What Excellent Pre-Sales Support Means For Your Business

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    The advantages of Pre-sales support (sometimes referred to as sales support) is often overlooked, but crucial for companies with complex sales processes or ecommerce websites with no salesperson involved. For business models like these, pre-sales support can significantly improve sales numbers, as well as customer experience and satisfaction. It could very well be a business opportunity worth pursuing.

    What is Pre-Sales Support?

    Pre-sales support is commonly used in B2C and online sales and focuses on answering consumers’ questions about the product or service as they make their buying decision. This helps the sales team focus on the business process and the key customer relationship deals, and not just the marketing or technology details.

    Pre-sales support helps find, win, and keep customers, depending on the scenario. Here are some of the primary activities that a team like this would focus on:

    • Qualifying leads: Pre-sales support teams, using their industry and audience knowledge, can create qualifications to predict which leads are most likely to move through the sales funnel and ultimately sign a contract.
    • Fielding questions: With their deep understanding of the product or offering, pre-sales support can answer consumers’ questions in order to make the buying decision easier. Questions can be answered across a wide variety of channels, including by phone, email, instant messaging on social media platforms, or live chat on your webpage.
    • Prioritizing deals: In large B2B sales processes, the pre-sales support team can help to strategically decide which deals to focus on and develop proposals for. Sales teams can also be a big component of this strategy, but pre-sales support brings a unique perspective given their technical experience.

    Additional activities include: conducting market research, as well as product and user experience research, preparing call scripts, performing customer and data analysis, identifying solutions to customer pain points, and crafting proposals. Together, all of these responsibilities make up an efficient pre-sales process that will enable a business to capitalize on opportunities and accelerate the sales process.

    For large-scale technology sales, pre-sales support teams are typically made up of experts who are knowledgeable about not only the technical aspects of the product itself, but also the industry in which the prospective client or customer is operating.

    What are the Benefits of Pre-Sales Support?

    Harvard Business Review recently found that “companies with strong pre-sales capabilities consistently achieve win rates of 40–50% in new business and 80–90% in renewal business—well above average rates.” While this sounds great in theory, it can be challenging to hire and implement a strong pre-sales support function.

    The sales operations and pre-sales support teams have to establish clear roles and responsibilities, particularly with highly complex sales processes. It’s important to manage the relationship between these two teams in order for them to successfully work together. But when it works, it’s well worth it. Continue reading this article to learn about the top benefits of strong pre-sales support.

    Efficiency in the sales process

    Pre-sales support team members bring their technical expertise and thorough understanding of the potential client’s needs to every step of the sales process. In turn, salespeople have more time to focus on the commercial side of the sales process.

    This division of responsibilities provides accuracy when qualifying leads and deals. Pre-sales support can also help position your offering in the most differentiated manner given their knowledge of the industry and competitive landscape.

    Likewise, pre-sales support can be a method for improving conversion rates and conversion marketing. They can provide feedback from their communications with customers to help craft optimized content so that marketing collateral appeals to your target market and buyer personas.

    In a world where sales and marketing are usually at odds with each other, pre-sales support can help bring alignment by sharing insights about end users’ preferences and behaviors, which in turn can be analyzed to drive more revenue for your business.

    Winning new customers

    In B2C sales, pre-sales support is essential in educating consumers about the product, service, or software they are interested in. This means fielding inquiries or explaining features and pricing in greater detail in order to help encourage an easy buying decision and acquire a new customer.

    In more complex B2B sales, since presales support team members have detailed customer insights, they can help analyze customer needs and propose ideal solutions to the sales team. They are the perfect partner to leverage when planning a winning proposal!

    Beyond crafting business proposals, pre-sales team members can answer technical questions from prospective stakeholders regarding the request for proposal (RFP) or implementation, which is information that a sales representative may not be able to provide.

    When deals get close to closing, clients typically ask for case studies, market research, or referrals that prove a high ROI, which can leave sales and promotions teams scrambling. Pre-sales support can provide these examples of success and persuasive data points firsthand during conversations that take place throughout the sales process.

    Consistent client satisfaction

    Maybe the most important, yet most overlooked advantage of pre-sales support is its impact on the client once the sale is made. The involvement of pre-sales support during the sales process increases the likelihood of a brand’s product or service meeting the needs of the customer from the very start, and also streamlines the implementation process where applicable. Pre-sales can really lay the groundwork for boosting brand loyalty.

    From a product management perspective, pre-sales support can provide feedback to the product teams to help improve the product based on the communications they are regularly having with customers and prospective buyers. Better yet, they may be able to identify untapped opportunities that will delight your customers and help you reach unprecedented customer retention rates.

    Pre-sales support can also help you manage your customer care team, as pre-sales can provide helpful advice thanks to their knowledge of the competitive landscape and close client relationships.

    Step Up Your Pre-Sales Support Game with Simplr

    Interested in strengthening your pre-sales support, but not sure you have the resources or tools? Simplr helps companies get their customer support up and running in a way that’s scalable and affordable, including pre-sales support for qualifying leads. By fielding potential customers’ inquiries through email, live chat, and more, Simplr empowers sales teams to increase revenue by allowing them to keep their focus on high-priority sales leads.

    We offer the best of both worlds

    Simplr offers companies like YETI, Steve Madden, Mack Weldon, and Princess Polly a human-first, machine-enabled customer experience solution that meets the on-demand needs of the NOW Customer across all digital channels.

    Offering a combination of a uniquely talented, flexible, and scalable Human Cloud, AI-based technology, and actionable data analysis, Simplr allows companies to immediately expand their CX capacity and engage customers with speed, empathy, and precision. Regardless of whether they’re DTC brands or B2B, scaling social selling has never been easier.

    With Simplr’s NOW CX solution, premium brands are eradicating customer neglect, turning browsers into buyers, and turning customers into five-star fans.

    “Our customers like being able to chat with a human on the other end. I feel like there’s no difference between our Simplr Specialists and our in-house agents. It’s still acting as another person who works for us on the other end of the email or chat. We haven’t had any customer reaction to the change that we made. It was a pretty seamless change for us.” – 5 / 5 stars! – Laura Cantor, Eleven Commerce (Reviewed November 26, 2018)

    See what more customers are saying about Simplr here.