As a presales professional within a larger organization, you’re likely familiar with popular productivity tools like Slack, Calendly, and Dropbox. While these presales tools are helpful for generic projects and communications, we presales professionals need our own tools to help keep prospects well-informed and supported, track and develop demos, and build frameworks for winning deals.
As you likely already know, any sales team must be properly enabled (and empowered) move effectively move prospects through the sales pipeline. Now, with presales becoming more important and more popular, it's time that presales professionals and sales engineers are enabled just like your sellers to drive more revenue for your product or service.
The presales process is unique when compared with a traditional sales process, and therefore they require their own unique tools. Therefore, it's time to take a look at the presales tools you need in your tech stack that properly support the role of your presales team.
To help you out, we’ve compiled nine presales tools that can help boost your success as a sales pro, and save time where you’ve been working through the drudgery. And, as a plus, we’ve featured reviews of each product, so you know what to expect.
9 Best presales tools in 2024
1. Vivun
Vivun is a platform for presales professionals that calls themselves “the world’s first AI-powered platform for presales, unleashing their strategic potential and creating a seamless interlock between sales and product.”
Their “Platform” option offers a place for presales teams to collaborate and manage themselves, while their Hero program helps teams keep track of progress, with features like Hero Scoring and Product Gap Library, designed to fine-tune presales teams’ operations and bring them to the next level.
Here’s a quote from a June 2021 review of the Hero function by Stef. F, a Solution Sales Consultant:
We are actively growing our presales team and have loved the framework that Hero provides us to track not only activities on each opportunity but also track product gaps to share with our product management team. It is a one-stop location that gives us information about all of our presales activities.
2. Demostack
Demostack is an all-in-one software solution for complicated, underwhelming demos. For pre-sales professionals who find themselves struggling to coordinate presentations, notes, and demo results, Demostack is an essential tool.
Demostack is a sales demo tool that wants you to be able to achieve six goals when working with their software:
- Demo to prospects earlier
- Facilitate independence from the screen to foster conversation
- Customize demos with prospect-centered content
- Tailor demos as prospect relationships progress
- Share demos with prospects without the need for accounts, and
- Track demo performance.
In a review for Demostack, Leyla Seka, Partner at Operator Collective and former EVP at Salesforce, says:
The hand off demo is going to have a huge impact on organizations getting deals done faster. Demostack offers the best solution I've seen to get product in the hands of prospects and gain deal-winning insights in exchange.
3. WalkMe
As stated on their website About Us page, WalkMe is a platform that allows organizations to “identify gaps and problem areas, and drive users to success, codelessly, and without changes to your underlying platforms.”
While WalkMe isn’t designed specifically for presales professionals, it’s a great way to integrate your team’s knowledge and expertise with the information your clients and customers are giving you. WalkMe offers features such as Management Dashboards, Digital Experience Analytics, Tracked Events & Funnels, and Session Streaming & Playback to help your pre-sales operation run smoothly and intuitively.
In her June 2021 review of WalkMe, Stephanie S., a co-founder of an enterprise business, raves:
WalkMe has both high quality and high quantity of powerful features that are highly user-focused. Paired with WalkMe's incredible analytic functionalities, it's hard to imagine how any other DAP tool can compete. I can't pick one favorite thing about WalkMe; it's how all the features work together to create a valuable and powerful asset to users and the company.
4. Highspot
Highspot is a sales enablement platform dedicated to providing sales teams with the content + sales strategy they need to achieve their goals, and isn’t strictly a pre-sales tool. However, Highspot is essential for pre-sales teams that are struggling to organize themselves within the company hierarchy. Highspot also provides training for sales professionals within organizations, teaching them how to smooth out processes and reach targets.
Highspot provides platform users with analytics, AI, integration tech, and security & privacy assurances to help “elevate rep performance and produce strategic insights.” As a sales enablement platform, they offer teams virtual coaching and classes to help refine skills and sharpen sales operations.
Janice B, a Product Marketing Manager in a mid-market organization, says in her January 2021 review of Highspot:
I'm in marketing and responsible for creating a lot of content. Before HighSpot, our sellers could never find the content we produced, so even though they were excited when we first created it, they couldn't find it when they needed it and soon forgot about it.
