0/ A very interesting trend to watch is the disappearance of pre-sales, and what it means to GTM tooling. (a thread)
1/ Pre-sales has traditionally been the function that brings a new customer to technical and financial close. Generally it involves an account rep (AE) and a sales engineer (SE) to educate a customer on the product, do technical demos, PoCs, integration etc.
2/ However, with the shift to bottom-up this role is changing. And in some cases going away entirely. This is happening so fast that a surprisingly high portion of new founders don’t even recognize the “pre-sales” / “post-sales” lingo.
3/ Take open source. Because open source companies normally start servicing inbound customers who are already users, even with very technical products they tend to have a lower SE to AE ration : 1 to 3 is not uncommon, whereas 1 to 1 is more standard in traditional pre sales.
4/ The move to product led growth further reduces the need for SEs because the products often have a focus on being simple to use. Or at least changes the conversation to showing how to get more value, which is typically a post sales conversation.
5/ An increasing number of companies have SEs who also double as solutions architects / customer success and are responsible for expanding accounts through the lifetime of a customer.
6/ Further, increasingly, net revenue retention, not initial ACV drives unit economics over time. So the post sales function is growing in importance and relative staffing.
7/ Meanwhile investment in product and community lead growth allows both inside sales and customer success teams to be far more effective than in the past.
8/ In fact, in some bottom up companies the entire GTM function consists of marketing, community management and post sales.
9/ Existing CRMs are being pushed into service to handle this. But often they are an ill fit, being built for a more traditional, direct model where the account management team is driving the engagement through the various sales stages.
10/ CSMs don’t really do the trick either are they are designed for account management teams to do renewals and upsells, but don’t nurture communities or top of funnel well.
11/ There is a lot of opportunity to rethink the CRM/CSM as a result of this. The dominant motion is now growing / maturing your existing user base, not managing a pipeline of outbound conversations.
12/ When bottom up rewires how we interact with customers, build GTM teams, and measure success, we need systems purpose-built to mange this new end-to-end customer journey.
13/ I know a lot of folks are working on this problem. We’re very interested in this space, so if you are, please reach out /fin
(thanks to @JenniferHli, @peter_lauten and @kshenster for their input on this)
(thanks to @JenniferHli, @peter_lauten and @kshenster for their input on this)
