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I asked the new AI chatbot ChatGPT by OpenAI, “What a PreSales Solutions Consultant does” and this is what it answered:
Over 18 months ago, I did not know that the PreSales Solutions Consultant title even existed. When I was approached for that exact role, I told the recruiter they had the wrong person — but it turns out that they didn’t. It turns out that I love my job. And since I started, I have been on a quest to find the best resources, practices, tips and tricks to be the best Solutions Consultant I could be.
The definition given by the chatbot is accurate, but allow me to rephrase it in the way that drives me every day: through a user-centric view, industry’s best practices, and technical knowledge, I inspire prospects and customers with ways to address their pain points and business objectives using technology. I am a trusted advisor who wants to make customers’ professional lives easier for a mutually beneficial, long-term business relationship.
Here are six elements that have helped me grasp the role in my first 18 months of PreSales:
Acquire and practice a deep understanding of the products/services you’re selling
Those who have never been bored during their onboarding period, please raise your hands! No one? We’ve all been through it: After a week or two of reading documentation, listening to calls, or shadowing peers, we get antsy and are ready to partake in the action. Why not? We feel like we know enough and that this newly acquired knowledge is already turning stale from not being used.
For starters, I highly recommend the book “Why We Make Mistakes” by Joseph T. Hallinan. It’s a fascinating depiction of how we overlook a lot of information without realizing it, while growing falsely confident about the partial information we’ve truly absorbed.
My big advice here is: Don’t downplay the impact of rehearsals and mock demos. During my first four to six weeks, my manager had me craft specific talk tracks for different solutions within our platform. Initially, I had to present each of them in 12 minutes, then five minutes, and finally down to one minute. By the end of it, I had thoroughly memorized all the different formulations around our use cases. This practice made it easy for me to refer effortlessly to the different ways of saying the same thing. Take that sweet time at the beginning — it’s worth it!
Adapt to the selling style of your Sales counterpart
There is a saying, “your team is only as fast as your slowest member.” Hear me out; I am not saying account executives are slow! What I mean is that, no matter how great you both are, your duo won’t accomplish much until you learn to complement each other’s weaknesses and reinforce each other’s strengths. A call is not a competition for who is the greatest, but instead an opportunity to come together as a team to provide a great buying experience to prospects. And if it’s to the prospect’s benefit, it will move the deal forward.
Don’t be shy or too prideful and ask for help
As trusted advisors, PreSales consultants have to establish credibility with prospects and customers so that they trust our solutions. Well, this works the same with your account executive. To some extent, and I am not saying to bend over backwards systemically, you want to reassure your partner that they can trust you to make the best decision for the deal. This could mean pulling in someone more relevant than yourself (a CSM, a PM, an Engineer, etc.) or putting additional and specific effort into demo assets.
No one can reasonably expect you to have all the answers, but it is your responsibility to look for and understand those you didn’t know you didn’t know.
Find a note-taking system that works for you
There are plenty of recommendations out there on tools every PreSales should use for taking notes. Some favor pen and paper, other digital notes, and still others a combination of both. The key to remember is that you won’t remember everything you’ll hear or read on a daily basis. In a nutshell, free your brain and record information that is interesting and relevant, yet not useful at the moment. This will allow you to refer to it later on when needed.
A few pieces of advice:
- Overall, use a company tool as the ultimate source of truth for your deal-related notes so anyone involved in the deal and/or management can access your insights and get a fuller perspective of the sales cycle.
- During calls, use the same company tool to take notes. It will save you some copy-pasting later on. Personally, I try to avoid using my computer for anything other than the demo itself when I am on a call. Even with two monitors, I’d rather not take the risk — we’ve all read horror or funny stories during the pandemic! I have a dedicated notebook where I jot down any relevant information and highlight what stood out.
- Outside of calls, I save relevant links and information to a digital notes app (Google Keep, Evernote, Obsidian, etc.). If I have more time, I’ll actually write an email to myself with the thoughts I have in mind (and have a filter that sorts the incoming email in the appropriate folder, depending on its subject). For unfinished thoughts, I send them to myself using our internal chatting tool (Slack, Teams, etc).
- Last but not least, your organization might use a recording tool like Gong. You can always annotate calls there as well. If not, your computer typically has a native recording feature that does the job of saving the conversation for your review later on.
