Sales Content Collaboration's Role in Pre-Sales

Pre-sales and sales engineering are the hidden superheroes of B2B sales teams. 

They’re one part technical expert and one part sales rep making them the ninjas of your revenue team. They hold valuable technical knowledge, crank out an immense amount of content, and help build credibility throughout the entire sales cycle.

They also drive revenue. According to McKinsey, companies with strong pre-sales capabilities consistently achieve win rates of 40–50% in new business and 80–90% in renewal business—well above average rates.

But, we often overstretch these crucial individuals. 

“Most organizations would try to have one sales engineer for every one or two salespeople. However...it is common to have a ratio closer to one sales engineer for every five reps,” Consensus wrote in a blog last year. 

So, how can we optimize these “people behind the curtain” if a 1:2 ratio isn’t in the cards? 

The answer lies in content. 

These individuals have to create and generate an absurd amount of documents throughout the sales cycle: SOWs, POCs, RFPs, RFIs, Security Questionnaires...the list goes on. 

Often, these documents are time-intensive: they lack automation and can be highly manual. ‍

In 2021, let’s make this process less arduous.

Make every sales engineer your best sales engineer.

Don’t you wish you could just clone your best sales engineer(s)? With a clear sales content collaboration strategy, you can basically do just that. 

Centralizing all of your sales content within a collaborative, scalable platform automates the knowledge transfer process for key messages such as value proposition, competitive differentiation, and technical acumen. This holds true not just for these sales responses, but for general knowledge and one-off questions as well. With global search available across the knowledge base, these platforms allow for instant knowledge-share to new team members as early as their first day.

Engage more quickly and strategically with clients.

Sales cycles are accelerating. Buyers want to be more informed and they want more personalized content. 

To keep up with these increasing buyer expectations, you need to be able to create content in seconds. With sales content collaboration, that becomes a reality. But, it’s not just the typical requests that can be created within these platforms. 

Want to preemptively send a security questionnaire or technical requirements “FAQ” so you don’t go to RFP? You can publish and send these documents to prospective buyers and track their engagement. Additionally, create other documents like seeded RFP templates to slant the bid process in your favor.

Control the message with centralized templates.

Gone are the days of desktop saves of a template from 2015. In 2021, be confident your sales engineers are sending accurate, up-to-date, and relevant content. Credibility is everything in today’s sales cycle—so don’t leave these pieces of content up to chance.

All of the knowledge transfer mentioned above can be injected into multiple document templates, that can be segmented for different products/offerings, industries, and regions. 

Even further, sections of content can be toggled on or off depending on the prospect’s use case. For example, an enterprise deal with professional services add-ons, custom configuration, and global support, may need many more pieces of information than a prospect on the floor of your ICP. With sales content collaboration, you can configure these templates to fit their exact solution.

Create a content “center of gravity.”

Sales content is often scattered. CRMs, Wikis, Sales Engagement platforms, and Sales Enablement platforms are just a few of the places it can end up. The problem with this scattered approach is that content quickly loses context. 

When you centralize and integrate the most important tools in your tech stack, your team has the full context in order to create great content, and when this content is searched against down the road, the team has full historical context to understand the relevance today. 

Clean and professional deliverables.

Stop spending hours formatting that POC deliverables table or SOW requirements. 

Customized template creation and full text-editing baked into the platform can be exported to any format your prospect desires. Have a lot of attachments and diagrams? Create a .zip file to have all your files in one convenient place.

You can also create customized two-way categorizations and personalization tokens to pull from your CRM or Sales Enablement platform. 

Give your sales engineer ninjas better sales content in 2021.

These sales content requests don’t have to be so arduous and time-consuming. In this new year, empower and equip your team with the wealth of knowledge this sales content holds by adding sales content collaboration to your pre-sales playbook. 

You don’t have to just take our point of view at face value. We’ve been working with the amazing team at Veeam since 2017. Check out Charles Clarke’s thoughts on how Ombud has become a “gathering point” for their sales content and requests.