Key roles in the presales process
Date
January, 2025
Reading time
7 minutes
Category
Best practice
Louis Emmanuel NDJOM BADGA
Louis Emmanuel is a pre-sales consultant working mainly in the IT sector. With over 3 years’ experience in the sector, Louis helps companies of all sizes to adopt innovative technological solutions to optimise their operations and boost their competitiveness.
With a Master’s degree in Business Development and Business Engineering, and a passion for technology and sales, he is able to understand customer needs and propose tailor-made solutions to meet their specific challenges. Louis is also recognised for his communication skills and his ability to work in international and interdepartmental environments.
Key words
#rolesinpresales
#bidmanager
#businessmanager
It can be quite complex to understand every aspect of the pre-sale world. Whether you are a newbie or an expert, navigating the principles, roles, responsibilities and ever evolving techniques and tools is a daily challenge. We all evolve in different contexts and industries but still must manage and understand not only our duties but equally those of our collaborators and be able to manage, assess and deliver qualitative offers to our partners and clients.
Today, let’s get a little closer to understanding one aspect of pre-sales by diving into the major roles involved in a pre-sales process. This article focuses on the roles involved in drafting the bid response. Governing and decision-making roles will be discussed in a subsequent article.
In various organizations and industries, roles and responsibilities can differ significantly, even when the same titles are used. These differences may also lead to blurred boundaries within the same organization. For instance, one department may have specific duties assigned internally, while another may have more or fewer responsibilities for the same role. This lack of clarity can result in conflicts, complicate the bidding process due to inadequate coordination, and create ambiguities in defining responsibilities.
To navigate these challenges effectively, understanding the situation and clearly defining who is responsible for what and when is crucial in achieving your organizational goals and ensuring smooth and efficient operations.
In the article, we propose our approach to the key roles that should be involved in a pre-sales process.
The main Roles in a pre-sales process
The Bid Manager/Pre-sales engineer
Let’s start off with one of the main players, the Bid Manager. They can be named differently depending on the industry or company, for example: pre-sales engineer/ manager/consultant.
They can be seen as a “Conductor” whose role is to coordinate the entire pre-sales process and define a successful response strategy to propose an effective response to the client’s requirements, needs and deadlines as well as ensuring the respect of internal policies and procedures. They assess the tasks to be performed and the need for contributors, plan these tasks and present the plan and organisation to the pre-sales team. They also contribute to the definition of the response strategy and content plan, organise regular follow-up meetings, take minutes and deal with any unforeseen issues. They report progress to the pre-sales team and management.
If you ever want to pursue a career in this role, you will need to possess great leadership and project management skills, be a good planner with interpersonal skills to drive your team and have a good understanding of your domain. If you want to train and improve as a bid manager, don’t hesitate to follow our articles and workshops, or get in touch with us.
The Proposal / Bid Writer
Then comes the Proposal/Bid writers. Sometimes, the pre-sales engineer may assume this role. Proposal writers are storytellers with an essential role in the pre-sales process as they are responsible for putting down the strategy and solution in an exceptionally compelling and persuasive way for the client. You may have the best proposal, but how well is it written? The answer to this question will be a great step towards winning the bid or not. Proposal writers are “Sculptors”, they might not be the ones to bring the rock, but they make the most beautiful statues out of it. They shape the proposal to be convincing and aesthetically pleasing.
They must also be highly customer-focused, able to fully grasp the needs and expectations of the clients and adequately address them in the proposal. When creating content, integrating content from other contributors, or adapting existing content, they must ensure that the content is compliant and responsive to client requirements.
Outstanding proposal writers have excellent writing skills that help them produce quality proposals with particular attention to details. They are able to organize ideas into appealing and structured proposals.
The sales/Business Manager
They are the client’s primary point of contact and are responsible for building and maintaining a close relationship with clients, understanding and investigating client needs, known or unknown. Sales/ Business Manager are often referred to as the “Bridge”: they are the link between a given client with identified and unknown needs that are to be solved, and a pre-sales team having the knowledge, means and willingness to solve these needs, while ensuring smooth and durable relationships for an efficient and effective partnership.
Having a good market knowledge is also a very important skill to have when you endorse this role, you need to be aware of actual and changing prices, trends, updates and predictions made in the industry or territory you are responsible for and adequately react to them.
They can help write parts of the response, such as the company presentation, the context and understanding of needs, the financial offer or the executive summary.
Sales/Business managers are usually extroverts not afraid to go out there and get things done. They are good communicators, possess excellent interpersonal skills, are often upbeat but are very versatile, able to adapt to the client, industry, atmosphere and to the flow of the interaction.
The Subject Matter Experts
The Subject Matter Experts are “The ones who know”. These experts are responsible for providing a technical, functional, organisational or business assessment of the request for proposal and client requirements related to their field of expertise. They propose suitable and feasible solutions to be implemented. The content they create is reviewed and integrated by the bid/proposal writer. A close collaboration between the entire pre-sales team and the subject-matter experts ensures that the solution is both feasible and suited to meet customers’ requirements.
