Presales teams haven’t historically had a lot of budget for tools to help them do their work (if they’ve had any budget at all). However, that’s changing as companies have begun to realize that solutions consultants have a much greater impact on the performance of the business when they’re strategic members of the team.
Lots of new tools have emerged in the last few years designed specifically for solutions teams. Below, we’re sharing some information to help you get started building your presales tech stack, including a definition of what presales software is, an explanation of the different types of tools that fall under the umbrella, and a list of the best presales software.
Presales software 101
Presales software is an emerging category of tools that helps solutions engineers automate and streamline their work, freeing them up to focus more time on closing deals.
Because it’s an emerging category, the term “presales software” includes a range of tools that can be used to improve a wide variety of activities within the presales process. For that reason, it’s important to be aware of the different subcategories within the presales software market:
- Interactive demo software typically refers to tools that use screengrab or application capture technology to capture your product’s front-end code. Data and elements can then be edited within these tools’ no-code builder applications, and screens can be tied together with steps, tooltips, and hyperlinks to create semi-interactive guided product walkthroughs.
- Video demo software lets teams turn their video content into personalized product walkthroughs. Some tools in this category use natural language processing to make your videos searchable, while others allow you to show specific videos to buyers based on how they answer questions you ask in a pre-video questionnaire.
- Demo automation software lets teams automate the process of creating, managing, and personalizing demo environments and POCs. Demo automation software typically works on top of either live product instances or demo environments, making the demos fully functional and truly interactive.
- Presales management software helps teams improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the presales process. It helps teams organize, capture, track, and manage presales data in order to generate insights that can aid in coaching, removing blockers, and strategic decision-making.
- RFP software helps teams manage and automate the creation of RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires, making delivering these assets faster and more efficient while improving the accuracy of the assets delivered. Key features include a centralized document repository, collaboration tools, and template libraries to help standardize responses and save time.
- Sales enablement tools typically include content management, training and coaching, and sales analytics features that are used to increase the sales team’s productivity, efficiency, and overall success.
- Revenue intelligence software uses AI and machine learning to analyze data collected from numerous sources — such as CRM systems, email interactions, call records, customer support tickets, and more — to provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of sales activities, customer behavior, market trends, and team performance.
The 11 best presales software
Now that you have a better understanding of how the different subcategories of tools under the presales software umbrella function, consider expanding your tech stack and lighten your load with these 11 top presales tools.
1. TestBox
Best demo automation software for customized demos and POCs.
With TestBox, presales teams can truly automate their demo operations.
SEs use TestBox to build fully live product sandboxes that are preconfigured with realistic data, functional integrations, and guided walkthroughs. Every AE gets their own unique sandbox to use as a demo environment, and reps can also send custom sandboxes to leads as a proof of concept after a sales demo.
These sandboxes can be created by SEs or AEs in seconds using either the TestBox app or a CRM integration.
TestBox works by iframing unique accounts within a live instance of your product. It contains your product’s full functionality, and all product updates appear in TestBox immediately with no additional work for your team. And by using a unique account for each sandbox your team creates, you can be sure that no PII is ever shared across leads.
All TestBox sandboxes are also automatically populated with data when a product account is created. As part of the integration process, TestBox builds datasets that include all of the data your leads need to properly evaluate your tool. After that, every new sandbox you create is preconfigured with realistic sample data generated by AI.
Beyond its usefulness in automating demo environment and POC creation, TestBox also has features to help reps improve their win rates.
When sales reps send TestBox sandboxes to leads, they get detailed metrics on how leads are (or aren’t) interacting with the POC. See which stakeholders accessed it, how long they spent testing, and which features and use cases they were most interested in. This helps you identify who to follow up with and what information to send in follow-ups.
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo to see how TestBox can help you create on-demand, personalized demo environments and POCs for every lead.
2. Consensus
Best video demo software for personalized, self-guided demos.
Consensus is a great tool for creating personalized video demo journeys. You use it to create a series of questions that potential buyers answer, then follow those questions up with videos that are specific to the answers provided.
This makes the process of watching video demos more personalized for leads, and it also provides sales teams with more information they can use to qualify leads before a demo.
Questionnaires can ask about a lead's role, then follow up with automated product demos showing how your tool helps with that specific role. Then, they can ask about features the buyer cares about, following up with videos about those specific features.
