Companies with effective presales teams typically count on win rates of 40-50% for new business and 80-90% for renewal business. 

The problem? Because of how effective they are, solutions engineers (SEs) often have way too much on their plates. The sales cycle becomes stuck in presales. 

Think about it: presales teams are charged with deep technical expertise, customer engagement, live demos, internal training, and evolving product features. And they also need to deliver quick turnaround times on even the most complex documents. 

One obvious way to reduce the pressure Presales is by leveraging AI and automation.

This doesn’t mean chasing the illusion of a fully autonomous sales cycle.

No. We need our SEs.

Instead, presales teams are using AI tools to automate repetitive work and accelerate their access to knowledge. With AI, SEs can even generate engaging customer-facing content with way less manual effort. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at the five ways presales teams are using AI to benefit you, them, and the customer. So everyone’s happy.

1. Answering Technical Product Questions Using Documentation

API docs can be a massive pain in the a$$. We expect them to be super detailed, accurate, and always up-to-date. It’s the most honest technical content a company produces. Documentation often explains system architecture, request formats, expected outputs, error codes, and much more.

Product docs are invaluable to your presales engineers. But they’re also massive and painful to navigate. 

It takes time to read and absorb good docs. And one thing presales teams don’t have a lot of is time. 

You’ve seen it happen before. A sales rep sends over that odd technical question, “Hey, a customer asked – how do we support webhooks for real-time updates?” 

We all know what happens next. 

The SE has to stop what they’re doing, pull up the API docs, prepare a response, and hope the sales rep goes away.

Now multiply that by dozens of requests each week, and before you know it, your presales team is just a glorified human search engine.

But AI tools give you that time back by generating answers for AEs and anyone else who needs them. A strong knowledge automation system will quickly pull answers from your API docs and save the SE time and trouble. 

Of course, you’re not replacing your SEs. This is AI augmenting the work they do by turning documentation into an on-demand assistant with peak expertise. 

2. Summarizing Sales Calls and Extracting Action Items

Tools like Otter.ai, TLDV, and Gong have revolutionized the way sales and presales teams deal with call data. There was a time when SEs had to take frantic notes during phone meetings. They had to capture technical requirements, security concerns, and next steps. 

And they did all this while actively participating in the call. 

Now? It’s all automated. 

AI transcription and summarization tools can generate detailed, searchable transcripts of every single call. These tools will flag action items, log questions, and bookmark key moments. 

For those team members in presales who’ve been bouncing between multiple sales cycles and stakeholders, your time has come. This is so much more than a summary of a call. 

It’s a second brain. 

And with OpenAI’s recent announcement that direct recording with ChatGPT will be enabled, call management just got even easier. The day is not far off when you won’t even need a third-party app. Your AI assistant will record and transcribe your calls for you. It might may even provide insights across your meeting history. 

3. Auto-Generating RFP and Security Questionnaire Responses

If you’ve worked with Presales or Solutions teams, you’re familiar with the dreaded words: “We’ve got an RFP due tomorrow.” 

RFPs can contain hundreds of questions, and they often address your product from every single angle – from uptime metrics down to the data retention policies and SOC 2 audit reports. They demand precision. 

What’s worse? A huge questionnaire can come out of nowhere, interrupting your work and dropping high-priority tasks down the line.  

That’s why Presales teams are using AI every day to generate high-quality first drafts of RFP and security questionnaire responses to accelerate this process by up to 10x. 

It does this by pulling from your internal knowledge bases, previous answers, and source-of-truth documents. 

With an RFP automation tool, you can upload a new questionnaire, and the AI system will suggest answers in moments. It will even highlight answer quality levels and flag questions that may need human review. 

No more spending hours manually copying from old spreadsheets. Now, SEs can review and refine, saving hours of time, not to mention holding onto your sanity. 

4. Drafting Personalized Email Follow-Ups

You know it. We know it. Your presales teams live in their emails. 

After every call, they need to recap, clarify technical details, and share follow-up materials. 

It’s a time sink. 

Of course, you want to keep it personal, because no one wants a boring, impersonal email. 

Sure, many marketing teams might rely on automated email generation. 

But SEs need to customize beyond just Hello, First Name!

They’re addressing nuanced technical questions. They’re describing unique systems architecture. They’re explaining specific security constraints. 

This is where AI-enhanced personalization comes in for the win. An AI system can pull from call transcripts, CRM fields, and internal customer knowledge. Then, it can draft a tailored follow-up that sounds like a human… not a template. 

And you don’t even have to send the AI version. But now you’ve got a great start. 

Of course, there’s going to be a trade-off. There always is. 

Over-automating your email can lead to bloat and tone mismatches. And you can lose your client’s trust. That’s why you should treat AI like a drafting partner, not a replacement. 

Sales automation has many pros and cons.

For the pros, AI can cut hours of grunt work, help scale early drafts, and give reps more time to focus on real conversations. It’s excellent at pulling out details and being analytical. But that’s where it should stop, because the second you let it speak for you, not with you, you start sounding like everybody else.

And the moment your emails start looking like AI slop, they stop working. When AI-generated messages flood inboxes, prospects get numb to them. Open rates drop. Replies disappear completely.

In the end, we’ve found that the best email follow-ups are those that capitalize on AI’s speed and still value human judgment. 

5. Generating Competitive Battle Cards from Internal Content 

Just when you think you’re landing that sale… your competitor’s name comes up. It happens every time. It might be a direct reference, or it could be a subtle message: “We’re also looking at Vendor X.” In any event, the SE in that situation must be able to respond with accurate, confident messaging that differentiates your company. 

Enter the AI-generated battle card. 

AI can analyze internal content like past deals, analyst reports, product updates, and more. The right tool can then create concise sales battle cards that provide just the right amount of context:

• How your product compares to the competitor’s, including important features. 
• What strategic advantages your product gives your buyer. 
• How your pricing differs from that of your competitor. 
• How to respond to the most common objections from buyers.
• Trap setting questions to share with your customer to ask the competitor.

Your SEs can be done with scrambling through Slack threads or buried Notion pages. The right AI tool will centralize and organize your competitive intelligence. And the format will be easy to access, edit, and share. 

For presales teams who often end up in deals late or find themselves in competitive dialogues, this kind of content is critical. 

Is AI Going to Replace Presales Teams?

No. AI isn’t replacing any presales roles. It’s evolving them. Today’s sales engineers can no longer be just product experts. With the help of AI, they can now be curators of knowledge and orchestrators of buyer experiences. And, they can scale their work a lot more.

Whether it’s summarizing calls or surfacing API docs in seconds, AI can help presales teams focus on what they do best: solve customer problems. 

If you’re ready to integrate AI into your presales workflow, start with questionnaire automation to automate things like technical product questions or 100-liner RFPs. It’s high-impact and low-risk, making it an entry point that will instantly save you hours. And it can scale across your team.

FAQs on How Presales Teams Are Actually Using AI