Have a growth mindset
The tech space, market dynamics and analysts’ trends are constantly changing, and you need to adapt to it. For instance, in the martech space, during the summer of 2022, several vendors switched their language from “Enablement” to “Intelligence” regardless of their respective platform’s purpose. As a result, wording and talk tracks had to change in order to help prospects better pinpoint differentiating features.
As a Solutions Consultant, it’s important to dedicate time and energy to learning and keeping your product knowledge and industry expertise relevant. It doesn’t mean you’ll get everything right on the first try or close deals in record times, but it will increase your credibility.
Also, don’t skip those release meetings and their accompanying documentation! Skim them if you don’t have time, because sometimes, general awareness is enough to begin to address a prospect’s hypothetical scenario. But make sure to block time to think through the implications of the changes or new features for prospects’ experience with your product or service.
It’s not about you, it’s about your audience
A piece of advice I got from a former manager that has served me many many times over: “Show up to every call as if it’s the first one.” It’s worked for me for several reasons:
- After 3+ calls with the same prospect, it’s easy to grow overly confident about our understanding of their needs. It means that we aren’t as attentive, we stop asking clarifying questions, and thus, we miss opportunities to dig deeper into discovery.
- It is just as easy to skip over to what we want to say about their needs and entangle them in our company’s jargon of benefits, value, and use cases. It’s tempting to want to sound smart! The call then turns into a showcase rather than a conversation. I have been guilty of that!
- As we grow comfortable in a sales cycle, we might lose our edge and take the win for granted. Next thing you know, a new stakeholder joins the committee and we’re not on our A-game to navigate the change in dynamics.
As a relationship builder, a Solutions Consultant focuses on understanding the customer’s needs — sometimes even helping them discover the underlying needs to their requests. Most importantly, we weave those insights into stories that help them visualize how our solutions will transform their professional lives for the better.
Conclusion
The past 18 months as a PreSales Solutions Consultant have been an amazing journey, discovering and learning about the role through peers, webinars, and more. I hope these lessons will help anyone falling into the role like I did to feel more prepared, build their confidence, and overall, in good PreSales fashion, I want to set their expectations straight.
The most important lesson of all is that working at the crossroads of sales, operations, product, people, and technology will be a humbling experience. Don’t get discouraged by what you don’t know or understand — embrace the journey and seize these opportunities to challenge your growth.
Written by:
PreSales Solutions Architect at PathFactory
Marie-Claire Asseko stumbled upon the PreSales Solutions field in April of 2021 and has never looked back. With close to 10 years of experience in the martech space, she inspires customers and prospects to innovate, scale, and systematize their tactics. She holds a Bachelors of Business Administration degree specialized in Business Intelligence, and enjoys geeking out on data, processes, and product management. When she’s not working from home in Montreal, she spends time on her rowing machine with a podcast or mentoring young entrepreneurs in making bold moves.
I asked the new AI chatbot ChatGPT by OpenAI, “What a PreSales Solutions Consultant does” and this is what it answered:
Over 18 months ago, I did not know that the PreSales Solutions Consultant title even existed. When I was approached for that exact role, I told the recruiter they had the wrong person — but it turns out that they didn’t. It turns out that I love my job. And since I started, I have been on a quest to find the best resources, practices, tips and tricks to be the best Solutions Consultant I could be.
The definition given by the chatbot is accurate, but allow me to rephrase it in the way that drives me every day: through a user-centric view, industry’s best practices, and technical knowledge, I inspire prospects and customers with ways to address their pain points and business objectives using technology. I am a trusted advisor who wants to make customers’ professional lives easier for a mutually beneficial, long-term business relationship.
Here are six elements that have helped me grasp the role in my first 18 months of PreSales:
Acquire and practice a deep understanding of the products/services you’re selling
Those who have never been bored during their onboarding period, please raise your hands! No one? We’ve all been through it: After a week or two of reading documentation, listening to calls, or shadowing peers, we get antsy and are ready to partake in the action. Why not? We feel like we know enough and that this newly acquired knowledge is already turning stale from not being used.
For starters, I highly recommend the book “Why We Make Mistakes” by Joseph T. Hallinan. It’s a fascinating depiction of how we overlook a lot of information without realizing it, while growing falsely confident about the partial information we’ve truly absorbed.