Additionally, videos can be gated at any point in the process, so you can require leads to submit their contact information to proceed once they're already invested in learning more, allowing your team to reach out later to schedule a live demo call.
3. Vivun
Most comprehensive presales management software.
Vivun empowers your presales team by unlocking their strategic potential as they guide your product roadmap strategy. The software's AI engine equips your team with accurate insights into what’s going on in the field. This means you'll have accurate forecasting, you’ll understand what features are driving deals, and you’ll be able to pinpoint emerging market trends.
With Vivun, your team will have a clear, holistic vision of all their account-related activities. It allows the presales team to keep track of their actions, progress, and outcomes so that everything's transparent and no information slips through the cracks. It offers the ability to review waning deals or problematic accounts to decide the best course of action.
Using Vivun's dashboards and reporting abilities, you can monitor key presales metrics and observe important trends, informing sales strategies and decisions.
Vivun also enhances operational efficiency by enabling seamless collaboration between your team members, empowering them to manage their own work, directly interface with the salesforce, and automate manual processes. It eliminates issues with untracked communications or lost spreadsheets, creating a smoothly run operation with no missed opportunities.
4. Homerun
Most intuitive presales management software.
Homerun gives presales teams a complete view of their pipeline data and team activity.
Presales leaders can use Homerun to manage team pipeline, get deal updates, and prep for one-on-ones. The data in Homerun makes it easy to identify blockers and warning signs, view team utilization and calendars, monitor performance metrics, and get deal status updates.
Solutions consultants can use Homerun to automate their activity tracking, prep for calls and demos, create tasks, compile notes, and log product gaps and feature requests. It provides a day-to-day view of tasks and alerts that help presales team members unblock deals, increase win rates, and hand deals off to customer success easily, improving the customer experience during onboarding.
Additionally, because all activity and data are tracked in Homerun, it makes it easy for other team members to fill in when someone is out of the office, letting you keep moving deals forward without having to do a ton of handoff work before you take time off.
Finally, Homerun lets teams define success criteria to refer to throughout the sales cycle. Using the data you gather inside the platform, you can create templates based on best practices and tailor your plans to ensure each deal has the best chance of success.
5. Loopio
Best Salesforce integration of all RFP tools.
Loopio streamlines the process of responding to RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires. It can deliver significant value to your presales team by improving efficiency, accuracy, and the overall quality of your responses to these customer queries.
Loopio’s library feature enables you to store and categorize your best responses, negating the need to start from scratch each time an RFP comes in. This allows your team to respond more quickly and accurately, increasing their productivity and freeing up more time for other presales activities. The feature also tracks changes, ensuring all team members have access to the most recent and accurate information.
Furthermore, Loopio offers extensive collaboration features that enable team members to work together seamlessly on responses. Tasks can be assigned, progress can be tracked, and responses can be reviewed and edited, all within the platform. This not only enhances efficiency but also greatly reduces errors and inconsistencies in your responses.
Finally, Loopio’s recent acquisition of Avnio makes Loopio even better, giving teams a solution that allows them to respond to RFPs, RFIs, and questionnaires directly within Salesforce.
6. Responsive
Best RFP software for enterprise companies.
If Loopio isn’t right for your team, Responsive (formerly RFPIO) is another good option to consider. Like Loopio, Responsive lets you catalog RFP, RFI, and security questionnaire templates, documents, and responses to expedite the process of creating these assets and responding to questions from leads.
Responsive also offers a unique feature: the ability to handle complex Excel-based RFPs. It has a spreadsheet-like UI that can import Excel spreadsheets and allow users to work seamlessly on similarly structured RFPs. This can be a game-changer for enterprise organizations that receive RFPs primarily in Excel format.
Responsive also supports a wide variety of third-party integrations with tools like CRMs, cloud storage systems, communication tools, e-signature software, and more.
7. Seismic
Category-leading sales enablement software.
Seismic is a sales enablement platform that helps teams align their content, communications, and training with their strategic objectives. Using a cloud-based interface, it provides marketing and sales professionals with advanced tools that make it easier to locate and utilize relevant content and share it with clients and prospective customers.
Seismic's content management platform gives organizations the ability to create, manage, personalize, and automate the delivery of sales content, helping to maintain brand consistency and relevance for various audience segments. Sales reps can access marketing-approved materials from anywhere, ensuring they always have the right material at hand
Importantly, Seismic also offers an analytics suite, which provides insights on various key metrics like content usage, audience engagement, and the overall effectiveness of sales pitches and campaigns. This helps stakeholders to make informed decisions and refine their strategies whenever necessary.
