How RevOps Can Power Presales for Greater Revenue Impact

RevOps teams primarily focus on optimizing sales, marketing, and customer success functions. But one critical, and dare I say overlooked, area is the presales team. This team may have a variety of titles in it including Solution Engineers, Sales Engineers, Solution Consultants, Solution Architects, and other technical sales professionals.

These teams play a vital role in translating product capabilities into real business value for prospects, ensuring that deals don’t just close but are set up for long-term success. By building structured processes, optimizing handoffs, and leveraging presales insights for forecasting, we in RevOps can elevate presales from a supporting function to a strategic revenue driver.

Defining Presales Roles: Solution Consulting, Sales Engineers, Solution Architects, etc.

Presales teams act as the technical bridge between a company’s product and its potential customers. Their primary function is to ensure that prospects fully understand the product’s capabilities and how it can solve their specific business challenges. While job titles may vary, these roles share a common goal: demonstrating value, reducing technical friction, and accelerating deal velocity.

Here’s how key presales roles contribute to the sales process. Mind you, that at many companies I’ve seen these roles can often be one and the same. But if I had to split hairs this is what might distinguish each title from one another.

• Solution Consultant (SC): Works closely with sales teams to understand customer needs and map solutions to business challenges. Often leads product demonstrations and proof-of-concept discussions.

• Sales Engineer (SE): A technical expert who provides deep product knowledge, technical validation, and hands-on demonstrations to showcase how a solution meets a prospect’s needs.

• Solution Architect (SA): Focuses on system design and integration, ensuring that a product can work seamlessly within a customer’s existing infrastructure. Plays a key role in complex enterprise deals.

• Presales Consultant: Similar to a Solution Consultant but often involved in tailoring solutions, competitive positioning, and technical deal strategy.

• Technical Account Manager (TAM) (in some cases): While primarily a post-sales role, some TAMs engage in presales activities, helping customers evaluate technical feasibility before purchase.

Regardless of title, presales professionals own the technical win, ensuring that a prospect’s decision-makers, IT teams, and end-users are confident in the solution before the deal moves forward.

How Presales Complements an AE in a SaaS Company

In a SaaS sales motion, AEs and Presales teams work in tandem to drive deals forward. While AEs focus on managing relationships, navigating buying committees, and driving business outcomes, Presales professionals ensure that prospects understand the technical value and feasibility of the solution.

Here’s how presales complements an AE at different stages of the sales process:

1. Discovery & Qualification

• AEs lead the business conversation, uncovering pain points and defining success criteria.

• Presales helps assess technical fit early, identifying potential blockers like integrations, security concerns, or data migration challenges.

• Together, they determine whether the prospect has both a business need and a technical path to adoption.

2. Solution Presentation & Custom Demos

• AEs tailor the sales pitch to the buyer’s priorities and business goals.

• Presales builds and delivers a custom demo that directly addresses the prospect’s pain points, showcasing how the solution works in their specific environment.

• AEs and Presales strategize on how to position the solution competitively based on technical differentiators.

3. Proof of Concept (POC) & Technical Validation

• AEs maintain deal momentum and keep the buying committee engaged.

• Presales guides the prospect’s technical team through POCs, security reviews, and compliance evaluations to ensure the solution meets all requirements.

• They work together to achieve the “technical win,” which signals that the prospect’s technical stakeholders are on board.

4. Proposal & Forecasting

• AEs manage pricing discussions, contract negotiations, and procurement hurdles.

• Presales provides critical insights for forecasting. They’ve seen how similar deals play out and can assess if technical concerns might delay a close.

• They also help quantify the expected time to value and ROI, strengthening the business case.

5. Post-Sale Handoff & Implementation

• AEs close the deal and transition the account to Customer Success.

• Presales ensures a smooth handoff to implementation teams, helping prevent surprises that could slow down deployment.

Why This Partnership Matters

When AEs and Presales operate as a tight-knit unit, deals move faster, win rates increase, and customer satisfaction improves. RevOps can support this alignment by streamlining workflows, defining engagement models, and ensuring presales resources are allocated effectively across opportunities.

So… you keep mentioning Technical Win? What does that even mean?

A Technical Win occurs when a prospect's technical stakeholders (such as IT, security, or engineering teams) confirm that a product meets their requirements and is approved for purchase from a technical standpoint. This is a critical milestone in the sales process, as it signals that technical feasibility is no longer a blocker to closing the deal.

While an Account Executive (AE) drives the business decision, the Presales team (Solution Engineers, Sales Engineers, Solution Architects, etc.) secures the Technical Win by addressing key technical concerns, ensuring compatibility, and validating the solution’s effectiveness.

Example of a Technical Win in SaaS

Scenario:

A SaaS company selling a cloud-based analytics platform is in the late stages of a deal with a large enterprise.

