What is “pre-sales”?
Pre-sales describes the activities and team that support a sale before the deal closes: technical demonstrations, solution design, integration scoping, RFP responses, security questionnaires, ROI modeling. Pre-sales engineers (also called solutions engineers, sales engineers or SEs) sit between sales reps and the product/engineering team. In complex B2B sales, pre-sales is the difference between a positive demo and a closed contract.
Pre-sales activities
- Technical discovery: understand customer’s technical environment, existing tools, integration needs.
- Tailored demos: showing the product with customer-relevant data and use cases.
- Proof of concept (POC): limited deployment in customer environment to validate fit.
- Solution architecture: documenting how the product will be deployed and operated.
- Security and compliance: filling out SOC 2, ISO 27001, KVKK, GDPR questionnaires.
- RFP / RFI response: structured response to formal procurement processes.
When pre-sales matters most
Pre-sales is critical when: (a) deals are large (mid-market and enterprise), (b) product is technically complex, (c) buyer’s technical team is part of the decision, (d) integration with existing systems is required. In SMB and self-serve SaaS, pre-sales is often handled by docs, automated demos and the support team.
Pre-sales in Turkish B2B sales
In Turkish enterprise sales, pre-sales is especially critical in purchases by banks, telecom operators and large holding groups: IT, security, procurement and business units each run their own pre-sales review. KVKK DPIA, ISO 27001, BDDK internal security requirements and e-Fatura/e-Arşiv integration are part of the typical Turkish pre-sales question list. An uncertified product will rarely clear the pre-sales threshold.
Do: invest in pre-sales early: at $1M+ ARR, the first pre-sales hire often unlocks the next 3x of pipeline.
Don’t: have sales reps doing pre-sales work themselves at scale: rep productivity collapses and technical accuracy suffers.
Sources. Law No. 6698 on the Protection of Personal Data (KVKK). Statute links open the official consolidated Turkish texts on mevzuat.gov.tr.