You already understand the importance of sales enablement. But what about what comes before that? Have you stopped to think about the pre-sales process and its impact on your sales cycle? If not, you should.
The pre-sales workflow is an essential part of any sales enablement strategy, allowing you to lay the groundwork for your other sales processes. The research you gather during this stage will serve to guide your entire sales journey. By giving you a better understanding of your customers and through the development of processes and best practices, you’ll also improve your sales capacity.
Common pre-sales activities include:
Research and documentation are only part of the picture, however. You also need to choose the right pre-sales tools. Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through some of the best in this blog.
While it may be possible to manually handle pre-sales tasks in a smaller organization, this is infeasible at scale. Even something as simple as monitoring customer interactions can be overwhelmingly complex if your business operates across multiple sales channels. That’s why pre-sales tools are so important —they streamline the pre-sales process, allowing it to operate more efficiently and affording a competitive edge to the businesses that use them.
Below, we’ve listed our top 10 picks for pre-sales tools in 2024. As you review the list, think carefully about your budget, the features you need, and how much training your employees will require.
Our own platform offers a powerful and simple virtual IT lab that almost anyone can use to spin up high-impact virtual environments in just a few clicks. Designed to support training, onboarding, and sales enablement in equal measure, CloudShare is easy to integrate with a range of different platforms and solutions, including Google, Docebo, and multiple learning management systems.
We also provide businesses with a comprehensive analytics dashboard that gives them complete insight into how users are engaging with demos and training content.
Storylane is a no-code software platform for developing and deploying interactive, personalized product demos. Fast, flexible, and intuitive, the platform is usable entirely through a browser extension. The software also includes analytics functionality to help your team gain a better understanding of how people are engaging with your demos.
While Storylane is excellent for no-code demo development, it can be a little cumbersome to use if you want to incorporate any HTML. The platform also suffers from a few minor technical glitches.
Gong uses a combination of analytics and artificial intelligence to provide insights that span your business’s entire revenue pipeline. The platform aims to give businesses a deeper understanding of customer interactions using AI-powered processes to powerpower revenue workflows. The platform also offers rich visual reporting, AI-driven automation, and a suite of powerful forecasting tools.
Seismic is a global leader in sales enablement for a reason — its software is very good at what it does. The company offers solutions that span the entire pipeline, from pre-sales to customer service. For pre-sales, Seismic’s Strategy & Planning solution supports the creation of content such as onboarding programs, playbooks, and sales plays. It also features smart content auditing, making it easy to keep track of and curate your company’s sales content.
Similar to Storylane, UserGuiding allows teams to create custom onboarding and other in-app experiences via a no-code builder. After installing the UserGuiding browser extension, users can start building out onboarding flows with just a few clicks. Product analytics and in-app surveys, meanwhile, provide insight into both customer behavior and product strategy.
Billing itself as a technical copilot for sales teams, Vivun uses artificial intelligence to provide technical resources and capacity to the entire sales team. Built on decades of experience and trained extensively on sales data and technical sales activities, Vivun not only provides new insights to teams but also functions as a sort of virtual assistant to sales engineers. It includes tools for operations, demos, product design, and more.
Highspot is an AI-driven sales enablement platform designed to consolidate coaching, training, content management, and more into a single, unified solution. In addition to providing contextual training to sales representatives, Highspot can also offer guidance to help them be more effective during deals. The solution’s content management functionality makes it incredibly easy to keep resource libraries organized and up-to-date, and the platform itself supports more than 80 native integrations.
Homerun provides a unified, collaborative presales workspace that brings together every single stakeholder in the sales process and makes it easy to track, organize, and optimize presales efforts. GDPR-compliant and SOC2-certified, Homerun automatically keeps track of sales activities and provides notifications for time-sensitive tasks. The platform also supports a wide range of different integrations along with analytics and reporting functionality.
Much of the pre-sales process focuses on knowledge — and that’s where Mindtickle excels. It provides a simple way to not only track details about products and services but also to measure the impact of specific training content and initiatives. Mindtickle also uses artificial intelligence to support professional development and skills reinforcement.
PandaDoc simplifies and streamlines what may well be the most time-consuming part of the pre-sales process: Proposals. With access to hundreds of pre-made templates and built-in e-signature functionality, PandaDoc allows businesses to create, share, and receive signatures on contracts, quotes, and more in a matter of minutes. The solution also features native CRM integration.
Pre-sales is an important part of your sales enablement process, one that you’re ill-advised to ignore. The tools above will go a long way toward giving your team what it needs to successfully manage all their pre-sales tasks. In the meantime, however, we recommend doing a bit more reading on pre-sales and sales enablement — to that end, we have a few blogs you can check out.