Technical Sales & Presales 101: The very basics

This article is mainly aimed at developers looking to switch into technical sales. So I cover the very basics of this topic.

Lead

A lead is just a potential customer. This can be someone that signed up for a demo, someone in your contacts who you think might be interested in your product, someone who signed up for a free trial etc. There are however different types of leads and I will introduce them now.

To avoid confusion, a lead typically refers to a person. That person of course it usually associated to a company, and that company will hopefully become a customer one day.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

A lead that meets certain marketing criteria (right job title, company size, industry, engagement with marketing content). Marketing might say: “This person looks like our ICP (ideal customer profile)”. This means, that person is a MQL.

Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)

This is a lead where sales agrees it’s worth working on. So the marketing team has a lead and the sales team “agrees it’s a good lead”. The lead then is considered a SAL.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

This is the stage we desire. This is the stage we want in order to continue with actually trying to make this lead a customer. So what a SQL is, is really just a lead that has shown interest in becoming a customer and marketing and sales agree they’re a good fit.

Often, BANT is used to see whether a lead is a good fit. BANT = Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. A SQL is often also called a prospect. BANT is just one framework though, MEDDICC is another important one. Some teams also use no framework at all.

SQLs are so important because they are the group of leads that are most likely to be converted into customers.

For example, imagine you’re selling cloud infrastructure services. A SQL might be a CTO from a growing startup who has:

• Budget: $50k+ annual cloud budget
• Authority: Decision-making power for technical purchases
• Need: Their current hosting can’t handle traffic growth
• Timeline: They need to migrate within 6 months due to a major product launch

We generally want to know as much as possible about our leads. This helps to identify why they need our product or service. This allows us for a tailored pitch and tailored language. And so on.

The Process

What we want is to find many potential customers, also called generating leads and at some point convert them into customers. So we want: lead ➜ SQL ➜ customer. This is the process. Here some more details.

1. Generating leads: there are many ways to generate leads and this is a big topic on its own. Some are networking, asking for referrals, or internet marketing.

2. BANT: So now that we have leads, we want to see whether they are qualified, so we would invest more time in them. Again: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. So we determine if the lead has the financial resources, decision-making authority, genuine requirement for the product or service, and a specific timeframe for purchase. If yes, then we consider this lead a strong candidate for further qualification. This assessment is typically done by sales representatives.

3. Lead Scoring: As the next step, we score our leads. That is, we assign them numerical values that represent how likely it is to convert them into customers. This can be based on many things, such as company size, engagement level and job title.

4. Lead Nurturing: By lead nurturing we mean taking care of a lead. The goal is to build trust and spark interest. This means providing info about the product or service and addressing their pain points. This may be achieved through personalised email campaigns, case studies, content marketing, and webinars. Important, we use our lead scoring to decide how much time we invest into lead nurturing for each lead.

5. Scheduling a Meeting or Call: Once a lead has shown strong interest in the product or service, we schedule a meeting or a call. Here we will dive deep into the lead’s requirements, understand their challenges and pain points, and present tailored solutions. This is often called a discovery call and might involve both the AE and a solution engineer if technical questions are expected.

6. Closing the Deal: This is the final step of this process. When the lead shows a strong interest in the service or product and you’ve had a meeting or multiple already, it might be time for closing the deal. This includes making a deal proposal, which includes a summary of the customer’s needs, a detailed explanation of the proposed solution, why and how that’s good for the customer, pricing, terms and conditions and more. But it also includes negotiating aspects of the proposal. For complex technical sales, this might also include technical proofs of concept or pilot implementations.

This process is called sales pipeline. If we would outline the same process but write everything from the customer’s perspective instead and notice that the amount of leads decreases with every step, it would be called sales funnel. However, these two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

Note that we also often say the pipeline and mean the above process together with all existing leads. So the state your entire sales cylce is in right now.

People involved

Let’s clarify who is involved in this process.

Account Executive (AE)

The account executive, also called sales representative or just sales rep, is the person who acts as the primary point of contact and owns a particular lead or potential deal. This means, he is the main face of your company to this lead. He is responsible for building the relationship and understanding the customer’s needs.

For example, if you’re selling enterprise software, the AE might be responsible for 20-30 active opportunities, each representing potential deals worth $50k-$500k. They spend their time on calls understanding business requirements, presenting value propositions, and navigating the customer’s procurement process.

However, he is not working alone of course.

The entire process can only start if we have leads. The lead generation is typically done by the marketing team (doing ads, social media marketing, online content etc).

