What Is a Pre-Sales Support Workflow?
What does it take to close a deal? Is it a firm handshake? A winning smile? Or just a knack for knowing what your prospect is going to say before they say it? In truth, today’s sales deals are rarely limited to a conversation between a prospect and their sales representative. By the time the conversation starts, the prospect has consumed your content and done their own research. That means the conversation often begins with technical questions or requests for sales collateral.
That’s what the pre-sales support workflow is all about. When your sales reps need backup, teams across your organization help them do what they do best: close deals.
Defining a pre-sales support workflow
A workflow is a map for getting things done. Workflows can cover a huge number of business processes, like cross-functional projects, support ticket escalation, or product backlogs.
The pre-sales support workflow covers a sales rep’s request for help and the steps taken to fulfill that request. Sometimes, a prospect has a technical question that the sales rep can’t answer, and they need help from someone with more technical knowledge, like a developer or a security expert. Other prospects need a piece of content, like an infographic or a one-pager, that helps them understand the product better or get buy-in from their team. Usually, that means the sales rep will work closely with a marketer.
Some organizations have entire teams dedicated to pre-sales support, composed of product experts, product marketers, and other roles dedicated to helping sales reps prioritize and close deals. But whether your organization has such a team or not, this workflow will help your sales reps and everyone who backs them up.
Common friction points of a pre-sales support workflow
Like cross-functional projects, the friction points of the pre-sales support workflow typically happen in the spaces between teams. What’s more, if your sales team doesn’t regularly need this kind of support, your workflow might not be as efficient.
Different teams, different problems
Pre-sales support inherently implies cross-team collaboration. After all, if the sales team could answer the question or find the content themselves, they wouldn’t need the support.
Collaboration across teams is often complicated by the fact that multiple teams, even within the same department, don’t work the same way. Their managers might have different leadership styles that trickle down to the way their reports work. Their work methods, deadlines, and projects can be completely different from the sales team’s. That’s ripe ground for things getting lost in translation.
Communication troubles
Communicating across teams is tough, especially when you’re working remotely. Whenever you need to step out of your team’s bubble to communicate with someone else, you have a few choices; set up a meeting, send an email, or use a chat app like Slack. Here’s the problem with each method:
- Meetings: How many video calls have you been in today? How full is your calendar? Now imagine trying to fit in another meeting in there. Beyond scheduling challenges, poor meeting etiquette can make getting together exhausting.
- Email: Your inbox is probably beyond cluttered right now. How many updates have you lost track of because they were in an email thread that started three months ago?
- Chat apps: While convenient, chats apps are very distracting. The ringing of their notifications is great for getting pulled out of deep work.
So why not put pre-sales support requests in a work management tool instead? That’s a great idea! Except for one small detail.
Tool incompatibility
What tool is your sales team using to keep track of their contacts and deals? Bet it’s not the same one the rest of the organization is using.
Tools like HubSpot and Salesforce are tailor-made for sales reps. They’re great for centralizing a contact’s information and visualizing your sales pipeline, less so for grooming a product backlog or planning a marketing campaign.
That means when sales teams need to work with people from other teams, they’re forced to jump into another tool or use a different method of communication. That can lead to delays, frustration, and a lack of alignment.
How Unito eases that friction
Unito is a workflow management solution that empowers you to build, optimize, and analyze your workflows. By combining deep integrations with a simple workflow designer, you can make your tools play nice with each other and keep teams on the same page. Here’s how using Unito fixes this workflow’s friction points.
It brings teams together
When you use a workflow management solution, your workflow becomes a bridge between teams. Despite differences in leadership styles and methodology, a great workflow can become the thing that unites teams together, helping them drive towards a specific purpose.
Just seeing a workflow mapped out can be a great tool for cohesion between teams. The truth is, many reports and managers don’t always know where information is going, or how pre-sales support requests get handled. With a visual representation of your workflow, everyone knows what’s happening and when.
It streamlines communication
No matter how you communicate between teams, Unito can help you make the switch to your project management tools. That’s because when your tools are integrated with Unito, tasks get carried over from one tool to the other, taking all associated information with them. Comments, attachments, due dates and more, can all be synced between tools. That means any request for updates, answers for a prospect’s questions, and even collateral can be added to a team’s tool and instantly carried over to the other.
It turns disparate tools into a single collaborative environment
Say your sales team never leaves HubSpot, and the experts they get technical answers from work in Jira. To complicate matters, the marketers they get their collateral from swear that Asana is the greatest project management tool there is. Without Unito, something’s got to give.
But when you use Unito, all these teams can work together seamlessly — and flawlessly — no matter what their preferred tool is. Working with other teams starts to feel just like working within your team. That leads to less frustration, fewer delays, and more deals won as you build a strong collaborative environment.
A pre-sales support workflow with Unito
With Unito on your side, you can completely transform the way your teams collaborate to close deals.
Imagine a sales team trying to get customers for a SaaS product. They get asked technical questions about the product’s capabilities, and some prospects will ask for videos and other collateral to better understand what they’re buying. When this happens, sales will reach out to either the product or marketing teams, as appropriate. The sales team works in HubSpot, whereas the developers are in Jira and the marketers in Asana. Here’s how this workflow can work.
- A sales rep in HubSpot gets a question they’re unfamiliar with from a prospect and create a task in HubSpot.
- Unito picks up the task and syncs it to Jira, where it’s seen by developers.
- Developers in Jira work on finding the answer, meanwhile they add a “Marketing Support” label to the Jira issue since they’re pretty sure marketing has collateral on this.
- The issue is synced to Asana, where a marketer finds it as a task. They attach the appropriate collateral, and the attachment is synced to Jira.
- The developers, now armed with an answer and collateral, comment in the Jira issue to let the sales rep know their question’s been answered.
- The sales rep can now use this new information and a piece of collateral to close their deal.
It’s that simple. The necessary information transitioned smoothly through three teams and their tools, and ended with a happy sales rep who had the information they needed. No extra work involved, and no one has to leave their tool. The sales rep feels supported while the developer and marketer feel like they’re directly contributing to the business’ growth. Win-win.
Ready to upgrade your workflow?
With Unito, disparate tools feel like they were designed to work together. Everyone in your organization can contribute to closing new deals, meaning more business, more growth, and better unity for your teams. Try Unito today and see what it can do for your sales teams.
What’s next?
- Ready to find out how you can optimize this workflow with Unito?
- See how Unito is shaping the flow of work.
- Ready to start? Try Unito free for 14 days!