The number of subject-matter experts required for a given deal will depend on the complexity of the proposal, the expertise required, the available company resources, company procedures, and the proposal’s timing. However, subject-matter experts should be people with proven expertise, able to work in a team and collaborate with functional and business teams, capable of simplifying complex concepts and translating requirements into accurate solutions. They should be able to justify their recommendations and adjust when needed.
The Financial Manager
The proposal needs to be priced, and for that, you will need the Financial Manager, or the “Money Person” as Scott Keyser calls them in The Winner Takes All. The Money Person oversees the financial feasibility of the proposal and its suitability for both the client and the bidder. They have a strong market understanding and develop detailed cost estimates, pricing strategies, and financial models in line with the client’s budget and expectations (e.g. price decomposition). Financial Managers work closely with the Sales Manager to understand and address any financial constraints that may arise. Depending on your organisation, a Bid Manager can also take on this role. The Money Person often receives input such as the cost estimate from the Subject-Matter experts, unit prices from the Business Manager or the relevant managers or directors. The financial offer is usually approved by the company’s finance department.
To be great at this role, you will need to have an understanding of financial principles to create compelling financial offers and clearly present these concepts to both decision makers and other stakeholders. You should be able to gather market trends and information from business managers and experts to make strategic financial decisions. Detail, rigour and mastery of tools such as Excel will be your allies, as you will need to automate sub-calculations and be precise, and careful to adequately draft the financial proposal considering every aspect that could influence the project. For example, you may propose a subscription-based payment model instead of a large upfront cost, easing the client’s budget concerns and making the deal more attractive. This creative solution helps close the deal and builds trust with the client. Financial managers are problem-solvers with critical and creative thinking to understand dynamics and expectations, tackle every financial challenge and propose viable and mutually beneficial solutions.
The Legal Manager
Given that tenderers and clients are different, each with specific constraints, procedures and rules, it is important that every document containing contractual and legal clauses is reviewed by the legal team. The Legal Manager is part of the pre-sales process to avoid legal pitfalls and ensure that the proposal complies with all regulations. I call her/him the “Law Lord”. The Law Lord oversees the legal appraisal of the tender, ensuring that every legal clause is compliant with the internal regulations of the bidding company. His responsibilities extend beyond merely analysing client requirements and expectations. He is also tasked with ensuring that the proposal incorporates all legal constraints, requirements, and expectations.
A legal manager in a pre-sales process must possess a diverse set of skills to effectively navigate the complexities of legal compliance and risk management. They must have expertise in contract law and regulatory requirements helping them review and draft documents, analytical skills to identify potential legal risks, pay attention to details to ensure that all legal constraints and requirements are meticulously integrated into the proposal.
But defining your response strategy is only the first step. Throughout the process, you will need to adjust and refine this strategy as and when you come across new elements that are likely to have an impact, whether it be it customer needs, your offering or the competition. As in sport, there’s no point getting bogged down with a strategy that isn’t working. If a competitor changes tactics or you spot a new opportunity, you need to be ready to adapt. Just like a time-out in a match, it’s crucial to pause, assess the situation and realign your strategy to stay competitive and maximise your chances of success.
The Administrative Assistant
Administrative assistants are responsible for managing the administrative aspects of the process, such as monitoring public tender notices, downloading RFPs published on purchasing portals, preparing all the administrative documents required for the response, uploading and downloading questions and answers, and submitting the proposal once it has been finalised for public tenders. On bids with a significant amount of reused content, they can help prepare the technical response.
The strengths of an administrative assistant in the pre-sales process lie in their organizational skills, attention to detail, knowledge of administrative procedure, and ability to multitask. They are adept at managing multiple priorities simultaneously. In addition, it is important for them to be able to remain calm and concentrated when an offer is submitted very shortly before the deadline.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the pre-sales process is a multifaceted and collaborative effort that involves a diverse array of roles, each having a unique contribution to the success of the bid. While it is important to tailor responsibilities to each bid, it is essential for companies to implement a well-defined and structured RACI framework. This framework clarifies the responsibilities of each participant, ensuring that role definitions are fully understood and shared at the enterprise level. Such integration fosters effective collaboration, leading to smoother and more efficient pre-sales processes, and ultimately driving greater success.
This article provides an overview of the key roles typically involved in a pre-sales process. Each organisation must decide, depending on its needs and sometimes the specific context of each case, whether to group these roles under one person, or spread them across several people. Other roles may also be added to the team (graphic designers or proofreaders, for example). If you’d like to delve deeper into this subject, I strongly recommend that you explore the sources referenced in this article, as well as our other articles on the pre-sales process. Stay tuned for the next article!
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