowledge is gathered for the exercise in terms of best practices, lessons learnt and

in case of an unsuccessful effort, a root cause of the failure. This is extremely crucial

because this information will help the organisation in adopting the best and avoiding

the contentious aspects in future similar exercise.

Let us now examine the individual components of Figure 1 to have an insight of the

various steps.

Leads

A “lead” can be defined as the information about a possible prospect for an

organisation to extend its products, offerings and/or services to a client. The pre-

sales process starts with a lead. Three most common leads are mentioned in the

figure above are elaborated below:

RFP A request for proposal is perhaps the most definitive lead. If a

client is floating a RFP, it means that they have already identified a

requirement and have budgeted the same. In a way, the job of the

pre-sales team becomes easier. It is expected that the client would

have provided sufficient details of the requirement and its

expectations in the RFP. The pre-sales team would therefore have

specific information on how and what to respond to. However, in

practice it is seen that there may exist gaps and it then becomes

the responsibility of the pre-sales team to identify and close these

gaps prior to responding to the RFP.

Internal Lead An internal lead is typically when personnel (may or may not be a

part of the pre-sales team) already associated with a client gets

information about a prospect and informs the pre-sales team to

pursue it further. In these scenarios, an organisation would try and

action the prospect as quickly as possible in order to avoid the

client having to raise a RFP thereby introducing competition.

In few cases, and internal lead may be a result of value-adds or

innovations proposed to the client. This aspect becomes a little

difficult from pre-sales perspective as it would need the team to

convince the client to undertake the proposed enhancement/

service and budget the same.

Cold Calling Cold calling is typically when organisations approach prospective

clients and extends its products, offerings and/or services. Most

common cold calling approaches are unsolicited telephone calls and

emails. Typically, the sales and marketing team members would be

involved in cold calling. Once the client agrees to have initial

discussions, pre-sales people are informed and the process of

information gathering and creation of necessary artefacts

commences.


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Preparations (Gather Requirements and Create Artefacts)

This is the most critical phase in the pre-sales process. During this phase, the pre-

sales team takes necessary steps to gather information about the prospect as much

as possible and use the information to create artefacts such as proposals,

presentations and so forth.

There are various aspects to this phase, some of which are listed in “Components of

Pre-sales” section. As mentioned, these aspects form the core of this phase. For

instance, visiting the client site and holding discussions and workshops for gathering

details about the requirements is vital for identifying the gaps and proposing to the

client an en-to-end solution covering all aspects of the requirement. Similarly, to

build a strong case in the proposal, information might be required from other expert

groups within the organisation in terms of detailing technical capabilities and prior

experience in executing similar exercises. This kind of information generates a

certain comfort level in the client.

Support to Sales and Marketing Team

Time to time, the sales and marketing team would require assistance or information

in relation to a proposal that is to be provided to a client or a product that is to be

marketed. The pre-sales team provides the necessary support and furnish all the

details to the sales team as necessary. For instance, post submission of a proposal to

a client, they may come back with a specific set of questions regarding the proposal.

Or as a part of evaluating the proposal the client may wish to make a site visit to the

vendor’s locations. They would typically approach the team member of the sales and

marketing team with whom they were in contact with in relation to the proposal. The

sales team would in turn reach out to the pre-sales team to gather all the necessary

details or arrange for the visit.

Why is Pre-sales Important?

Core Benefits

There are definitive benefits that are derived from pre-sales. Some core benefits are

elaborated below.

• Large organisations having dedicated pre-sales team for various verticals tend to

have a large knowledge base that is built over time whilst working on various

prospects. This knowledge base becomes useful in future prospects and those in

turn contribute to the base. As can be imagined, it is a cyclic process.

Organisations with this capability have a far better chance in materializing a

prospect into a customer than those who don’t.

• Background support to sales and marketing teams. As mentioned earlier in the

paper, the pre-sales team provide support to the sales and marketing team in

furnishing them with all the necessary information and artefacts, which forms the

basis of the sales and marketing team to approach the customer with a proposal

or market a product. This renders the sales team to be not involved in-depth with

a prospects or have exhaustive knowledge about the intricate details of the same.


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• Pre-sales activities convert to better resource utilization. Large organisations

would typically ask its relevant “benched” resources, who are generally from a

technical background, to assist in pre-sales activities. This is a win-win situation

for all stakeholders in terms of the fact that the organisation gains from the

technical knowledge that the resources possess and to the resources in terms of

contributing towards the cause or goals of the organisation.

• Networking. Pre-sales team members often reach out to various groups and

departments within the organisation as well as to clients and other organisations.

This creates a network of people, which does contribute a certain extent when

the pre-sales team is working on a prospect. The stronger the network is, the

better is the possibility to create a strong case for a prospective client.

Organisation’s Expectations

It is worthwhile to note here that depending on the scale and size of an organisation,

it may or may not have a dedicated pre-sales team. However, it does not limit

smaller organisations to undertake pre-sales activities. Usually, in such

organisations, technical resources take up pre-sales activities in addition to their

consultation or service delivery roles.

The expectations of organisations from pre-sales’ perspective more-or-less remains

the same irrespective of its size or human resources. It expects its pre-sales teams

to have their “eyes and ears open” for any possible prospect that might result in a

source of revenue for the organisation or gain market share. The organisation in turn

invests in the area and may provide performance based initiatives for responsible

personnel.

