THE PRESALES BUYER’S GUIDE

A WELCOME NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS

Welcome to the Presales Buyers Guide!  We are delighted to offer this information to the presales community and hope that you will find this guide useful as you begin to consider your options for investing in presales technology and automation.

The purpose of this executive summary is to provide some insight into who the guide is designed for, why we created it, and what you will find inside.  We will also share some insights and key findings we have made along the way and some thoughts on how we see the market evolving in the coming years.

First and foremost, we would like to thank the vendors who agreed to participate in this effort.  They were asked to conduct an initial interview, answer a lengthy, detailed questionnaire, and provide a 75-minute demonstration.  This was no small investment of time on their part.  And we appreciate their support, cooperation, and collaboration.  Needless to say, this report couldn’t have been produced without their contributions.

It is also worth noting that since we began this project back in September of 2021, we have discovered a handful of other vendors whom we would have included in the report had we known of them when we launched (further highlighting the need for a report like this).  However, it was not possible to add them to the process mid-flight.  We have agreed to mention them as vendors to be aware of, and you will see mention of them in the report.  We plan to invite them to participate in future releases.

We would also like to set the record straight that this initial project was not a “pay to play” activity.  Vendors were exclusively invited to participate based on one primary factor – that presales leaders and professionals were the primary target persona for their technologies.  The vendors were not charged any fees to be included in the report.

Additionally, we would like to clarify that our goal was not to score, assess, or rank the vendors and their solutions.  Rather, this was, as we like to call it, an “information dissemination play”.  The goal of the report is twofold: 1) to better inform the presales buyer community of the investment and automation options that have emerged in recent years, and 2) to give the vendors in this nascent market an equal opportunity to present themselves and their products to the community through a well-informed, unbiased third-party voice.  Our goal was to shed light on both the opportunity presales leaders have to scale through automation and the vendors that have emerged in the market.

That being said, throughout the Guide you will find a handful of charts and graphs that show the vendors side-by-side in various contexts.  These are intended more to highlight facts about the market as a whole, as opposed to drawing attention to individual vendors.  The contexts in which they are used are a) to present vendor information that is otherwise publicly available on sites such as LinkedIn and Crunchbase in one concise view, and b) to further elaborate some of the key points in the Focus Area write ups.  “Focus Area” is the term we are using to refer to the “subcategories” that emerged during our research – more on that to come.

We think it’s also worth noting that we view this report as a resource written FOR presales professionals BY presales professionals.  As everyone in this industry knows, presales is a very unique role in the go-to-market team.  We believe that in order to effectively represent the unique value proposition the tools in this space have to offer, and to accurately reflect the priorities and challenges of presales leaders and individual contributors, one must have experience in the field as both a sales engineer (SE) and an SE leader.  This report was written by two individuals who check both those boxes.

We’d also like to explain why the “report” has been published as a website, as opposed to a downloadable document.  The primary reason is that this market, and the vendors within, are evolving rapidly.  Our plan is to give vendors the opportunity to provide updates on a regular cadence – quarterly, semi-annually, etc.  The one thing we wanted to avoid was having outdated copies of the report circulating in the community.  For that reason, there are no downloadable assets as part of this Guide.  All information will be kept up to date on the website.

The presales profession has seen tremendous growth and recognition over the past couple of years.  We hope that this Guide will help build upon that momentum for years to come.  Our goal is for this to become THE go-to source for information about the vendors in this space, the categories that make up the space, and the use cases and benefits organizations can expect to achieve when making these investments.

Enjoy the Guide.  We hope you find it useful in making investment decisions.  We welcome and look forward to your feedback.

All the best,

Kerry & Chris

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Why did we do this?

For years – if not decades – presales has arguably been the most underserved role in the sales enablement and sales automation technology markets.  Until recently, there were very few software platforms designed to scale and automate the work of technical presales, aka sales engineers, solution consultants, etc.  But since 2019 there has been a surge in awareness of, and attention to the profession.  Numerous software companies have entered the market with solutions aimed at the presales professional and leader.  Community organizations like the Presales Collective and SE Nation have gained tremendous momentum and membership.  And the role has become one of the most difficult positions to fill, as there is a massive talent shortage for qualified, experienced presales professionals.

