Imagine if you could predict which customers would become your best advocates before they even signed a contract. Picture a world where you could diagnose an unhappy customer before they even realized they were unhappy. What if you could fine-tune your product roadmap based on real-time insights from thousands of customer interactions?
This isn't just a pipe dream. It's the potential future of SaaS businesses, and it all starts with an unlikely hero: the presales team.
I've spent years in presales, working with highly technical products that require deep expertise to fully understand and explain. And I've come to a realization that didn’t click for a long time: no other team in a company has the unique blend of customer knowledge, product expertise, and domain experience that presales does. It's a critical ingredient in building great businesses, whether you're a scrappy startup or a Fortune 500 giant.
But here's the catch: we're not using this superpower to its full potential. Not even close.
A few weeks ago, I read a great post from Packy McCormick about Eight Sleep's mission to build the world's best predictive health platform. As I dove into the details of their approach, a light bulb went off. There are many parallels to a SaaS business, and I couldn't shake the idea that we could apply similar principles to change how we understand and serve our customers.
I’ll add a snippet here, I recommend giving the whole article a read!
Here's a thought experiment.
If you wanted to build the world's best predictive health platform, how would you do it? What attributes would it have?
First, you'd need a lot of sensors. You'd want to track as much useful data about each person's body as you could.
Second, you'd need adherence over a long period of time. The best sensors are only as useful as each person's willingness to use them, and data becomes more insight-rich over time.
Third, you'd want the ability to experiment. Tracking data is great, but using that data to adjust conditions and tracking the data that comes out of those adjustments is better.
Finally, you'd want all of that across a large population. The more data you get from more people over time, the more accurate your predictions get.
That's what Eight Sleep is building.
So what if we wanted to build the world's best predictive customer platform for SaaS businesses, how would we do it? What attributes would it have?
- Sensors: The Data Collectors
Just as Eight Sleep needs sensors to track vital health data, SaaS businesses need "sensors" to collect customer data. And who's best positioned to be these sensors? You guessed it - the presales team.
Sales Engineers are already capturing a wealth of data about customers: their industries, pain points, use cases, and more. The challenge? This data is scattered across CRMs, docs, chat logs, and email threads. It's like having a cutting-edge health monitor that can't transmit its data.
This fragmentation leads to missed opportunities, repeated work, and a lack of cohesive understanding of customers. How much valuable insight is lost in the cracks between these systems? How many patterns are failing to be recognized because the full picture isn't visible?
- Adherence: The Engagement Factor
Eight Sleep knows that the best sensors are only as good as people's willingness to use them consistently. The same goes for our SaaS customer data platform. The tool needs to be something that the presales team genuinely enjoys using.
Think about it: how many times have you been asked to use a new tool that's supposed to "make your life easier," only to find it's a clunky, time-consuming nightmare? We need to flip that script. The platform should be intuitive, even enjoyable to use. It should seamlessly integrate into the presales workflow, not disrupt it.
When the tool becomes an indispensable part of the presales process, that's when the magic happens. Data becomes more consistent, more comprehensive, and more valuable over time.
- Experimentation: The Growth Engine
Think about your last great sales win. There might be several factors contributing to what made that go well like; what stage you were brought in, a specific pain point they had, a specific stakeholder joining a call, some new positioning of a demo. With a treasure trove of customer data at your fingertips, the possibilities for experimentation are endless. Which types of customers become successful fastest? What sales processes lead to the shortest sales cycles? Which product features are most critical for specific industries?
This is where the real power of the platform shines. You can start testing hypotheses, tweaking approaches, and measuring outcomes with unprecedented precision. Maybe you discover that companies in the healthcare sector who engage in a specific type of demo are 70% more likely to convert. Or perhaps you find that customers who ask a particular set of technical questions during presales are the ones who become your biggest advocates down the line.
The key is that these aren't just hunches or anecdotes anymore. They're data-driven insights that can transform your entire go-to-market strategy.
- Large Population: The Scale Factor
Just as Eight Sleep's predictions get more accurate with more users, our SaaS customer insights platform becomes more powerful with scale. The more sales engineers using the tool, the richer the data becomes for each customer, and the more customers we have data on.
The insights you could glean if you had detailed, structured data from every presales interaction across your entire organization would be invaluable. Now take it a step further: what if we could anonymize and aggregate this data across multiple companies in an industry?
The potential is huge. We could start identifying industry-wide trends, predicting market shifts, and understanding customer needs in a way that's never been possible before.
The Road Ahead
So where does all this lead us? With this kind of comprehensive, real-time customer data at our fingertips, we're looking at a future where:
Promising leads can be proactively identified based on patterns from the most successful customers.
Potential issues with a customer's implementation can be diagnosed before they become deal-breakers.
Sales processes can be refined based on what's proven to work, not just gut feelings.
Product development can be informed with real, quantifiable customer needs and pain points.
A living view of Product Market Fit can be maintained with insights into details never before available.
The key to unlocking this potential lies in creating a central hub where all this valuable data can be collected, organized, and made actionable. But here's the crucial part: just like Eight Sleep had to build a consumer product people love to use to achieve their long-term vision, the key to success in this realm is creating a tool that individual contributors in presales genuinely enjoy using day-to-day.
It's not just about the grand vision; it's about the daily experience of the people on the front lines of customer interactions. Get that right, and the rest will follow. The potential is there. The data is there. The need is there. All that's needed now is the right platform to bring it all together. And when that happens, it will transform how SaaS businesses understand and serve their customers.