Ideally a BA works in project or operation. Sometimes due to lack of dedicated resources, our organizations tend to involve BAs in presales activities. Ideally an IT organization should have a dedicated team for presales consultants. But in reality, we see that along with the project work, BAs are involved in presales activities. So the million dollar question is can a Business Analyst get into a Presales job dedicatedly? The answer is yes they can provided they have gained enough experience in certain areas. You may start your job as a fresh BA but not as a fresh Presales Consultant. 

Let us understand what we mean by Presales job. There are various definitions depending upon the organization and the business process. For example, some organizations consider “cold calling as pre sales“. I am not referring to that profile. Here we are concerned about IT presales (mainly software). As it happens in IT organization, you have an Account Manager who is purely into Sales and his key performance indicator is sales target attainment but when it comes to presales guy, he will not have any sales target but he will have to create technical proposal, coordinate with an architect to get an estimate and high-level project plan. So the presales person will mainly work closely with the Account Manager to build the proposal including solution and cost estimate. Now the overall responsibility of the presales consultant varies from company to company; e.g. in some organizations the presales person is also involved in customer demonstration of the solution, presales clarification (questionnaire session). Remember we are talking about all these activities when there is a sales lead in the presales state. So the process looks like below –  

RFI / RFP / RFQ Process – 

• A potential customer is interested >
• Account Manager gets in touch to understand what the customer needs >
• The customer wants to understand your company’s capability on a ERP/CRM >
• AM gets in touch with Presales Consultant to get Capability document on ERP/CRM >
• Customer is interested for a proposal >
• AM will bring in the Presales guy in the picture to discuss the requirements with customer >
• After that Presales person will prepare a proposal, consult with Architect on the solution, risk, assumptions, estimate >
• The proposal is shared with AM who will schedule another appointment for solution Demo >
• Presales person will join the demo to showcase the solution and handle customer queries >
• AM will close the deal >>>>> After the order is received the BA will be involved to gather project requirements; so here the project work will start as per SDLC >>>

What a BA has to know about Presales?  

As a BA you must understand that in Presales we do not get into the functional or technical requirements but only on high-level business requirements. Based on this we have to provide a high-level solution and estimate our efforts, and provide a timeline. So a lot of assumptions, dependencies, risks need to be considered. You should be clear on the in scope and out of scope work items. You should also have good knowledge about your organization’s solutions, accelerators, frameworks etc. so that you can plug them in as part of your solution. Presales consultants must be able to articulate the Value Additions for the potential clients and show the Unique Selling Propositions. 

Once you start working on some of the RFPs on Implementation, Consulting, Upgrade, Support & Maintenance and build solution documents (Proposal) you will understand the basic expectations and over a period of time you will continue to improve. 

How does it differ from BA Job? 

Well, every day or week you will see new requirements, new solutions, new industry. So you have to be very dynamic to adapt. Also knowledge on various industries, technology trends (AI, Machine Learning, Big Data, DevOps, Cloud, Digital Platform like AWS, Azure), software integration (SOA Architecture, Service Bus, ETL, Batch Jobs, Real Time, API) etc. will definitely add value towards your contribution.