My big advice here is: Don’t downplay the impact of rehearsals and mock demos. During my first four to six weeks, my manager had me craft specific talk tracks for different solutions within our platform. Initially, I had to present each of them in 12 minutes, then five minutes, and finally down to one minute. By the end of it, I had thoroughly memorized all the different formulations around our use cases. This practice made it easy for me to refer effortlessly to the different ways of saying the same thing. Take that sweet time at the beginning — it’s worth it!
Adapt to the selling style of your Sales counterpart
There is a saying, “your team is only as fast as your slowest member.” Hear me out; I am not saying account executives are slow! What I mean is that, no matter how great you both are, your duo won’t accomplish much until you learn to complement each other’s weaknesses and reinforce each other’s strengths. A call is not a competition for who is the greatest, but instead an opportunity to come together as a team to provide a great buying experience to prospects. And if it’s to the prospect’s benefit, it will move the deal forward.
Don’t be shy or too prideful and ask for help
As trusted advisors, PreSales consultants have to establish credibility with prospects and customers so that they trust our solutions. Well, this works the same with your account executive. To some extent, and I am not saying to bend over backwards systemically, you want to reassure your partner that they can trust you to make the best decision for the deal. This could mean pulling in someone more relevant than yourself (a CSM, a PM, an Engineer, etc.) or putting additional and specific effort into demo assets.
No one can reasonably expect you to have all the answers, but it is your responsibility to look for and understand those you didn’t know you didn’t know.
Find a note-taking system that works for you
There are plenty of recommendations out there on tools every PreSales should use for taking notes. Some favor pen and paper, other digital notes, and still others a combination of both. The key to remember is that you won’t remember everything you’ll hear or read on a daily basis. In a nutshell, free your brain and record information that is interesting and relevant, yet not useful at the moment. This will allow you to refer to it later on when needed.
A few pieces of advice:
- Overall, use a company tool as the ultimate source of truth for your deal-related notes so anyone involved in the deal and/or management can access your insights and get a fuller perspective of the sales cycle.
- During calls, use the same company tool to take notes. It will save you some copy-pasting later on. Personally, I try to avoid using my computer for anything other than the demo itself when I am on a call. Even with two monitors, I’d rather not take the risk — we’ve all read horror or funny stories during the pandemic! I have a dedicated notebook where I jot down any relevant information and highlight what stood out.
- Outside of calls, I save relevant links and information to a digital notes app (Google Keep, Evernote, Obsidian, etc.). If I have more time, I’ll actually write an email to myself with the thoughts I have in mind (and have a filter that sorts the incoming email in the appropriate folder, depending on its subject). For unfinished thoughts, I send them to myself using our internal chatting tool (Slack, Teams, etc).
- Last but not least, your organization might use a recording tool like Gong. You can always annotate calls there as well. If not, your computer typically has a native recording feature that does the job of saving the conversation for your review later on.
Have a growth mindset
The tech space, market dynamics and analysts’ trends are constantly changing, and you need to adapt to it. For instance, in the martech space, during the summer of 2022, several vendors switched their language from “Enablement” to “Intelligence” regardless of their respective platform’s purpose. As a result, wording and talk tracks had to change in order to help prospects better pinpoint differentiating features.
As a Solutions Consultant, it’s important to dedicate time and energy to learning and keeping your product knowledge and industry expertise relevant. It doesn’t mean you’ll get everything right on the first try or close deals in record times, but it will increase your credibility.
Also, don’t skip those release meetings and their accompanying documentation! Skim them if you don’t have time, because sometimes, general awareness is enough to begin to address a prospect’s hypothetical scenario. But make sure to block time to think through the implications of the changes or new features for prospects’ experience with your product or service.
It’s not about you, it’s about your audience
A piece of advice I got from a former manager that has served me many many times over: “Show up to every call as if it’s the first one.” It’s worked for me for several reasons:
- After 3+ calls with the same prospect, it’s easy to grow overly confident about our understanding of their needs. It means that we aren’t as attentive, we stop asking clarifying questions, and thus, we miss opportunities to dig deeper into discovery.
- It is just as easy to skip over to what we want to say about their needs and entangle them in our company’s jargon of benefits, value, and use cases. It’s tempting to want to sound smart! The call then turns into a showcase rather than a conversation. I have been guilty of that!