Key Technical Challenges Identified:

• The prospect's IT team requires single sign-on (SSO) and SOC 2 compliance before approving the tool.

• Their engineering team needs to confirm API integrations with existing data warehouses.

• The security team has concerns about data encryption and storage policies.

How Presales Secures the Technical Win:

• Conducts a technical workshop to walk the IT team through SSO setup and security certifications.

• Provides API documentation and a live integration test for the engineering team.

• Works with security stakeholders to complete a vendor security questionnaire and confirm encryption standards.

• Leads a Proof of Concept (POC) demonstrating that the platform can successfully pull and analyze data from the company’s systems.

Does everything look clear?

After validating all technical requirements, the IT, security, and engineering teams give their approval to move forward. This is the Technical Win. Now, the deal rests on commercial negotiations, procurement, and executive sign-off.

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Why the Technical Win Matters

Without a Technical Win, deals stall or get lost in IT/security review cycles. By ensuring technical buy-in early, Presales reduces friction, increases deal velocity, and improves close rates. All of which directly impact revenue performance.

How RevOps Can Support Technical Wins

• Define Technical Win Criteria: Standardize what qualifies as a Technical Win across different products and deal types.

• Create a Repeatable Process: Develop a checklist for IT/security approvals, integration tests, and POCs.

• Track and Forecast Technical Wins: Capture Technical Win data to improve pipeline accuracy and forecast deal velocity.

By formalizing Technical Wins within the sales process, RevOps can help sales teams move deals forward with confidence and predictability.

Here is an example of a sales process incorporating a technical win:

You’ll see down at the bottom that the sales rep achieves a “vision match” or a “business win”. There’s a clear ROI for the prospect. The technical win is shown here as a sequential step but it can also be parallel tracked. Perhaps right before your proposal sales stage you bring in a technical workshop for the IT and technical folks. In the example above you’re trying to allay any concerns. Typically these concerns fall into a few camps:

• Privacy + security (SSO, row level security, advanced profile settings, field (column) level security)

• Regulatory compliances (i.e. HIPAA, GDPR)

• Available integrations or access to API (i.e. our tool does not integrate with X tool… welp that’s a problem!)

How do you track this in Salesforce?

The crude way? A checkbox in Salesforce.

But that shortcuts some really valuable information you could capture between your prospects and the technical team.

Option 1: a detailed series of custom fields on the Opportunity object

Option 2: a custom object that when an SE is pulled into the opportunity it creates a record on an object called Technical Validation

The fields on that object would be:

• Technical Win Criteria: will vary by deal

• Opportunity Contact Role: technical roles from prospect

• Link to customer call

• Transcript

• Solution recap: does your solution work turnkey? or will you require a workaround? If a workaround is needed do you propose a custom implementation solution fee?

Capturing Feature Requests and Product Gaps in Presales

Throughout the sales cycle, prospects might ask whether your product can support specific capabilities.

• Can it do this?

• What about?

• Does it handle that?

These questions come up during technical discovery calls, demos, RFIs/RFPs, or within an Evaluation Plan’s Use Cases. In response, presales teams quickly provide a “Yes,” “No,” or “It’s on the roadmap” answer. However, top-performing presales teams don’t just stop at providing answers. They log feature requests and product gaps in their presales platform, CRM, or product management tool.

Why Logging Feature Requests Matters

Tracking feature requests and product gaps is now a standard best practice in modern presales. Key details typically captured include:

• Prospect/Opportunity Name – Who is requesting the feature?

• Feature Request Details – What specific capability is needed?

• Status & Criticality – How urgent is the request for the deal?

• Revenue Impact – What is the potential deal value associated with the request?

Streamlining Feature Request Tracking with Presales Platforms

Presales platforms simplify feature request tracking by allowing teams to tag deals against specific feature requests. If the platform is integrated with your product management tool, presales can search for existing tickets to see whether a feature is already in development or on the roadmap.

Since the same feature request may appear in multiple deals, presales should record any deal-specific variations. Product managers need details to make informed decisions!

Classifying Feature Requests: Status & Criticality

Presales teams should assign a status and criticality level to each request based on its impact on the deal:

• Blocker – The prospect will not buy unless this feature is available before signing the contract.

• Future – The prospect is willing to buy now but requires a commitment that the feature will be delivered in the future (often called a "presales commitment").

• Nice-to-Have (NTH) – The feature is not a requirement for the deal but would enhance the product’s appeal.

Why Revenue Data is Essential

One of the most critical data points in feature request tracking is revenue impact. By logging requests in a presales platform integrated with your CRM, revenue data can be automatically pulled, eliminating duplicate data entry and ensuring product teams understand the financial impact of each request.

By systematically capturing and prioritizing feature requests, presales teams can bridge the gap between sales and product, helping drive roadmap decisions that align with revenue potential.

For paid subscribers I’ve included down below a simple presales template. Feel free to adapt for your needs.