Unqualified leads don’t just waste time for your sales team. They keep your team from spending valuable time on more productive leads. Yet according to our Sales Engineering Compensation and Workload Survey, the majority of respondents said that 30+% of their sales demos are for under or unqualified leads.
A pre-sales department armed with the right tools can help solve this problem. We asked marketing professionals to share more about the integral role of the pre-sales team.
Identifying And Acquiring Leads
The pre-sales department plays an important role in acquiring qualified leads for the sales department. In an organization or a marketing agency, the pre-sales department employs different strategies to identify and acquire leads; these strategies include market and product research, data and customer analysis, identifying customers’ pain points and proffering solutions, and preparing call scripts and unique selling propositions.
All these strategies are geared toward generating qualified leads for the marketing department. It is important to note that while the pre-sales team plays an essential role in identifying qualified leads, it is the marketing department’s job to convert such leads to paying customers.
Proposal Prep and Positioning
The pre-sales team can help speed up the process of submitting bids by helping with proposal prep and positioning. This way, an organization won’t miss out on qualified leads simply because the sales team doesn’t have time to go through all leads quickly. When both departments work together, a company can see a major increase in acquiring more qualified leads.
Analyzing Data to Find the Best Prospects
A pre-sales department’s role for acquiring more qualified leads is analyzing the data to find the best prospects for the sales department to close. The department’s goal is to help the sales and marketing teams find, close, and renew customers. And when you think that companies generally don’t bid on roughly 20% of leads – either because of lack of time or because the leads aren’t strong enough – having the pre-sales department helping and having another look at the prospects can help increase sales.
Building Crucial Relationships with Potential Leads
The pre-sales department builds crucial relationships with potential leads. From reaching your target audience to starting conversations through live chats, cold calls, and emails, the pre-sales team plays a vital role in identifying qualified leads and directing them to the sales department. Ensure your pre-sales team analyzes customer needs and pain points to improve your sales process and closures.
Educating Prospects
A prospect with the potential for higher budget allocations and a requirement for your products particularly would be the perfect definition for a qualified lead. Your pre-sales team [should convey] a good amount of information about your products to the leads you wish to attract. This will allow the closure experts to welcome a pool of clients interested in your products and have a higher probability of conversion.
When the customers are well-informed about your product, which occurs only due to a good pre-sales team, they will be more interested in buying your products. This would consequently mean that it would help attract more qualified prospects to your company. It also allows the audience to get more engaged on the right aspects of your project by keeping them pitched with marketing messages promptly. The main role of the pre-sales department is to create a robust and consistent sales process that constantly aids the organization in churning out prospects.
Market Research, Data and Customer Analysis, Unique Selling Propositions
Reputable brands know the significance of creating an effective pre-sales team and strategy. Without pre-sales, businesses wouldn’t be able to create apt customer profiles and generate leads to increase their engagement and revenue.
In layman’s terms, a pre-sales team is responsible for all activities that happen before closing a sale. Some examples of pre-sale activities are market research, data and customer analysis, and creating unique selling points (USPs).
All the activities conducted by a pre-sales team aid in drawing a potential customer’s interest towards a particular brand and subtly persuading them to take the desired action, such as purchasing a service or product.
Ultimately, the pre-sales department at your company is responsible for researching where and how people spend their money, identifying your ideal customer and their demographics, and creating the best strategies for convincing them why they should use and trust your brand.
Narrowing the Field
The pre-sales department should have the ability to qualify a potential client before the salesperson gets involved. A qualified sales lead will be more likely to buy. Sales leads need to be prioritized based on their level of qualification. A small sales force can narrow the prospects down to a few that are most likely to buy. The salespeople should be able to focus on converting those prospects faster
Asking Specific Questions, Analyzing the Data
[For our business], the pre-sales department is in charge of figuring out whether a lead will be someone who will be likely to purchase or rent our containers. By asking specific questions and finding out more details about the company or individual through the use of data analysis, they can either eliminate them from the list of high-quality leads or move them onto a list of qualified leads that we should prioritize.
This is a very helpful step in the sales process because it helps us save a lot of time in the long run. Rather than tirelessly contacting everyone who has interacted with our business, we can remove unnecessary leads and increase our chances of success.
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