At the same time, the demand for presales professionals continues to rise.  Today’s B2B enterprise software buyer is more informed than ever before.  And when they do engage with a software vendor, they typically don’t want to talk to salespeople.  They want to talk to experts, who can answer questions, offer advice and guidance, and help them make informed decisions.

The result?  The need for presales leaders to scale the productivity of their team.  They need to do more with the teams they have.  They need to do more to keep the teams they have.  And they need the ability to get new hires up to speed quickly, adding value to the organization.   They need leverage.  They need tools and automation.

As experienced presales professionals and entrepreneurs in this field who offer sales training and demo coaching to software sales and presales teams, we have a unique vantage point in the market.  We neither sell the software products that are in this space, nor are we purchasers of these products.  However, we speak with the vendors frequently and hear regularly of their frustrations with the confusion they see in the market and the frequency with which their solutions are misunderstood and/or misrepresented.  And we consistently get questions from our training and coaching clients pertaining to software solutions in the space designed to automate and scale presales.

By mid-2021 the situation in the market became perfectly clear.  There was massive confusion in the market.  There was a significant need amongst presales leaders and professionals to better understand the vendors and options available.  And the vendors longed to bring clarity regarding where they fit and how their solutions could help presales teams scale and improve.

With limited information available and no single authoritative source, presales leaders were struggling to make informed decisions.  With limited budgets to begin with, it’s critical for presales teams to make fully informed buying decisions when investing in automation, but that process can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive.  Not only is it a matter of which vendors to talk to, but which functional area(s) of the presales domain leaders should prioritize, and understand what those options are to begin with.

This report – website if you prefer – seeks to become the single authoritative source on what to consider when investing in presales automation and tooling.  We have organized the field into five subcategories, or “Focus Areas”.  In each of the focus areas, we have identified common use cases, benefits to expect, capabilities to look for, and things to consider.  And we’ve identified the vendors that play in those particular focus areas (as defined by them) and created a vendor profile for each of the participants, accordingly.

As a point of reference, here is a summary of the journey we undertook in creating this report:

Who is the Guide for?

First and foremost, this Guide was designed with the presales leader and presales professional in mind.  Throughout the Guide you will find concepts and terms common in the presales vernacular.  Our assumption when writing the Guide was that the reader will have a fundamental understanding of presales and/or the role of the sales engineer, particularly within SaaS and software organizations.

That’s not to say that you must be a presales professional in order to benefit from this material.  Anyone involved in considering an investment in software solutions for presales automation or enablement will benefit from this content – sales leadership, sales enablement, RevOps, etc.

In addition, some of the solutions evaluated are used by other roles in the Go-To-Market team, including marketing and customer success.  For example, anyone in marketing looking to augment top-of-funnel collateral with automated demos or “choose your own adventure” product walk-throughs will benefit from the information in the Demo Automation segment of the report.

At the end of the day, anyone in a technology, software, and/or SaaS Go-To-Market role, looking for new ways to scale technical selling motions – at any stage of the funnel – may benefit from the capabilities offered by the vendors represented in this report.  Whether you’re seeking to better understand this market and the subcategories that define it, or looking for information on specific vendors, this report has something to offer.

What will you find?

The Guide is made up of three primary sections:

  • Focus Area Profiles
  • Common Presales Use Cases & Challenges
  • Vendor Profiles

Focus Area Profiles

The Focus Areas, aka subcategories, define functional groupings that make up the landscape of Presales solutions.  Most of the vendors fall into one of the focus areas, although some span more than one.

