BA involvement in pre-sale support

As a BA you may be called upon to help the sales team with pre-sales support sometimes also called as Request for Proposal (RFP), although it is hard to generalise the content of the document they usually follow a standard format.

Sales people may not have the technical knowledge for the RPF and that is where the BA can be very handy, you may ask a question as to why not involve the technical people? The answer is very simple, most of the RFP are targeted to middle or senior manager and some may have the technical expertise but in my experience most don’t, so there is a need to represent the technical information in a business language.

BA will play a major role in designing and developing a prototype for the proposal, a good BA will spend reasonable time investigating customer’s business, trend and preferences to customize the demonstration that will make the customer more confident on your product/service.

Sales people are often stereotyped as commission hungry and income driven individuals , getting a BA involved in the sale gives customer the confident that your company is serious about the product/service and they are thinking of all the aspect of the sale like installation, implementation, training, support and maintenance.
There is one more advantage in this process, as a BA you experience firsthand the needs of a new customer this can be very handy to enhance the product and may lead to identify new opportunities and business sector.