The Product Management Interface - Pre-Sales

Few months back I started documenting certain interactions a Product Management personnel engages with various organization internal teams. The first one in the list was on engagement of PMs with the Sales Team. The article can be seen at: The Product Management Interface - Sales. This article is the second article in the series focusing on the interaction with the pre-sales team. Pre-sales interaction with PMs are are by far the most engaging and most detailed and sometimes can get to high-pitched discussions. There are obvious reasons for these as well. Most importantly, many PMs in their previous life have executed the role of a pre-sales in some form before moving into a PM role. Moreover, in certain scenarios they also choose in pre-sales careers when the PM roles are not available during difficult times. There is almost a symbiotic relationship between PMs and pre-sales in some sense in an organization. A harmonious relationship is definitely needed to be established with the pre-sales team. If a PM keeps gets right level of engagement with the pre-sales team, he can virtually get a good bit of market insight without having to engage with many direct customers. Hence, it's crucial to develop this interface significantly in an organization.

Who is a Pre-Sales Person?

I will like to specify a generalized definition of pre-sales team here. Pre-sales team comprises of all the functional or technical people who engage with the customer before the customer has paid for the product or service. Unlike the sales team who depend quite a lot on interpersonal customer engagements, pre-sales teams typically do a lot of advertisement of the product or service based on the features, functions and capabilities of the solution. And, showcase the effectiveness in delivering a customer value. In organizations, the following profiles can be considered as a person falling in the pre-sales profile:

1. Solution / Sales Engineer
2. Professional Services
3. Functional Consultant
4. Sales Consultant
5. Product Trainer

I will consider product trainer in this section and not in the post-sales category as many a times they are the first person engaging with the customer or user in giving an experience of the product or solution. Challenging the customer's existing understanding and molding them at times to think in the new paradigm. As you can see, other than product engineering and support / escalation engineering everyone else kind of falls in the category of pre-sales like characteristics in their customer engagement. Hence, has been discussed here.

Sales and Pre-sales do not have similar incentives

For sales teams, incentives are typically on transaction and transaction volumes. Associated pre-sales teams engaged directly with the sell may be provided a similar incentive. But, it may not be always true. For example, certain organizations have lower incentives percentage on pre-sales and consultant roles as they are engaged many a times in general marketing activities and not essentially always on a specific deal chasing. Thus their commitment to specific deals may be limited. As the organization gets larger, very soon one realizes the incentive structure may even vary from region to region. For a global product manager, this can be a concern as unless she gets a engaged pre-sales interaction with the customer, it's not always easy to get a clear picture on the customer needs. Engaging with each individual customers can be hard. As a product manager, it's important to understand these in an important deal and ensure the incentives are well aligned or ensure the pre-sales is well engaged for the customer to be successful. While a PM may not have a say in the incentive structure, it's at least important to ensure engagement expectation with the pre-sales team is properly established.

Ensure there are Product Experts

This is a difficult challenge for a PM in a geographically distributed product environment of a large organization. The product that's least complex and simpler to explain gets the maximum pre-sales focus. Rightly, so as well. If something is easy to showcase, explain to a customer it'll definitely sell in bigger numbers. Particularly, in a large organization it's an internal competition to better over the products of the other BU. Hence, it's rather important for a PM to create a formal team of experts in the pre-sales organization and provide them the necessary tools to quickly showcase the solution. Ideally, anything that can be installed on the corporate environment on the mobile platform is the easiest to showcase. The challenge comes in is the pre-sales teams will have their specific geographic needs and commitment as experts are only limited. The other challenge that arises is on incentive sharing. In sales teams, whenever a help is extended from one team to the other, it's expected the incentives will be shared equitably based on the level of engagement. Many a times, regional weaker teams may not contact the global experts as the incentive sharing may reduce their pie of the deal. This is significant yet non-productive challenge for a PM with very limited control on the situation.

Tools for Showcasing the Product

The artifacts needed for sales-engineering are multitude. And I will not like to discuss a complete list of documents here. But, will like to describe a general guideline of what is expected in such artifacts and documentation. Some organization may need marketing team providing some portions of such contents as well. Generally, product demo instance should be developed for a release and be available with a reasonable data and demo script for a pre-sales person to deliver in front of a customer. However, many of the other artifacts include product documentation, training, RFP responses, competitive battle cards etc. While some of the requirements are customer specific, large volume of artifacts are product related. Ideally, a wiki or knowledge portal with collaborative capabilities provide the best options to develop a product central database for organization to use. Expecting PM to provide every little customer query response is not a practical solution and creates unnecessary organizational delays and dissonance. While marketing function plays substantial roles in developing content, certain organizations functionally focus on field marketing leaving the product marketing activities to the PMs. It's very important to understand the organization functional design to address these needs. As a general guidelines, I will expect PM organization to provide the following general guideline artifacts that generally do not change significantly overtime and can be updated intermittently.

1. Product Scope and Vision
2. Market Segment, Targeting and Positioning
3. Pricing Guidelines - Giving enough leeway for sales or senior management to decide on discounts
4. Functional Training of Product Concepts - Not detailed steps
5. News of knowledge of latest happenings that may affect competitive positioning

Essentially, PMs should help pre-sales teams to develop a solid foundation to engage with the customer better. Detailed product hands on training can be developed by trainers, engineering with every major releases of the product.

Focus on Collaboration

When you have managed to establish a group of experts and also established a basic level of documentation, then the next logical step is to have the interaction flow effectively across the organization. Wikis even simple mailing lists are way to go. Sharing already existing content, slide deck in one place goes a long way. Have an open culture to edit and exchange content across the team. Use PM to ratify answers to specific queries and not expect him to provide answers on every question on the RFP or provide slides for every customer engagement. PMs also depend on pre-sales inputs to enhance their knowledge and understanding of the customers. Hence, as much as PMs are expected to provide answers, it's equally important to provide them the market intelligence. A product level discussion forum every couple of weeks help understanding the product focus. Secondly, there is also a need to provide a pre-release scope of a product before the implementation starts to take valid inputs in the design phase of the product. This ensures the before the actual customer engagement happens you have at least a set of people who have got to evaluate the product and reviewed the mock ups and validated.

Pre-Sales is not the Customer

It's rather imperative for a PM to understand that the pre-sales team is not the customer. While engaging one needs to keep in mind if the feature request benefits a customer or a sales engagement while demonstrating the product. For example, for a sales engagement, entering forms may be easier to demonstrate but in the real life the customer may use a bar code scanner to register assets to a system. Spending elaborate development time on best possible interface for form filling while not enhancing the bar code scanner user interface can be fatal for production customers. Scale is another area where pre-sales may not be able to provide a lot of inputs to but a deployment engineer can provide lots of insights. Many products introduce build to build updates or upgrading from beta builds etc. This helps a lot to pre-sales teams to be operational as soon as the product is released. But this also may increase the test matrix. Focusing on upgrades across released versions may help enhance customer experience and something that cannot be bargained for. Given priorities the PM should consider where the gains are maximum vis-a-vis the time to be spent.

Conclusion

Engagement with pre-sales and PM team is an ongoing process. Mutual trust, collaboration and cooperation goes a long way in establishing products in the market. However, there are challenges that needs to be mutually addressed. Again, pre-sales becomes the most important team who can vouch for product effectiveness and quality that sales and senior management trust. Hence, an engaged pre-sales team ensures success of a product to a significant extent.