The focus areas are important because they represent distinctly different functional areas in which presales teams can invest.  Each focus area has been described in terms of the benefits the solutions in that category offer, the use cases supported, the functional capabilities presales teams can expect to find, and things to consider when looking at vendors in that particular space.  We believe that presales leaders looking to scale their team through automation and tooling should begin first by understanding the different focus areas.  We recommend choosing the area to invest in before considering what vendors to evaluate.  Of course, we provide the list of vendors in each of the subcategories.

The five focus areas that we have defined for the Presales solution landscape are:

  • Presales Oversight & Management
  • Presales Opportunity Execution
  • Demo Automation
  • Response & Knowledge Management
  • Presentation & Data Tools

These are each described in full detail on the Focus Area profile pages.

One point of note is that when we began this project, we did not set out to define Focus Areas or subcategories.  In fact, quite the contrary.  We were planning to map the vendors to a series of “Technical Sales Motions” and “Presales Operational Tasks”.  However, we discovered two things along the journey.  One, the mapping of vendors to these functional “buckets” was insufficient to make any meaningful determination of where to consider investing.  Two, the focus areas emerged naturally.  We did not set out to define them.  It just became readily apparent that there was a natural grouping of solutions into these five functional areas.  Most importantly, we believe that prioritizing the needs for automation in these five areas will help presales leaders make better investment decisions.

For reference, these were the ‘Technical Sales Motions” and “Presales Operational Tasks” we were originally planning to map the vendors to.  It didn’t happen.

Here’s where we landed.  This chart shows the five Focus Areas and the core Use Cases within each:

Common Presales Use Cases & Challenges

The use cases section is a list of the most common use cases that we see supported by the Focus Areas.  This list is provided as another tool to help presales leaders prioritize where to invest.  Leverage the list of Use Cases to determine the functional areas of the team that you believe would benefit the most from automation and/or tooling.  For each Common Use Case we have provided a brief description of the use case and a link to the Focus Area(s) that support that use case, designed to help you narrow in on the Focus Area most valuable for you and your team.

The presales challenges that the vendors referenced in this Guide seek to address include the following:

  • Unqualified Demos: Strain Presales Resources
  • Inadequate Demo Infrastructure: Technical Delivery Challenges
  • Disjointed Customer-Facing Engagements: Presentation/Demo Delivery & Execution
  • Difficult to Demo Non-Visual, Under-the-Hood Solutions
  • How to Enable Product-Led Growth by Focusing on the Buying Process
  • Long Customization/Build Times: How to Effectively Scale Demo Personalization
  • Need to Scale: Accelerate Onboarding, Automate Proficiency, Eliminate low value tasks
  • Lack of Insight and Visibility into Team Activity, Contribution & Performance
  • Inconsistent Opportunity Execution, Engagement, Delivery, Messaging
  • Difficulty Managing Evaluations: Unstructured, Poorly Defined, Delayed, Incomplete
  • Lack of Alignment between Field Intelligence and Product Direction

For clarification, these use cases do not tie directly to Vendors.  We have genericized the list for the purpose of mapping them to one or more Focus Areas.  You will also find a separate list of “top use cases” in each of the vendor profiles.  Those are the top five use cases supported by the vendors – AS DESCRIBED BY THEM.

Vendor Profiles

We have created a profile page for each of the vendors in the study.  This is information that was written by us, as a result of the vendor interview, detailed questionnaire, and product demo that we received, and sent to each vendor for final review and validation.  The vendor profiles are intended to give enough information about the vendor to understand how they fit into the market, the use cases they believe they support, some of the unique and noteworthy features of their product(s), and other key information to help buyers in the presales market gain a high-level understanding of the organization and their product.  These profiles are not intended to be all-inclusive of everything their solutions can do or have to offer.  Just because the profile doesn’t cite a specific capability or feature, does not mean they do not support it.  It simply means it wasn’t something we felt compelled to highlight.  We encourage everyone considering these vendors to do their own due diligence in evaluating these platforms.  Our hope is that these profiles will help you a) get a massive head start in understanding the players in the market, b) narrow the playing field to vendors that fit the profile of what you are looking for, and c) save both you and the vendors a tremendous amount of time by avoiding unnecessary calls for products that are misaligned with your objectives and requirements.