- As we grow comfortable in a sales cycle, we might lose our edge and take the win for granted. Next thing you know, a new stakeholder joins the committee and we’re not on our A-game to navigate the change in dynamics.
As a relationship builder, a Solutions Consultant focuses on understanding the customer’s needs — sometimes even helping them discover the underlying needs to their requests. Most importantly, we weave those insights into stories that help them visualize how our solutions will transform their professional lives for the better.
Conclusion
The past 18 months as a PreSales Solutions Consultant have been an amazing journey, discovering and learning about the role through peers, webinars, and more. I hope these lessons will help anyone falling into the role like I did to feel more prepared, build their confidence, and overall, in good PreSales fashion, I want to set their expectations straight.
The most important lesson of all is that working at the crossroads of sales, operations, product, people, and technology will be a humbling experience. Don’t get discouraged by what you don’t know or understand — embrace the journey and seize these opportunities to challenge your growth.
Written by:
PreSales Solutions Architect at PathFactory
Marie-Claire Asseko stumbled upon the PreSales Solutions field in April of 2021 and has never looked back. With close to 10 years of experience in the martech space, she inspires customers and prospects to innovate, scale, and systematize their tactics. She holds a Bachelors of Business Administration degree specialized in Business Intelligence, and enjoys geeking out on data, processes, and product management. When she’s not working from home in Montreal, she spends time on her rowing machine with a podcast or mentoring young entrepreneurs in making bold moves.
I asked the new AI chatbot ChatGPT by OpenAI, “What a PreSales Solutions Consultant does” and this is what it answered:
Over 18 months ago, I did not know that the PreSales Solutions Consultant title even existed. When I was approached for that exact role, I told the recruiter they had the wrong person — but it turns out that they didn’t. It turns out that I love my job. And since I started, I have been on a quest to find the best resources, practices, tips and tricks to be the best Solutions Consultant I could be.
The definition given by the chatbot is accurate, but allow me to rephrase it in the way that drives me every day: through a user-centric view, industry’s best practices, and technical knowledge, I inspire prospects and customers with ways to address their pain points and business objectives using technology. I am a trusted advisor who wants to make customers’ professional lives easier for a mutually beneficial, long-term business relationship.
Here are six elements that have helped me grasp the role in my first 18 months of PreSales:
Acquire and practice a deep understanding of the products/services you’re selling
Those who have never been bored during their onboarding period, please raise your hands! No one? We’ve all been through it: After a week or two of reading documentation, listening to calls, or shadowing peers, we get antsy and are ready to partake in the action. Why not? We feel like we know enough and that this newly acquired knowledge is already turning stale from not being used.
For starters, I highly recommend the book “Why We Make Mistakes” by Joseph T. Hallinan. It’s a fascinating depiction of how we overlook a lot of information without realizing it, while growing falsely confident about the partial information we’ve truly absorbed.
My big advice here is: Don’t downplay the impact of rehearsals and mock demos. During my first four to six weeks, my manager had me craft specific talk tracks for different solutions within our platform. Initially, I had to present each of them in 12 minutes, then five minutes, and finally down to one minute. By the end of it, I had thoroughly memorized all the different formulations around our use cases. This practice made it easy for me to refer effortlessly to the different ways of saying the same thing. Take that sweet time at the beginning — it’s worth it!
Adapt to the selling style of your Sales counterpart
There is a saying, “your team is only as fast as your slowest member.” Hear me out; I am not saying account executives are slow! What I mean is that, no matter how great you both are, your duo won’t accomplish much until you learn to complement each other’s weaknesses and reinforce each other’s strengths. A call is not a competition for who is the greatest, but instead an opportunity to come together as a team to provide a great buying experience to prospects. And if it’s to the prospect’s benefit, it will move the deal forward.
Don’t be shy or too prideful and ask for help
As trusted advisors, PreSales consultants have to establish credibility with prospects and customers so that they trust our solutions. Well, this works the same with your account executive. To some extent, and I am not saying to bend over backwards systemically, you want to reassure your partner that they can trust you to make the best decision for the deal. This could mean pulling in someone more relevant than yourself (a CSM, a PM, an Engineer, etc.) or putting additional and specific effort into demo assets.
No one can reasonably expect you to have all the answers, but it is your responsibility to look for and understand those you didn’t know you didn’t know.
