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The Presales Role – Consultants and Engineers

The presales role is vital for many businesses.  What is the role of the presale consultant? What does a presales engineer do? Are the roles different?The presales role is vital for many businesses. What is the role of the presale consultant? What does a presales engineer do? Are the roles different?

While these are simple questions, they always lead to deeper ones focused on skills, best practices, and so on.

In this article we will explore the presales role and we hope to answer all of your questions.

Let’s start at the beginning.

What is a presale consultant?

A presale consultant helps builds relationships with prospective customers while developing a deep understanding of their business challenges. The consultant may create proposals and finalize the business, or they may hand the prospect to an account executive to close the deal.

What is a presale engineer?

The presale engineer has a deep understanding of your products and how they are used to solve business challenges. The engineer creates and delivers demos, answers detailed product questions including those related to how your solutions work with the broader tech stack the customer is already using.

As you can see, the pre sale engineer and the pre sale consultant are two separate roles, valuable for specific types of sales and selling situations, and your business may require one, the other other, or both.

Critical skills for each role

Some of these may be clear based upon our role descriptions above — let’s review.

Key Skills for Presales Consulting

Business and Industry Knowledge

The presales consultant must understand current challenges in the prospects industry, the state of their market, top competitors, and common business challenges.

The consultant needs to use this knowledge to build confidence in the companies ability to solve these challenges.

Relationship Building

These people must be great communicators and comfortable and confident relationship builders.

This role requires working with prospects and stakeholders from across the business, in various job functions, they need to make each stakeholder confident in your solutions and your company.

Key Skills for Presales Engineering

Product and Technical Knowledge

The pre sales engineer need to know every corner of your solution and how each piece can integrate with other solutions your customers are typically using.

Demo Wizardry

The presales engineer must be able to create and deliver demos that leave your customers excited about your products and confident that they are worth every penny you will be charging them.

Listen to Chris White share his tips for delivering great demos.

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