8. Gong
Best revenue intelligence software for SaaS companies and startups.
Gong is a leading revenue intelligence platform that uses AI to analyze sales calls, meetings, and emails, providing insights and data that can be leveraged to close deals more effectively and efficiently.
Gong's main functionalities include conversation analytics and deal, people, and market intelligence. Conversation analytics uses AI to capture and analyze every customer interaction across phone calls, web conferences, and emails, helping teams identify what communication strategies are working and what can be improved.
Deal intelligence helps in tracking deal progress and risk. It identifies behaviors and activities that lead to successful deals, thus allowing sales teams to replicate successful tactics across all deals.
Gong's people intelligence provides insights into individual and team performances, enabling managers to coach their teams effectively.
Finally, market intelligence allows businesses to analyze aggregate data from all customer interactions to identify market trends and sentiments. It gives a broader perspective of customer feedback about a particular product or service, industry trends, and competitive positioning.
9. Provarity
Best revenue intelligence software for enterprise companies.
Provarity is a revenue intelligence tool that integrates with your CRM, helping to streamline and monitor crucial data throughout your sales process. The platform features an AI engine that provides real-time assessments of all active presales engagements, ensuring your sales progress is consistently tracked and evaluated.
Provarity gives sales engineering leaders insights into the performance of sales opportunities and helps them identify potential bottlenecks. This, supplemented with team and organization-level analytics, allows for workflow optimizations aimed at enhancing win rates and productivity.
The platform's standout features further include mechanisms to highlight evaluations that may be at risk of delay or decline, alerting leadership teams in early stages to mitigate challenges proactively. A one-of-a-kind perspective is offered by integrating evaluation data into your CRM, enhancing insights into opportunities that may be at risk due to evaluation struggles.
10. Walnut
Best interactive demo software for workflow-specific leave-behinds.
While interactive demo tools like Walnut and its competitors aren’t really practical for live demos and POCs, they can be really useful for sending tours to leads to show off a specific feature or interaction that’s difficult to demo.
For example, say a lead wants to see how a niche integration with your systems works. You don’t have that set up in your demo environment, but you know you can emulate a customer’s product to see it. However, because of PII, you can’t show that directly to the customer. You also can’t take screenshots or a video of it.
Walnut is really useful in these types of scenarios because it allows you to emulate the customer, capture screengrabs of the front-end code, edit the data that displays, tie the screengrabs together into an interactive tour, and send that to the lead to show off the functionality without compromising PII or going to great lengths to set up the integration in your demo environment.
Related Reading: The Best Walnut.io Alternatives and Competitors
11. CloudShare
Best demo automation software for complex technical products.
CloudShare is a leading cloud-based solution that provides businesses with advanced environments for their cloud computing needs. It was designed specifically to streamline the processes of creating, managing, and sharing virtual machines and environments.
Companies often use CloudShare to develop, test, and deploy software; conduct training, sales demonstrations, and POCs; or hold virtual trade shows. CloudShare provides pre-configured templates for a wide range of IT environments, facilitating fast setup and deployment.
The platform enables users to easily replicate complex IT environments, which can then be shared with colleagues, clients, or partners anywhere in the world. This allows for real-time collaboration, thus improving efficiency and productivity.
CloudShare also offers analytics tools so companies can collect insights into how their environments are being used, and it can integrate with a variety of systems, including customer relationship management, learning management systems, and automation tools.
Additional resources
Leveraging the right presales software can be a game-changer for any organization, but adopting these new tools should only be one portion of your approach to improving team performance and efficiency. So we also wanted to mention a few of our favorite resources for training and education for solutions consultants.
- 2Win! Global (formerly Demo2Win) provides soft skills training for SEs on topics like demoing, presentations, discovery, objection handling, storytelling, and customer success.
- GreatDemo! provides workshops, seminars, webinars, and coaching for presales professionals and has a deep library of useful, actionable content.
- Mastering Technical Sales is another training and consulting provider with a variety of free assets for sales engineers, including reading lists, thought leadership, and leadership advice.
- PreSales Collective is a global community of more than 30,000 presales professionals dedicated to providing resources, knowledge, networking opportunities, and mentorship.
