Last summer, I made the career transition to go from post-sale customer success to becoming a pre-sales engineer. While I had thought the two roles were quite different, in reality, the two roles were not as different as it may seem. 💡 Here's what I've learned in the last year and a half: 📕 Approach discovery calls as you would if it was a cadence meeting. Learn about their use-cases and practice goal setting with your customer. In this way, like a CSM would generally document a success plan in post-sale, the SE is starting to document a mutual action plan to shape the PoC and identify the success criteria important to the customer. 🤝 Establish a rapport with your customers; people generally buy from who they like! Similar to when a CSM establish trust with customers by advocating for their feature requests, the same customer empathy is a valuable skillset and applicable in pre-sales. 🌟 Lastly, while some companies have a distinct hand off process from pre-sales to post-sales, the line is blurred these days. Customers may want to stay with the person they purchase from. While the sale may be done, the work is never finished! The next milestone is actually implementing the tool and seeing the hard-work come to fruition. ❓ What do you think? Do you think there are overlaps between the two roles?
Great perspective, thanks Sandra!
João Emilio
2mo
Very nice hearing from you, Sandra Liu. Great insights!
Varun Talwar
1mo
You captured what it means to have customer empathy, Sandra.
Customer Success Leader @ GitLab | Scaling Customer Success teams and loving every minute of it
2moThank you for sharing your story! I know so many folks that are thinking about the transition from post to presales. What has been the most surprising part of your new role?