Each vendor profile contains the following sections:

  • Vendor Description
  • Client Profile: Who Should Consider Them (as described by the vendors)
  • Top Use Cases Addressed (as described by the vendors)
  • Noteworthy Features & Capabilities
  • Integrations
  • Typical Onboarding & Implementation Process, Client Support
  • Pricing Model
  • Notable Clients & Case Studies
  • Where to Find Them: Contact Information and Social Media
  • Corporate Information & Funding Summary
  • Buyer Review Summaries

Key Findings

During the process of researching the vendors in the space, and through our discussions with presales leaders about their experience implementing and using these solutions, we came up with some key findings that may be helpful to anyone considering an investment in this space:

  • All of the products we’ve looked at have VERY impressive capabilities
  • Vendors are to be commended for what they’ve done in a short amount of time
  • The market is rapidly changing; the tools are evolving rapidly
  • Company maturity doesn’t necessarily indicate product maturity and vice versa
  • Important to consider the PRODUCT, the COMPANY, and the PEOPLE
  • Some products address NICHE use cases, while others are more broad across multiple use cases
  • Vendors tend to have a unique understanding & interpretation of presales processes, requirements, etc.
  • Products tend to have different taxonomies, data structures, nomenclature
  • Things that sound similar may not in fact be
  • Be sure to clarify what you hear and what you see; and pay close attention to product roadmaps
  • The more structured your current process is, the better positioned you are to implement these solutions
  • Implementation is critical: what level of effort needs to be expended to get to success?

We encourage you to explore the rest of the Guide and encourage any feedback that might help us improve it.

FOCUS AREAS

Our View of the Presales Solutions Market

As described in the Executive Summary, we view the market as encompassing five distinct focus areas as listed below.  We encourage presales leaders to explore these areas to identify where they have the biggest challenges in order to prioritize their investment decisions.  To learn more about a focus area by accessing its profile, click on the “Learn More” button next to it in the table below.

Each Focus Area Profile includes the following:

  • Focus Area Overview
  • Relevant Use Cases: The presales use cases and challenges addressed by the Focus Area
  • Key Benefits to Expect when Using a Solution in the Focus Area
  • Key Capabilities found in Solutions in the Focus Area
  • Buying Considerations
  • Vendors to Consider: Which vendors address this space

As a reminder, here is our view of the Presales Solutions Market:

Presales Oversight & Management

This focus area encompasses the responsibilities, challenges, and concerns of the typical presales leader – from pipeline visibility and opportunity oversight to process implementation and team management. The capabilities in this area are designed to enable presales leaders to run their organization like a business.

Presales Opportunity Execution

This focus area enables presales professionals (aka individual contributors) to work at speed and scale. Capabilities in this area are designed to give ICs a unified workspace to access, record, and manage all the information and activities involved in executing a presales opportunity.

Demo Automation

As the name suggests, this focus area is all about automating and scaling demo creation, delivery, and consumption, whether in the context of top-of-funnel, self-service demos, live demos delivered by individuals, or product trials (aka sandbox demo environments). The tools in this space are used to create “safe” usable, shareable demo assets that can be analyzed to determine customer interest and intent.

Response & Knowledge Management

This focus area represents the automation of the cross-team coordination, collaboration, and effort that goes into responding to formal RFx requests. It also includes the collection, curation, and dissemination of company and product information commonly used to answer questions and respond to questionnaires during the sales and presales process.

Presentation & Data Solutions

As the name suggests, this focus area encompasses the tools in the market explicitly designed to help presales professionals give better, more compelling live demonstrations, tell better stories, facilitate better meetings, show more relevant information, and manage heavy demo data workloads.

PRESALES USE CASES / CHALLENGES / PROBLEMS

We’ve listed the most common presales use cases so you can quickly identify which Focus Area(s) they typically fall into, and which Vendors may be able to help.