Find a note-taking system that works for you
There are plenty of recommendations out there on tools every PreSales should use for taking notes. Some favor pen and paper, other digital notes, and still others a combination of both. The key to remember is that you won’t remember everything you’ll hear or read on a daily basis. In a nutshell, free your brain and record information that is interesting and relevant, yet not useful at the moment. This will allow you to refer to it later on when needed.
A few pieces of advice:
- Overall, use a company tool as the ultimate source of truth for your deal-related notes so anyone involved in the deal and/or management can access your insights and get a fuller perspective of the sales cycle.
- During calls, use the same company tool to take notes. It will save you some copy-pasting later on. Personally, I try to avoid using my computer for anything other than the demo itself when I am on a call. Even with two monitors, I’d rather not take the risk — we’ve all read horror or funny stories during the pandemic! I have a dedicated notebook where I jot down any relevant information and highlight what stood out.
- Outside of calls, I save relevant links and information to a digital notes app (Google Keep, Evernote, Obsidian, etc.). If I have more time, I’ll actually write an email to myself with the thoughts I have in mind (and have a filter that sorts the incoming email in the appropriate folder, depending on its subject). For unfinished thoughts, I send them to myself using our internal chatting tool (Slack, Teams, etc).
- Last but not least, your organization might use a recording tool like Gong. You can always annotate calls there as well. If not, your computer typically has a native recording feature that does the job of saving the conversation for your review later on.
Have a growth mindset
The tech space, market dynamics and analysts’ trends are constantly changing, and you need to adapt to it. For instance, in the martech space, during the summer of 2022, several vendors switched their language from “Enablement” to “Intelligence” regardless of their respective platform’s purpose. As a result, wording and talk tracks had to change in order to help prospects better pinpoint differentiating features.
As a Solutions Consultant, it’s important to dedicate time and energy to learning and keeping your product knowledge and industry expertise relevant. It doesn’t mean you’ll get everything right on the first try or close deals in record times, but it will increase your credibility.
Also, don’t skip those release meetings and their accompanying documentation! Skim them if you don’t have time, because sometimes, general awareness is enough to begin to address a prospect’s hypothetical scenario. But make sure to block time to think through the implications of the changes or new features for prospects’ experience with your product or service.
It’s not about you, it’s about your audience
A piece of advice I got from a former manager that has served me many many times over: “Show up to every call as if it’s the first one.” It’s worked for me for several reasons:
- After 3+ calls with the same prospect, it’s easy to grow overly confident about our understanding of their needs. It means that we aren’t as attentive, we stop asking clarifying questions, and thus, we miss opportunities to dig deeper into discovery.
- It is just as easy to skip over to what we want to say about their needs and entangle them in our company’s jargon of benefits, value, and use cases. It’s tempting to want to sound smart! The call then turns into a showcase rather than a conversation. I have been guilty of that!
- As we grow comfortable in a sales cycle, we might lose our edge and take the win for granted. Next thing you know, a new stakeholder joins the committee and we’re not on our A-game to navigate the change in dynamics.
As a relationship builder, a Solutions Consultant focuses on understanding the customer’s needs — sometimes even helping them discover the underlying needs to their requests. Most importantly, we weave those insights into stories that help them visualize how our solutions will transform their professional lives for the better.
Conclusion
The past 18 months as a PreSales Solutions Consultant have been an amazing journey, discovering and learning about the role through peers, webinars, and more. I hope these lessons will help anyone falling into the role like I did to feel more prepared, build their confidence, and overall, in good PreSales fashion, I want to set their expectations straight.
The most important lesson of all is that working at the crossroads of sales, operations, product, people, and technology will be a humbling experience. Don’t get discouraged by what you don’t know or understand — embrace the journey and seize these opportunities to challenge your growth.
Written by:
PreSales Solutions Architect at PathFactory
Marie-Claire Asseko stumbled upon the PreSales Solutions field in April of 2021 and has never looked back. With close to 10 years of experience in the martech space, she inspires customers and prospects to innovate, scale, and systematize their tactics. She holds a Bachelors of Business Administration degree specialized in Business Intelligence, and enjoys geeking out on data, processes, and product management. When she’s not working from home in Montreal, she spends time on her rowing machine with a podcast or mentoring young entrepreneurs in making bold moves.
