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.
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 →
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Often confused with
Comparing tools?