Consistent Delivery

Presentations and demos are often complicated by disjointed delivery. Sales team members pass presentation control back and forth, and demos that show multiple solutions or that represent multiple personas, frequently switch interfaces and use multiple browsers, making them appear more complex. Additionally, organizations’ lack of a standardized library of demo assets often leads to a proliferation of siloed demo models where each SE presents a very different experience from their peers. Solutions that help organizations present a more unified and consistent solution can reduce setup time and in-demo technical challenges, and reduce buyers’ perceptions of complexity.

Related Focus Area(s)

Demonstrating Non-Visual Solutions

For platform, middleware and other solutions where there isn’t an obvious interface to demo, illustrating how the solution works and provides value can be challenging, often managed through static process and flow charts that are either too high-level or too confusing for buyers to easily comprehend. Applications that can visually represent how systems, data and flows interact and change over time can simplify buyer understanding and accelerate sales opportunities.

Related Focus Area(s)

Eliminating Demo Infrastructure Challenges

Presales typically relies on other departments to set up and maintain critical demo environments, often resulting in long lead times and a lack of flexibility to customize demo models and data to fit prospect needs. The ability to outsource demo infrastructure can alleviate these challenges, helping SEs more effectively educate buyers by delivering demos that are more easily configured for each prospect.

Related Focus Area(s)

Eliminating Unrealistic, Stale & Missing Demo Data

Telling the right stories requires the right demo data. Yet demo models often only include generic data that not only doesn’t support compelling narratives, but that is also incomplete, or even missing, resulting in misleading visuals that require the audience to guess what they should be looking at. Getting the right data into demo models can be both challenging and time-consuming, especially when time-sensitive data needs to be incorporated to properly showcase how the product works. Solutions that can automatically inject the right data into products in real-time reduces setup and configuration time, and helps SEs deliver compelling stories to properly convey the value of their products.

Related Focus Area(s)

Enabling Product-Led Growth: Focus on Buyer Enablement

Buyers increasingly expect to evaluate B2B software on their own terms, similar to the product-led experiences they have with B2C apps: instant access to product without qualification or other gating steps. Yet, most enterprise solutions are too complex to simply give buyers unfettered access without proper training. Additionally, to properly enable the buyer, early access to product needs to include proper guidance and messaging about how the solution addresses their challenges and helps improve their lives.

Related Focus Area(s)

End-to-end Product Messaging Consistency

As companies grow and evolve, subject matter experts come and go, sales and presales teams churn over time, etc., it is critical to maintain a consistent message across the organization. It is also important ensure the dissemination or distribution of the most current and up to date information as products improve and markets change. This is a steep challenge in today’s fast moving business environment. Response management solutions are designed to help companies ensure consistent messaging in spite of the changing environment.

Related Focus Area(s)

Evaluation Management (POC/POV)

Similar to the Structured Presales Methodology Guidance use case mentioned earlier, this use case is specific to POCs/POVs. Many consider this to be the most time consuming and difficult of all presales tasks, and in terms of impact on winning, the most important. A number of the tools in the space are explicitly designed to help ICs run evaluations like a formal project, with clear objectives, success criteria, project plans, milestones, customer engagement, etc.

Related Focus Area(s)

In-Meeting Collaboration & Effectiveness

Collaboration and coordination amongst the sales team during demos can be challenging. Having to simultaneously present and monitor third party messaging tools can be distracting, and lack of access to discovery notes, opportunity details from the CRM, and relevant supporting documentation from marketing and product, can result in less than ideal answers or the need to follow-up after the demo. By allowing sellers and SEs to communicate in real-time from within the same tool they’re presenting from, and have real-time access to any relevant information, messaging is more on point and the need to “let me get back to you” is minimized.

Related Focus Area(s)

Internal & External Collaboration

Presales teams operate at the crossroads of almost every function within the organization – sales, marketing, product, customer success, professional services. They have a tremendous need to collaborate with each other and individuals in other departments. They also need to interact with prospects and customers in a meaningful way during presales engagements and evaluations – to include the capture and sharing of documents, mutual action plans, requirements, success criteria, etc. Tools in this space are designed to enable this internal and external collaboration.