5. Seismic
Seismic is another sales enablement platform that has the potential to turn your pre-sales team into an organizational masterpiece. Seismic believes that their platform can provide pre-sales professionals with “instant access to deal-clinching collateral at the right time, training when it’s most effective, and news when it matters most.”
Seismic emphasizes their ability to help you achieve four particular goals: customizing buyer experiences, streamlined selling processes, automated content management, and content analytics. Like Highspot, Seismic combines content production with sales enablement to deliver a powerhouse platform well-suited to pre-sales professionals.
Jackie R., a mid-market level Senior Enablement Manager, says in her April 2021 review of Seismic:
Two years ago we replaced our previous content management solution with Seismic. Since then adoption of the platform has been extremely high, sellers can easily find the content they need, and for Enablement & Marketing we have the analytics to make more informed decisions about our content. Customer experience has been exceptional from their team, and whenever assistance is needed the team jumps in right away.
6. Nytro.ai
If you’ve been searching for a software solution for quantifying results from demos, pitches, and onboarding, you’ve found a miracle in Nytro. As they write on their website, Nytro is “AI-powered pitch intelligence for sales onboarding and readiness.”
Nytro’s uniqueness comes from their use of AI. Salespeople are encouraged to upload and submit recordings of their pitches onto the Nytro workspace, along with a little description and a title. Nytro then analyzes your pitches and gives feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
In his December 2020 review of Nytro, Calvin N. (member of an enterprise-level organization), said:
Our use of Nytro's demo capabilities was to enable field and partner technical audiences, to watch, engage, and become familiar with technical demos without access to a live environment. This enabled non-technical resources both internally and externally to become familiar with our solutions and product features. This product made it easy to get our enablement and education to our field, beyond simply releasing video demonstrations. The click-by-click and transcription capability enabled greater familiarization with our features vs. audiences just watching a video demonstration passively.
7. Brainshark
Brainshark is another sales enablement tool that’s a boon to any pre-sales professional’s success. Brainshark’s motto is “prepare your teams today to win more tomorrow.” They achieve this success for organizations by equipping them with everything they need from start to finish.
Brainshark offers a sweeping array of tools for pre-sales professionals. Their featured processes include a scorecard tracking system for KPIs, smoothing relationships within company hierarchy, distributing and tracking training programs, and developing sales content.
Rebecca G., a member of a mid-market organization, says about Brainshark in her November 2020 review:
The versatility of Brainshark was also an upside...Brainshark is more than just a video-watching tool. It provides you with an interactive way of learning by allowing slides for knowledge checks, and document submission.
8. MindTickle
MindTickle is a well-loved, well-tested sales enablement platform that helps companies smooth out onboarding processes and ensure that sales reps have all the information and awareness they need to land prospects and close deals.
This platform is a great resource for pre-sales pros who are either new to organizations and need to pick up information and techniques quickly, or for pre-sales folks who are training people under them. They pride themselves on their product’s ability to shorten onboarding times, develop skills in new hires, and drive high adoption through an attractive platform and gamified experience.
Reese G., the CEO and co-founder of a mid-market company, says about MindTickle in his June 2021 review:
It is very easy to use and the support is excellent. We are able to provide initial and ongoing training is a very effective way that is engaging. We can also easily track competency development...
9. Userlane
Like MindTickle, Userlane is an employee and client onboarding software that helps smooth out wrinkles in the onboarding process, both within and outside the company.
Userlane offers employee training sessions through what they call “daily meaningful microlearning experiences,” which happen while employees work at their desks, and offers customers automated checklists and personalized journeys to keep them engaged and supported.
Alex K., Marketing Director at a mid-market computer software company, says in his June 2019 review of Userlane:
Userlane is very well designed. The editor works with all browsers and is extremely user-friendly. We were able to build all of our guides after a couple of calls, and new ones can be created extremely fast and with multi-language capability. There wasn't a single occasion where a challenge presented wasn't solved (by their team) in an elegant fashion, allowing us to present an extremely professional onboarding solution to our enterprise clients that looks like a part of our app.