Pre-sales: A Working Principle How does pre-sales work? To understand the working principle of pre-sales, it is

imperative to know the components and fitment of pre-sales in the complete life

cycle of converting a prospect into a customer. These aspects are elaborated in

earlier sections.

In a nut-shell, the end-product of pre-sales activities is a proposal for a client that

details how an organisation will meet the client’s requirements and along with it all

supporting information such as prior experience of the organisation in the area,

organisational capabilities and so forth. There are three main considerations whilst

creating a proposal.

• Technical Solution

A proposal by it nature will provide details of a proposed solution to a

requirement for the client who raised the RFP. The details would contain technical

aspects about the requirement. During the pre-sales phase, the technical solution

may include a proof of concept, technical demonstration or a mock-up of the

proposed architecture. For instance, consider a proposal to a client who would

like to migrate its Visual Basic 6.0 based home-grown application to the .NET


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platform. In the proposal, various approaches to undergo the conversion would

be mentioned, which may be direct code conversion, code conversion with partial

reengineering or total reengineering. The proposal will highlight the preferred

approach and specify the advantages of using it over other approaches. Such

details are highly technical and relevant information would mostly be available

from the COE for application migration or subject matter experts (SMEs). Pre-

sales team members may or may not have in-depth expertise in the area. In

such instances, the pre-sales team will liaise heavily with the COE and/or SME

and provide relevant information in the proposal.

• Administrative Approach

Once a solution is determined, the pre-sales team will be required to ascertain

the factors that will enable the solution to be implemented. This aspect cover

estimation of the effort required, staffing requirements from managers, analysts,

consultants to developers, project execution window and infrastructure

requirements. Most of this information will be available from past experience of

handling similar prospects and the team can make an intelligent “guesstimate” of

the figures. There are other industry standard approaches like function point

analysis that can be utilized to have guidelines for estimating effort. It is worthy

to note here that a single approach is never adopted for estimating effort. It is

always a combination of two or more approaches. Most proposals will also add a

certain percentage of the effort as a “buffer” to arrive at the total effort. This

buffer is introduced to absorb unforeseen situations during the execution of the

project.

At times, a client may seek references and/or a testimonial from the

organisation’s other clients who had undergone a similar exercise. Unless already

available, the pre-sales team would reach out to the management

representatives/ account owners of similar projects to obtain the same from the

respective client.

• Financial Aspects

One of the key components that clients focus on in a proposal is the costing

details. Few aspects are:

− Total cost of the project

− Billing model – time and material (T&M) or fixed price (FP)

− Invoicing mechanism

− Mode of payments

The first two are specific to the proposal while the last two are at organisational

level. To arrive at these details, the pre-sales team would have to liaise with

departments like accounts and legal.


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Tools: An Aid to Pre-sales A tool that can be used for a purpose always helps in executing a related task. Pre-

sales is no exception. Such teams use a variety of tools to aid in the pre-sales

process.

• Knowledge Base

Pre-sales team usually would build a knowledge base comprising of information

ranging from FAQs to information that are required for all proposals. An example

could be the executive summary. Referring to this knowledge base shortens the

time required to complete the exercise as necessary information is mostly

available at a single location.

• Templates and Frameworks

A proposal is a structured document and tends to be similar in its organisation.

Therefore, if there exist a template, the process of documenting the details

becomes very simple and gets limited to simply plugging in the relevant

information.

• Email Groups

A COE or a set of SMEs may have a dedicated email group, which they would use

as an interface mechanism for external resources to engage with them. Emails

sent to these mailboxes would be taken up by one or more recipient and

addressed. The process becomes transparent to the sender.

Case Study XYZ CONSULTING firm has an existing production support engagement with a large

financial institution based in the United Kingdom. The engagement started 3 years

back and the project is executed from both onshore work locations of the client and

offshore development centre (ODC) dedicated for the account. The firm has its

resources deployed at both the locations.

During the course of his regular work, one delivery team member of the firm at the

client location learnt that the client is considering a centralized system that will act

as a “one source of truth” and manage the operational data. As on today, every

portfolio the client has maintains and uses this data in its own domain that has

resulted in inconsistencies and financial losses. The team member is associated with

one such portfolio and works with applications processing this set of data. From pre-

sales perspective, this is an example of a “lead”.

The team member approached his supervisor with this information and they got in

touch with representatives of the client who were associated with this prospect.

Details of the prospect was obtained in terms of the software that the client intends

to use, the budgeted cost, time frame for implementation, current state of the

prospect and so forth. It was found that the software that the client intended to use

was developed and marketed by another firm with whom XYZ CONSULTING had an


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alliance. The team then approached the firm through the channel and obtained

information about the product and the value adds that the firm can propose to the

client – financial or otherwise – if they award the contract to the firm. They also

liaised with a relevant team (COE) within the organisation who had done consultancy

and implementation of the same product for other customers. All the information was

collated and an approach paper was created to be presented to the client. Alongside,

the business development manager for the account was informed and he arranged

for representatives from the COE to visit the client side and make a presentation to

them. This set of activities can be thought of as preparations for the proposal.

Pre-Sales in IT Industry

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