Related Focus Area(s)

Multi-discipline Collaboration & Coordination

Tied very closely to the project management use case, tools in this space are designed to facilitate the orchestration of key individuals from different parts of the business – e.g., marketing, sales, presales, product, finance, etc. They all tend to have their own tools that they interact with. Tools in the Response Management space are designed to bring them together to collaborate in these multi-discipline projects.

Related Focus Area(s)

Onboarding, Enabling & Scaling Presales

As cited countless times in this Guide, presales leaders need the ability to scale their teams. They need the ability to onboard quickly, enabling new hires to add value and contribute as soon as possible. And they need to increase the productive output of the team without burning them out. Mitigating “busy work” and streamlining processes does just that.

Related Focus Area(s)

Organic Stakeholder Discovery

With buyers only directly engaging with sellers for 17% of the sales cycle, and average buying teams growing in size, sellers need ways to not only find out who buyer stakeholders are, but to reach and enable them earlier in the sales cycle. Solutions that help champions sell internally by sharing vendor demos allow organizations to reach more stakeholders, including ones they didn’t know existed, and to better understand their needs and priorities so when they do engage, conversations are more meaningful.

Related Focus Area(s)

Pipeline Visibility & Performance Analysis

Just as sales leaders need visibility into pipeline, deal status, performance, etc., presales leaders need visibility into the revenue their team is responsible for and contributing to. They need a way to measure performance against KPIs and metrics. Tools in this space are designed to provide just that – data-backed insight into forecasts and results.

Related Focus Area(s)

Playbook & Best Practice Definition/Implementation

Most presales professionals will agree that there’s both an art and a science to success as a sales engineer. The art aspect is difficult to replicate, and experts agree that every SE must “find their own voice”. But the science behind the successful execution and close of a deal can and should be replicated. What does that mean? Following a precise cadence. Using proven, best-of-breed collateral. Leveraging structure and methodology built from trial and error of those who have come before you. The playbooks and templates available in these tools allow presales leaders to replicate and scale the science of success.

Related Focus Area(s)

Presales Activity & Utilization Insight

As presales leaders, we never want to be caught off guard by a question from sales or leadership on where our team members are spending most of their time or what they did in the context of a specific deal. In fact, it is our job to ensure that the team is maximizing their time. In addition, we need the ability to justify headcount and/or make the case for more. Accurate visibility into team activity and utilization gives us the information we need to do so.

Related Focus Area(s)

Presales Document Curation & Generation

Presales teams are frequently required to generate standard form documents, such as Statements of Work, Weekly Evaluation Status Reports, etc. Tools in this space are designed to give teams the ability to define document templates and generate required documentation directly from the information contained in the knowledge repository.

Related Focus Area(s)

Presales Master Data Management

To effectively manage against metrics and put process and structure in place, it’s important to put a foundation of data constructs and master data in place. This includes defining products, sales plays, use cases, personas, competitors, key capabilities, core infrastructure components, etc. In essence, this is the process of defining the “language” or semantics of your presales organization and operation. Establishing this in a formal manner goes a long way towards building rigor and repeatability into running presales like a business.

Related Focus Area(s)

Presales Opportunity Data Capture & Management

Presales professionals need the ability to capture, leverage, reuse, and manage a broad range of data throughout the lifecycle of a sales engagement. This includes information they collect from the client directly, observations and insights, notes from meetings, a history of events, meetings, collateral used, feedback for product teams, etc. This has historically been done in haphazard, unstructured ways using a variety of tools – most of which aren’t explicitly designed for the presales professional. Tools in this space seek to address that gap, giving presales professionals one place to capture, record, and access all the meaningful information they need to successfully engage in an opportunity and bring it to closure.

