Learn why strong Presales and Product Marketing alignment drives sales results, and discover some tactical collaboration tips.
Times have changed, and presales and product marketing professionals have finally received the recognition they have always deserved. Presales professionals are also known as solutions consultants, sales engineers, and other related titles. Product marketers are generally part of the marketing team but sometimes sit on the product team.
In many ways, these two roles have faced similar situations, often being wedged between other stakeholders and teams, serving as middlemen supporting others.
This dynamic has made it difficult to attribute impact and has led to a lack of resources being allocated to these very specialized and nuanced practices.
Luckily due to the growth of these roles and macro trends such as movements like the Product Marketing Alliance and PreSales Collective, resources, playbooks, and even tech stacks have emerged to support these dynamic functions.
Product marketing spends a lot of time developing messaging and positioning, while sales are testing the output of product marketing’s work on the front lines and gathering new insights across countless meetings.
Presales professionals are often in between product marketing and sales and have a front-row seat to see what is working and driving the conversions that lead to their involvement in a deal.
They work with multiple account executives/sales reps which allows them to see the multiple styles, messages, and pitches being executed. Most importantly, they have a window into what is resonating with prospects and customers across these various scenarios.
Product marketers can take the insights and feedback from presales, mesh them with their existing data, and determine the latest and greatest narratives, positioning, and messaging. The latest iterations of the output developed by product marketing will now be used to unify the stories, copy, and other content across all communication channels.
These channels include various assets used by sales, product, marketing, and executive leadership teams. These unified stories should be consistent across experiences including your website, social media, sales enablement collateral, in-product copy/messaging, fundraising, and investor relations assets, just to highlight a few.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that pitches, demo narratives, asset creation, and messaging development are singular exercises. On the contrary, these are constantly evolving and require new iterations influenced by multiple stakeholders and teams.
These assets are some of the most important ways of showing the power of product marketing and presales working together. Product marketers are often focused on crafting the foundation of the narrative that will be used for decks and one-pager content. Then presales will build and present demos that bring these stories to life through product experiences and sales-led storytelling.
Although the workflows and operational processes can vary across organizations and teams, the more their development is prioritized, the sooner the organization will benefit. Presales, like sales reps, have a very intimate understanding of the product and narrative as they relate to specific prospects and one-to-one conversations they are having. They are often pulled into pitching features and functionality.
Product marketers are able to step back and see the bigger picture and what these elements look like at scale. They are able to help presales gain perspective from these higher levels of analysis and storytelling, which will help yield a more holistic narrative.
Product marketers don’t necessarily have to understand the technical workings of a product but they must understand the technical aspects based on how it relates to storytelling and customer pain points. Product marketers must be able to work with presales to understand the technical “what” and “why”, and ultimately the impact the product is having on the customer’s business.
It’s important to constantly emphasize the fact that both product marketing and presales teams are focused on the same end goal. Some leading indicators to determine the health of this collaboration include tracking metrics such as win rates, sales cycles duration, pipeline stage acceleration, and deal sizes.
Organizations should also track internal analytics such as what assets are being used the most, who is using what, and what type of content is resonating the best with prospects.
Analyzing these various data sources as a unified team of presales and product marketers will create an even more powerful feedback loop that will be used to refine the approach moving forward.
This post was inspired by a recent #TheGTMPack community webinar we hosted featuring James Kaikis, Head of Go-To-Market & Meghan Spork, Product Marketing Lead both at TestBox who gave us a deep dive into maximizing the relationship between these critical stakeholders.
Watch the full replay below:
