Product pre-sales and demonstration

In order to provide customers with best services and make sure they get the most out of the products they have chosen, many companies offer pre-sale services before customer purchases one of products. The purpose is to help customers make the proper product selection in terms of specifications, compatibility and size.

Creating product demonstration plan
Most successful companies, especially software development ones, involve their Technical support teams in the process of pre-sales and product demonstration. Usually Sales department team attracts customer's attention in order to show the product features and functionality. Sales professionals in close cooperation with tech support service specialists can deliver the products to customers and demonstrate features and capabilities to the target audience. In addition, they may leave the demonstration products with customers for a period of time (usually up to two weeks), allowing them to show the product samples to other individuals in the organizations.
There are two points the product demonstration plan is based on:

• Tech support team gets product demonstration requests from customers and prospects.
• The company develops the marketing strategy which entails arrangement of advertising and promotion campaigns.

To organize product pre-sales and demonstration, there should be a smooth cooperation between Sales team and Tech support department. They should work together by sharing common tasks and effectively communicating with each other. This can be reached by using VIP Task Manager. This software allows to build joint workflow with possibility to create, assign, share and track tasks. The manager can create the task group "Demonstration and pre-sales" and plan all tasks in this task group by using Calendar view. These tasks can be like "Create PowerPoint slideshow", "Prepare video materials to be shown on stands and monitors", "Send invitations to all concerned customers and prospects". Each task can be scheduled by due date and priority. The manager can also set an estimated time needed for task completion. VIP Task Manager allows to use checklists and activity templates to easily plan regular and iterative product demonstrations and promotional campaigns.

Tracking pre-sale presentation tasks
Whether it is on-site product demonstration or online pre-sale session, the manager needs to know the progress of the session by tracking tasks statuses. The support engineer may need some help or assistance while communicating with customer and presenting the product features.VIP Task Manager offers a smart job-tracking tool that can help prioritize tasks and manage product demonstration workflow. By using Filter Bar and Notifications Panel, the tech support manager can clearly see the current status of work in the showcase, preventing deadlines from being missed. The intensive workflow covers the main steps of the demonstration process, including visual presentations, verbal communications, product sampling and customer feedback receiving. The support manager can track how the support engineers do their tasks. If there are some problems or a lack of demonstration materials, the engineer can communicate to the manager in real time through VIP Task Manager to describe the point of the matter and find ways to resolve the problems.

Creating task report on pre-sales presentation
This is very important part of the 'Product pre-sales and demonstration' function as the tech support manager needs to know the results of presentation and productivity of support staff. Task report is the way to assess the overall effect resulted form the support team activities and conduct performance analysis. VIP Task Manager allows to create task status reports. The support manager can easily create reports by using Report Builder and Charts Panel.

Report Builder creates task reports in text and HTML view. Such reports includes all information concerned the pre-sales presentation tasks like assigned employees, actual time spent to complete the tasks, history of task changes, a list of used presentation materials, and other. Charts Panel can be used to build visual reports. For example, the support manager can use Pie chart to compare Estimated Time versus Actual Time. Such a visual report will show discrepancy between scheduled task time and actual time the support engineers spent to complete their jobs.

• Technical support department staff
• Technical support department functions
• Providing technical support service and consultation
• Processing and transferring product enhancement requests
• >> Product pre-sales and demonstration