Related Focus Area(s)

Product Gap Identification, Analysis & Communication

There has historically been a divide between what sales engineers see and hear in the field and what product teams prioritize in product development roadmaps. This use case addresses that gap. Presales teams need the ability to articulate gaps and/or shortcomings in the product in ways that align with customer requirements, feed that information back to product teams in a systematic manner and show the revenue impact of those shortcomings. When they do, product teams can prioritize enhancements that drive the most value for customers and the organization.

Related Focus Area(s)

Reducing Build Times

To maximize understanding and buy-in, prospects typically need to see demos that are realistic and relatable to their specific situations, yet customizing each demo can be onerous and time consuming, further exacerbating presales bandwidth issues. Solutions that can simplify customizing and personalizing demos and help presales organizations create and maintain libraries of vertical, persona and use-case specific demo models will not only make demos more effective at convincing buyers but will also save SEs considerable time.

Related Focus Area(s)

Reducing Unqualified Demos

One of the biggest drains on scarce presales resources: according to a recent industry study, over half of the respondents indicated that 30% of their demos are unqualified. Lowering the percentage of unqualified demos will not only make better use of SEs’ time, but opportunity conversion rates will improve for those buyers that do engage with presales.

Related Focus Area(s)

RFx Automation

Formal RFx response projects can be very time consuming. They often involve numerous contributors from different functions of the business and, without automation, can be extremely tedious to complete. Tools in the Response Management category automate the mundane, manual tasks, so that SMEs and project teams can focus on the high value activities that require their expertise.

Related Focus Area(s)

RFx Project Management

Successful execution of formal RFx responses requires a structured project management approach. These activities need to be treated like formal projects and managed accordingly. Tools in this space provide project management capabilities explicitly designed for managing a response project – which often involves tight deadlines that cannot be missed, the mobilization/involvement of key individuals from multiple functional groups, and an “all hands-on deck” mentality.

Related Focus Area(s)

Sales Intelligence Creation, Curation & Dissemination

Note the intentional use of the term “sales intelligence” in the name of the use case. Information captured and curated in response management tools goes beyond “product and company information”. It is information about the company, products, features, functions, capabilities, etc. explicitly curated to support sales conversations. This is an important distinction, and one that differentiates the information captured in these tools and that which is captured in a “traditional” internal knowledge management tool.

Related Focus Area(s)

Scale the Team

Presales teams are increasingly being asked to support the entire sales cycle, from top-of-the-funnel motions (creating and delivering webinar and other lead-gen demos) to post-sale support (e.g. demoing new features, working with clients to identify upsell opportunities). This has contributed to an explosion in the demand for presales resources, with recent estimates placing the number of open presales job recs worldwide at over 121,000, far outpacing the number of available candidates. With the average time to fully onboard new Sales Engineers at 6 months further complicating the issue, organizations need to find other ways to scale their teams.

Related Focus Area(s)

Simplifying Disjointed Multi-Persona Demo Execution

Demos that incorporate multiple user personas often require the use of different or incognito browsers to simultaneously emulate each persona. Even when SEs remember to explain who they are emulating during the demo, buyers can often get confused or forget which user type is being represented at any given time. Solutions that permit multiple simultaneously logged in users without having to switch browser interfaces can simplify demo flows and make it easier for audiences to follow along.

Related Focus Area(s)

Streamlining Multi-Solution Presentations

Vendors that show multiple products in their demos, especially if they have unique user interfaces or logins, often risk inviting complicating questions about integration, training, licensing and other implications. Solutions that help SEs seamlessly transition between different products can help mitigate those concerns, allowing sellers to focus buyers’ attention on the value their solutions can deliver.

Related Focus Area(s)

Structured Presales Methodology Guidance

This use case is very closely related to Playbook & Best Practice Definition/Implementation. In essence, this is the benefit of defining and implementing playbooks and templates – the guidance that they provide ICs out in the field. Once defined, they offer (in some cases) step-by-step guidance to SEs on how to execute important aspects of the presales opportunity, such as discovery, POC, POV, etc.