Next, we distinguish between pre sales and post sales. Not hard to guess, but presales is all the activities and support that occur before a sale closes. That includes customer research, prospecting, discovery (including technical discovery) and more. Post sales is everything after the deal was closed, so for example a good onboarding and general customer success.

Just as a note, developers, software architects, designers and so on, are not part of this process. At least not by the standard business lingo. Of course, the developers start working after the deal was closed, but when we say “post sales”, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about things like customer suport or account management.

Now when we talk about someone in presales, often we mean someone with technical expertise. That is often a solution engineer or a solution architect and their role typically is to help with technical discovery, answer technical questions that might come up (AEs don’t know the answer normally), help architect and design the proposed solution and take part in the presentation of it, in the pitch.

Not everyone is a Prospect

I will not dive deep here, but I want to mention, that it’s important to understand that not every lead is a prospect. It’s very important to narrow down in the sales cycle. There is a reason we have different terms (Lead, MQL, SQL). If you don’t narrow it down and do good lead scoring, you will waste resources massively. Don’t treat everyone like SQL.

Solution Engineers & Architects in Presales

For developers considering a transition into sales, the solution engineer or solution architect role is often the natural entry point. These roles bridge the gap between technical expertise and business value. Let me break down what this actually looks like in practice.

What Solution Engineers Do

A solution engineer (SE) is essentially the technical wing of the sales team. While the AE focuses on relationship building and understanding business needs, the SE handles all technical aspects of the sale.

Technical Discovery: This means understanding the customer’s current technical environment. For example, if you’re selling a cloud platform, you’d need to understand their current infrastructure, what databases they use, their security requirements, and their deployment processes. You’re not just asking “what technology do you use?” but rather “how does your current system handle peak traffic?” or “what’s your disaster recovery setup?”

Solution Design: Based on the discovery, you design a solution that fits their specific needs. This isn’t about presenting a generic demo, but rather showing exactly how your product would integrate into their environment. For instance, if they’re a retail company with seasonal traffic spikes, you’d design a solution that shows auto-scaling capabilities specifically for their Black Friday traffic patterns.

Technical Demos: You’ll give live demonstrations of the product, often customized to their use case. This might mean setting up a demo environment that mirrors their data structure or showing how your API would integrate with their existing systems.

Proof of Concepts (POCs): Sometimes customers want to test your solution with their actual data or use cases. You’d help set up and run these technical evaluations.

Examples of Solution Engineer Work

Let’s say you’re selling a data analytics platform to a logistics company:

• Discovery: You’d learn they track 50,000 shipments daily, use Oracle databases, have compliance requirements, and their current reporting takes 3 hours to generate.
• Solution Design: You’d design a solution showing real-time dashboards, automated compliance reporting, and integration with their Oracle systems.
• Demo: You’d use their actual shipping data structure to show how reports that currently take 3 hours could be generated in real-time.
• POC: They might want to test with their actual data for 30 days to see the performance improvements.

Or if you’re selling cybersecurity software to a financial services company:

• Discovery: Understanding their current security stack, compliance requirements (like PCI DSS), incident response procedures, and integration needs.
• Solution Design: Showing how your solution fits into their existing security infrastructure without disrupting operations.
• Demo: Demonstrating threat detection using scenarios relevant to financial services, like detecting suspicious transaction patterns.

Solution Architect vs Solution Engineer

The terms are often used interchangeably, but there can be subtle differences:

Solution Architect typically implies more strategic, high-level design work. They might work on larger, more complex deals and focus on architectural patterns and long-term technical strategy.

Solution Engineer often handles more hands-on technical work, demos, POCs, and day-to-day technical customer interactions.

In smaller companies, one person might do both roles. In larger companies, you might have senior solution architects who design complex solutions and junior solution engineers who execute demos and handle technical questions.

Why This Role Works for Developers

This role is attractive for developers because:

1. You use your technical skills daily - understanding APIs, databases, cloud architecture, security patterns, etc.
2. You learn business context - seeing how technology solves real business problems, not just technical challenges.
3. Direct customer interaction - you get immediate feedback on how your technical solutions impact real users.
4. Higher compensation - presales roles typically pay more than pure development roles.
5. Career progression - you can move into sales leadership, product management, or customer success roles.

The key difference from development is that instead of building solutions, you’re designing and demonstrating them to solve specific customer problems. Your success is measured not by code quality or features shipped, but by whether customers understand and buy the technical solution you’ve presented.

But ultimately, it’s a matter of whether you like to sell or not. Personally, I think sales is a super interesting field to work in as, when you think about it, everything in life is basically sales. So becoming good at it is not just a career win :)