Last week I presented PresalesIQ to a room full of developers, IT professionals, and founders at a networking event in Seattle. Before I got into the product I put up a slide explaining what presales was.
I still got questions about it afterward.
That told me something. Presales is one of the most important functions in B2B technology sales, and most people outside of it have never heard of it. So here is a plain English explanation.
The short version
Presales is the technical side of the sales process. It is everything that happens between a prospect expressing interest and a contract being signed that requires deep product and technical expertise to execute.
If a salesperson is the relationship driver, the presales professional is the person who makes the product real. They answer the hard technical questions, run the demonstrations, design the proof of concept, and make sure the prospect actually understands how the solution solves their specific problem.
What does a presales professional actually do?
The most common title in presales is Solutions Engineer, though you will also see Sales Engineer, Solutions Consultant, and Presales Consultant used interchangeably depending on the company.
On any given day a solutions engineer might be running a technical discovery call to understand a prospect's environment and requirements, delivering a product demonstration tailored to a specific use case, designing and executing a proof of concept to validate that the solution works in the customer's context, responding to RFPs and security questionnaires, or working with the product team to communicate gaps and feature requests surfaced during customer conversations.
It is a role that sits at the intersection of sales, product, and engineering. Solutions engineers need to understand the technology deeply enough to answer tough questions under pressure, and they need to communicate it clearly enough that a non-technical buyer can make a confident decision.
Why does presales matter?
In complex B2B sales, the technical validation is often the deciding factor. A prospect might love the salesperson and trust the company, but if they cannot get comfortable with the technology they will not buy. Presales is what closes that gap.
Research consistently shows that deals with active SE involvement have significantly higher win rates than those without. Presales is not a support function for sales. It is a revenue function in its own right.
Why it is underserved
Despite its impact, presales has historically been one of the most under-tooled functions in a revenue organization. Sales teams have CRMs built specifically for them. Marketing teams have automation platforms. Customer success teams have dedicated software.
Presales has mostly been running on spreadsheets, shared documents, and CRM fields that were designed for account executives and repurposed out of necessity.
That is the problem PresalesIQ was built to solve.📬 Enjoying this? We publish practical presales ops content twice a month. Subscribe to the newsletter, it's free →