The Future of PreSales - Introduction

Hi there, my name is Don Carmichael and I want to welcome you to this new podcast series, the Future of PreSales. If you're in any kind of Technical Sales role I totally recommend you follow and subscribe to the whole podcast series. We're going to be exploring where the PreSales role is going, how its evolving, and what new skills you'll need to build, we'll look at the new PreSales Tech stack and focus on how to make sure you can build a thriving career in a profession that's about to go through incredible change.

Interestingly most of this change will not be driven by Sales Leaders, new sales processes, methodologies or even new sales technology; it'll be driven by Buyers, their surprising, or not, behaviours and the complete focus on their needs. For most Technology companies, this is a radical new way of thinking. Most of the new thinking about this is labelled Buyer Enablement and you're going to hear a lot about this in this podcast series.

We should just stop and define what we mean by PreSales; I've used the term a lot already. Would you be surprised, for instance, to know that there are over 1 million PreSales professionals just in North America and Europe?

Some of you might think that PreSales is a pretty old-fashioned job title and maybe even misleading or inappropriate in a modern Technology sales organisation; and I'd agree with you.

PreSales is really now just an umbrella term for a vast number of job titles that are effectively Technical Selling roles and specifically the technical, domain and value expert role. Historically we would be the ones who would be expected to demonstrate how our technology worked and answer functionality questions. These days we're called many things like Sales Engineers, Solution Consultants, Advisors, Architects the list goes on and on. The best way I've found to define the role is as a skill set that's 1 part technical expert, 1 part domain, industry and value expert, 1 part people and communications specialist and, right now, 1 part Buyer enabler. That is a huge range of skills to ask anyone to master and that's going to be another theme of this podcast series.

PreSales, as a craft and profession, is one of the most demanding and yet fulfilling roles in Technology Sales.

I've been in PreSales for over 35 years and pretty much spanned every single role from Individual Contributor, plying my demonstration trade, to PreSales Manager, PreSales Trainer and then onto regional leadership positions eventually becoming Head of PreSales Development in EMEA for both SAP and Oracle.

In 2015, I made the leap to starting my own PreSales training and coaching company called Winning Skills Ltd which we rebranded as Don Carmichael dot com last year.

I've been really lucky to have had the opportunity to work with lots of Tech companies like Adobe, Deloitte, Freshworks, SurveyMonkey, SAP, Concur, Sage and many, many more and in this podcast series, I'd like to give you an idea of how all these Tech companies are approaching the evolution of the PreSales role.

Along the way, we're going to meet lots of guests who've something really important to say about the future of PreSales and the new skills that will be needed.

So come and join me; click follow or subscribe and let's find out together where the most fulfilling job in Tech is going.