Here are a handful of emerging and established tools – either created specifically for presales and/or having terrific application for presales folks. We are listing each with text from the vendor followed by a few of our comments. Enjoy – and let us know of other tools to explore…!
Vivun
From the Vendor:
Vivun is the world’s first AI-powered platform for presales, unleashing their strategic potential and creating a seamless interlock between sales and product. Vivun helps presales leaders achieve operational excellence by equipping them with the metrics they need as the result of individual contributors having a single place to manage their work. Using Vivun, organizations increase forecast accuracy by leveraging the technical conscience of every deal, find revenue by reviving dormant opportunities, and deliver winning products by tapping into the collective insights from the field. Vivun works with startups like Harness, growth companies like Seismic, and global enterprises like Autodesk. Visit Vivun.com to learn more and request a demo.
Our Comments:
If you are a presales manager looking for ways to track, manage and improve activities and outcomes for your team this is a truly terrific tool. And if you are currently laboring using Excel to accomplish this, then you are the perfect candidate!
DemoFlow
From the Vendor:
At Demoflow, we believe it’s now harder now than ever to run a great sales presentation and connect with your audience. Demoflow pieces together disjointed systems of record into a cohesive system of action to help sales reps show the most relevant sales content helping them connect with their audience remotely. Ensuring everyone tells a story about their product that sells… every single time.
Our Comments:
Excellent for Vision Generation Demos, this tool enables consistent delivery of early-stage demos, in particular – and ensures that the full history of the interaction and follow-up steps are captured in your CRM. An enablement dream!
Demodesk
From the Vendor:
Demodesk redefines screen sharing for Sales and Success teams, by automating scheduling, preparation, and CRM logging time to help you sell more and increase customer retention. All while skipping downloads and compatible with any browser and device. Create a standardized, scalable process by setting up personalized talk tracks with every pre-loaded playbook to have the perfect structure readily available at all times.
Our Comments:
While Demodesk has some similarities with DemoFlow, they take a different approach, positioning their tool as an alternative to Zoom/WebEx/etc. – enabling interesting collaborative browsing and editing capabilities. Their playbooks offer a guided, structured approach to improving Discovery conversations, in particular.
Consensus
From the Vendor:
Consensus enables you to scale presales effortlessly. Demos are critical to the buying experience, but presales teams often struggle to cope with increasing demand for live demos and growing a team of expert solution consultants takes time. Learn how interactive video demos provide a personalized demo experience on-demand, branching, summarizing, and expounding according to the responses of each prospect.
Our Comments:
Consensus provides intelligent automated demo capabilities, enabling prospects to self-qualify, self-discover and generate vision on their own – while you, the vendor, uncover the buying committee and their specific interests. Even better, this all done without a live human – releasing presales folks from hours of repetitive “overview” (harbor tour) demos. Truly a breakthrough technology!
Refract
From the Vendor:
Refract analyses every call and demo, profiling the revenue defining moments, revealing what leads to successful outcomes for your team today. Profile where revenue is won and lost in every interaction. Identify the most valuable conversations and key moments to review, coach, and share. Learn the DNA of your conversations that leads to successful outcomes.
Our Comments:
Refract is a truly terrific coaching and best practices environment for presales, providing capabilities to “slice and dice” demos to uncover key moments, words, phrases, and software screens that “wow”. Libraries of “what great looks like” include snippets as well as full demos to enable rapid onboarding of new hires and ongoing development of existing team members. This is the best choice in the “coaching” category for presales.
The next several tools are of more general use (for sales, BDR’s, SDR’s, and customer success folks, for example), but can certainly be applied to improving presales practices:
Gong
From the Vendor:
Trying to figure out what happened on a sales call? Reading the summary in your CRM is useless. 30 written words never truly recap 6,000 spoken words. Gong captures and analyzes every word of every sales conversation (meetings, calls, and email) – so you have the unfiltered voice of the market. Gong then uses AI to help you win more deals, improve rep success and gain critical market intelligence. Gong helps you see what’s working and what’s not so you can respond in real-time.
Our Comments:
Gong is focusing less on individual coaching and more on uncovering what contributes to closed business – “Revenue Intelligence”. Gong also continues to publish enlightening studies – they authored the seminal study on 67,149 demos that delightfully validated Great Demo! methodology.
Chorus
From the Vendor:
Chorus provides a simple, scalable solution to capture and analyze all customer calls, meetings, and emails to create visibility, drive process and behavior changes, and deliver bottom line impact. Our proprietary AI helps Revenue teams capture, measure, and act upon every customer interaction to drive team performance, build stronger relationships, and gather unbiased market intelligence.
Our Comments:
While Gong, Chorus and ExecVision have many similarities (and some overlap with Refract as well), Chorus appears to have particular strengths for onboarding. An intriguing capability is a view of presentation and/or demo activity as a “voice” (in addition to “vendor” and “customer”).
ExecVision
From the Vendor:
ExecVision provides sales leaders and enablement teams with data mined from calls and web conference conversations with prospects, which helps them close the Insights-to-Performance Gap. Discover the key words, phrases, and behaviors that generate pipeline and drive deals so you can replicate best practices that increase results. Insights alone won’t improve outcomes, which is why ExecVision is designed to facilitate human behavior change that improves performance and gives leaders the ability to make more informed decisions. No more assumptions or guessing on activity metrics alone.
Our Comments:
Like Gong and Chorus, ExecVision enables reps, managers, and enablement folks to surface key moments, words and word phrases. However, ExecVision offers additional focus on coaching, with capabilities to track and manage coaching effectiveness. Further, this tool’s recommended implementation process includes training on how to coach – that’s a key differentiator.
Balto
From the Vendor:
Balto is the first real-time call guidance software. Powered by AI, Balto analyzes speech on both sides of the call and immediately delivers critical information to reps using Balto. For leaders, this means your entire team can respond to the most difficult questions in your own words, every time. For reps, this means you’ll never have to worry about forgetting what you should say or how you should say it. Never forget your training again.
Our Comments:
Balto’s intrigue is its real-time AI analysis and prompting, providing guidance and suggested scripts to reps during calls. While it is designed more for call centers, it offers capabilities that could rather dramatically improve demo delivery. For example, it prompts the rep when they are exceeding speaking 70% of the time – a common challenge for most demonstrators!
Please let us know:
- If you are using and recommend any of these tools.
- If you know of other tools you’d suggest we investigate!