It’s just a fact - we all make better decisions when we base them on data. But data can tell you more than just what’s happening right now - it can help you influence others to make choices and help you prepare for the future.

In PreSales, we have access to a huge amount of data if we know how to use it, for both leadership and individual contributors. Here are a few ways some PreSales teams are using their data to influence decisions.

Developing the Right Data

Gathering data is important - but it will have more of an impact if you’re being careful to collect the right data. In PreSales, there are plenty of data points you can look at to understand what’s going on with your team and figure out how to scale effectively for leaders.

Here are some of the data points you can measure for your PreSales team:

• SE engagement activities – meetings, business reviews, and others
• Technical validation activities – Demo, Trial, PoC, others
• Conversion rates of these activities
• Conversion rates without these activities
• Sales stages of these activities
• Aging of opportunities
• Aging of wins vs. aging of loss
• Strategic vs commodity products
• Specialist contribution
• Price/Unit
• Renewal rate
• Customer satisfaction

But much of this data isn’t just helpful for leadership - it’s critical for individual contributors as well. If you’re looking to get a promotion and eventually move into a leadership role, your ask will be more effective if you can back it up with data like how many demos you did in the last year and your win rate with those demos.

How to Influence Decisions

Data can tell you important information, like how many demos your PreSales team is doing and how much time they’re spending on demo prep. How busy is the team? What are you doing? Are you working on the right things? And most importantly, what are the trends for the month and the year ahead?

Those trends are especially important because they can help PreSales identify upcoming problems for the sales team. For example, if your requests for demos are suddenly falling off a cliff, that data points to trouble ahead for the sales pipeline.

You can also help out your product partners by identifying and measuring any product gaps that PreSales is currently covering up in demos. Once you’re collected enough data to make it clear that a problem exists, you can proactively go to your product team and ask your peers there to shore up those issues.

And PreSales also has lots of access to customer conversations that can provide value to the whole organization. Capture what your customers are asking for in demos, like competitor features or changes to the product, and how often they ask for them. It’s a big value-add for the PreSales team when you relay these insights to the product and sales teams so they can be more effective as well.

Ensuring Data Accuracy

Getting PreSales to actually regularly record data is vital to getting accurate measurements. Your data entry discipline needs to be quite good to make sure you have a clear picture of what’s going on. But your PreSales team members are probably quite busy, and not excited at the thought of yet more data entry tasks to complete. There are a few ways to inspire them to get the job done, though.

To get better data, your system should be simple to use because you’ll get more adoption. Look at tools that have the ability to automate things to make entry even easier for busy reps. Sell your team on the process by telling them the benefits of entering their data - like getting more support on busy product lines. You can even run a contest or have some sort of perk for whoever enters their data the most consistently or quickly to encourage adoption.

Key Takeaways

Be sure to always look at what data really matters, not just what data you can measure easily. And don’t be afraid to be creative when thinking of ways to use it, either. This will help you drive decision-making forward in your organization, no matter if you’re a PreSales leader or individual contributor.

Want to learn more? Check out our in-depth webinar: