Pre-sales career for an IT professional.
By admin at 29 May, 2008, 4:53 am
Recently I was talking with a hardcore pre-sales manager from my firm to get few insights about pre-sales activities. After initial lengthy talk of numerous value additions, value propositions, so on and so forth they make to firm’s bottom line, he finally agreed to touch upon the modus operandi of a pre-sales in IT industry. I did some research later on, and what I learned that a great portion of pre-sales activities consists of responding to RFIs (Request for Information), RFPs (request for proposals), preparing client visits, and estimating the pricing policy for the proposals.
In layman’s term, pre-sales are activities you do prior to selling your products to clients.
- Identifying the opportunity for a business, or “generating lead”.
- Managing the identified opportunity.
- Identifying whether you are going to bid for that opportunity or not. In economics it’s called terms evaluating the “opportunity cost”.
- Generating a proposal according to the client’s requirement, highlighting your firms’ expertise and core-competencies.
- Identifying whether your proposal exactly matches the client requirements.
- Delivering the proposal
- Closing the sale.
There may be few more steps in between here and there based on your firms rules and guidelines. But the format will be more or less same across the industry.
Needless to say, pre-sales position requires both technical and marketing skills. During making a proposal or suggesting a work flow for any technical solution, a marketing professional may make some assumptions, which sometimes may not generate the best technical solutions. Remember your proposal will compete some of the best brains in the industry for the same opportunity.
An IT professional can look pre-sales as a career. After few years in pre-sales team, a techie can elevate himself to business development manger or to account manager or to any client facing roles.
In my next article I will talk about RFI and RFPs and why these documents are crucial in pre-sales phases.
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