Related Focus Area(s)

Task Management & Prioritization

It’s easy for ICs to become overwhelmed by the number of deals they are working, tasks and activities they are responsible for, etc. As such, it can be difficult to keep track of all the open items and outstanding tasks they have pending, and things can fall through the cracks. Nothing builds credibility more than following through on our commitments and doing what we said we would do. The tools in this space are designed to help SEs keep track of and prioritize all the moving parts on their radar.

Related Focus Area(s)

Team Management

Not unlike the manager of a sports team, who needs to ensure they have the right mix of skills, experience, personality, etc. “in the locker room” or on the field of play, presales leaders need to make sure they have the right mix of talent on the team to support the sales organization and revenue aspirations of the business. They also need the ability to balance the workload, and ensure that every member of the team is getting ample opportunity to contribute and is placed in a position to succeed – working on deals that leverage their capabilities and expertise.

Related Focus Area(s)

VENDORS

Participating Vendors

The following 19 vendors spent a great deal of time and effort educating us about their companies and solutions, and where they fit within this newly forming market.  The vendors engaged in a set of structured meetings and demonstrations and responded to a detailed RFI, from which we created a Vendor Profile for each of them.  We would like to again thank them for participating in this inaugural version of the Presales Buyer’s Guide.

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Other Vendors To Be Aware Of

Perhaps as a clear indicator of just how rapidly the Presales technology marketplace is expanding, we found nine additional vendors after we initiated our research.  While it was too late to include them in the process of creating a Vendor Profile, we felt it was important to make our readers aware of them to be as inclusive as possible.  A number of these vendors have already expressed an interest in going through the same process our Participating Vendors did to enable us to add a formal Vendor Profile for them.  To be notified when additional Vendor Profiles are published, please sign up for our Newsletter by filling out our Contact Form.

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BY THE NUMBERS

Overview

These reports are intended to provide information on the market as a whole as much as, if not more than, individual vendors.  They are based on either information that a) is publicly available on sites like LinkedIn and Crunchbase and/or b) was provided by the vendors at our request (as noted accordingly on the charts).

The goal with these charts was to put each piece of information in one place for each of the vendors to save viewers the time of having to do so themselves.

Year Company Formed

This chart shows the year in which each company in our study was formed.  As you can see, almost 80% of the vendors in our report were started in the year 2018 or later, indicating just how young this emerging category is.

Number of Employees

This chart shows the number of employees according to LinkedIn at the time of publishing.  The key takeaway from this chart is that over half the vendors in the study have less than 30 employees, further indicating the early stages of the market.

2021 Calendar Year ARR

We invited the participating vendors to share with us in ranges, what their 2021 Annual Recurring Revenues were.  Not all participants chose to disclose this information, but those who did are grouped below.  Impressive numbers for such a young market.

2021 # of Active Paying Clients

We invited the participating vendors to share with us the number of active paying clients – again in ranges.  We did this as much to weed out any vendors that did not have at least a collection of paying customers that they could identify by name.  As you can see in the chart, about a third of the vendors have between 10-50 paying clients, and just over a fourth have between 100-500.  Another indication of how much room for growth there is in this emerging market.

2021 # of Active Users

We invited the vendors to share with us the number of active users they had registered in their platform as of the end of 2021.  Another interesting distribution of numbers across the vendors.  Also another indication of the tremendous opportunity for growth in the market.

# of LinkedIn Followers

We thought it was interesting to look at the number of followers each vendor has.  Again, we believe this is an insight into how young this market is and how much opportunity for growth there is.

Total Funding to Date

The amount of investment money that has flooded the presales software market has received a fair amount of attention in the past year.  This chart provides some of the numbers behind that conversation.  These are the total funding amounts to date (in USD) according to numbers publicly available on Crunchbase and some provided by the vendors themselves.

Latest Funding Round

Another indication of the early state of this market, this chart shows the latest funding round as cited in Crunchbase.  As you can see, every vendor in the study are Series B or earlier.