Ask the pre-sales team
An account manager has a customer on the phone asking whether the standard edition includes single sign-on, or whether they need the enterprise tier. Another customer wants to know if the current version runs on their older server operating system. A third asks whether their existing perpetual licences can be upgraded to the subscription with any credit. Every one of these goes into a Teams message to the same two pre-sales engineers.
The engineers know the answers, or know where to find them. They also have three proof of concept builds and a technical workshop this week.
Why every question lands on the same people
Software vendors publish a great deal of documentation: datasheets, edition comparisons, system requirements, licensing guides, release notes. It changes with every release. A reseller selling for ten or twenty vendors cannot expect account managers to know it, so questions go to whoever does.
Answers given in past emails and calls are not written down anywhere reusable, so the same question gets answered from scratch next month.
| Question type | Where the answer lives | Needs an engineer? |
|---|---|---|
| Which edition includes a feature | Vendor edition comparison | Rarely |
| System requirements | Vendor documentation | Rarely |
| Compatibility with other products | Vendor docs, release notes | Sometimes |
| Licensing and upgrade paths | Vendor licensing guides | Often, for confirmation |
| Architecture for this customer | Engineer's judgement | Always |
What the bottleneck costs
Deals slow down while account managers wait for answers. Pre-sales engineers spend time on lookups rather than on design work, workshops and proof of concept builds that actually win deals. Sometimes an account manager answers from memory instead of waiting, and gets it wrong, which leads to the wrong edition being quoted.
Licensing questions are the riskiest. A wrong answer about what an edition allows is expensive to fix after the order.
The pre-sales assistant we build
- Document library: vendor datasheets, edition comparisons, system requirements, licensing guides and release notes for the vendors you sell are collected, with version dates, and refreshed when vendors publish updates.
- Your own answers: past pre-sales answers from emails and Teams, where your engineers approve them, are added as reviewed notes.
- Grounded answers: account managers ask questions in Teams or your CRM, and the assistant, using a model such as Anthropic Claude or OpenAI, answers only from those sources and shows which document and page each answer comes from.
- Uncertainty handling: if the sources do not clearly answer the question, or the question is about licensing terms or a customer's architecture, the assistant says so and routes it to a pre-sales engineer with the context attached.
- Engineer review: engineers see routed questions in a queue, answer them, and can mark the answer as reusable so the next person gets it.
- Staleness checks: answers based on documents older than the current release are flagged, so account managers know to double check.
The assistant is internal. Account managers stay responsible for what they tell customers, and anything with licensing consequences goes to an engineer or the vendor.
A week for pre-sales with the assistant
Simple lookup questions get answered in the moment, with a link to the vendor document, which account managers can forward to the customer. The engineers' queue holds the questions that need their judgement, with the context already gathered. Over time, the library of approved answers grows, and new starters become useful sooner.
Is your pre-sales team stretched like this?
- Pre-sales engineers spend a lot of time on lookup questions.
- Account managers wait on answers that sit in vendor documents.
- The same product questions are answered from scratch repeatedly.
- A wrong edition has been quoted because of a guessed answer.
- New account managers depend heavily on the engineers.