Glossary
Presales (sales engineering).
Presales is the technical function inside a sales organisation — sales engineers and solutions engineers — that runs demos, answers technical questions, and owns evaluations from discovery to proof of concept.
Also: sales engineer · solutions engineer · SE
In most B2B software companies the account executive owns the deal and the sales engineer owns the truth: what the product actually does, shown live, against the prospect's requirements. Demos are the craft's centre — building demo environments, tailoring the flow per deal, presenting under questioning — and SE time is chronically the scarcest resource in the sales motion.
Demo automation exists largely to protect that time. Interactive demos absorb the repetitive top-of-funnel showings ('what does it look like?'), leave-behinds carry the story to stakeholders who missed the call, and the live SE hour is reserved for qualified, technical conversations that need a human. The demo tools built for the presenter side of the job (Walnut, Demostack, Reprise) are covered in the sales-demo guide.
In Tellane: SEs use lanes as pre-call qualifiers and post-call leave-behinds on prospect links — the analytics show what each account explored before the technical call. See how →
Related terms
Often confused with
Comparing tools?