You lost the deal three weeks ago. You just don't know it yet.
It happened the moment your sales director uttered those seven deadly words: "Just grab whoever's available for this call." The architect who joined? They'd never worked that vertical before. They didn't know the customer's tech stack. They fumbled through questions about integration patterns they'd never encountered.
Your competitor's architect? Hand-picked for their expertise in exactly what the customer needed.
We've watched this movie hundreds of times at enterprise deals across every industry. Companies with brilliant solutions, competitive pricing, and eager customers somehow manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Not because their product failed. Not because their pricing missed. But because they treat their pre-sales function like a pool of interchangeable warm bodies instead of what it actually is: the quarterback of modern enterprise sales.
The $280 Million Question Nobody's Asking About Pre-Sales ROI
Here's what should terrify every sales leader: Your pre-sales team determines whether you're selling commoditized hours or transformative solutions. One gets you rate card negotiations. The other gets you strategic partnerships with 3x higher win rates.
Brian Copeland learned this the hard way. When he took over a services company's pre-sales function, they were stuck at $280 million, selling testing services like contractors sell labor—by the hour, at whatever rate procurement could squeeze. The deals they won were getting smaller, margins thinner, relationships more transactional.
Five years later? Over a billion in revenue.
What changed wasn't the service. It was how they treated pre-sales collaboration and expertise matching.
Your Pre-Sales Team Supports Sales, But Serves the Business Outcomes
Most companies get the pre-sales charter backwards. They think these technical experts exist to make salespeople happy. Close deals at any cost. Say yes to everything. Promise the moon.
Wrong.
The best pre-sales teams operate on a different principle: Support sales, but serve the practices.
What does that mean? Your solution architect's job isn't just to win the deal. It's to protect deal structure so delivery can actually succeed. To ensure what you're selling can be delivered profitably. To prevent those nightmare projects that destroy margins and customer relationships.
Think about your last three lost enterprise deals. How many failed because:
The wrong architect showed up to the wrong meeting?
Your solution felt generic while competitors demonstrated deep expertise?
Technical questions went unanswered or poorly answered?
The proposed solution didn't align with what delivery could actually execute?
We're betting it's most of them.
The Five Buyers Your "Next Available" Architect Will Never Reach
When you treat pre-sales as plug-and-play, you're essentially betting that one person can simultaneously speak to five different buyers, each with completely different concerns:
The Functional Buyer wants to know if your solution solves their immediate problem. Can you integrate with their legacy systems? Handle their transaction volumes? Meet their specific requirements?
The Strategic Buyer cares about transformation. How does this move their three-year plan forward? What competitive advantage does it create?
The Financial Buyer needs to understand value, not features. ROI models. Payback periods. Budget impact across multiple fiscal years.
The Business Buyer wants outcomes. Not what you'll do, but what changes for their business when you're done.
The Procurement Buyer has compliance checkboxes, vendor requirements, and risk assessments that can kill your deal at the eleventh hour if ignored.
Your randomly assigned architect who specializes in financial services just walked into a healthcare RFP. Think they can address all five buyers effectively? Think they even know which questions each buyer will ask?
Stop Hiring Solutioneers. Start Building a Pre-Sales Workflow That Wins
The companies winning their unfair share of deals don't have better products. They have better pre-sales disciplines.
They don't grab the next available architect. They match expertise to opportunity with the precision of a Swiss watch. Their financial services specialist works financial services deals. Their healthcare expert handles healthcare proposals. Obvious? Yes. Common? Absolutely not.
They invest in pre-sales skills development. Not just product training, but teaching their teams to recognize which buyer they're talking to and adjust their message accordingly. To understand deal structure implications. To spot risks before they become surprises.
They treat pre-sales metrics as seriously as sales metrics. Win rates by architect. Deal velocity when specific solutioneers are involved. Customer feedback scores by pre-sales team member.
The Brutal Truth About Your Current Proposal Approach
If your pre-sales assignment process is "whoever's free," you're not just losing deals. You're training your sales team to expect mediocrity. You're burning out your best architects on deals they shouldn't be touching. You're teaching customers that you don't understand their business.
Worse? You're probably celebrating the wrong victories. That deal you won despite the architect mismatch? Pure luck. The customer bought despite your process, not because of it.
Meanwhile, your top performers—the ones who actually move the needle on win rates—are getting randomized across opportunities where their expertise goes to waste.
Three Changes You Can Make This Week to Improve RFP Win Rates
1. Create an expertise matrix. Map every architect's deep knowledge areas. Industry verticals. Technical domains. Business processes. Customer segments. Then use it religiously for assignments.
2. Implement a "fit score" for every opportunity. Before assigning an architect, rate the alignment between what the customer needs and what each team member brings. Below 70%? Find someone else or pair them with a specialist.
3. Track pre-sales impact religiously. Which architects consistently advance deals? Whose involvement correlates with higher close rates? This isn't about blame—it's about understanding your true competitive weapons.
The Question Every Pre-Sales Leader Should Be Asking
Companies obsess over sales methodology. They debate MEDDIC versus Challenger versus Solution Selling. They hire consultants to transform their sales motion. They implement sophisticated CRM workflows.
But they grab the next available architect.
Here's the question that matters: If you had one deal that would make or break your quarter, would you assign your pre-sales team the way you do today?
If the answer is no, why are you treating every other opportunity like it doesn't matter?
Your pre-sales team isn't overhead. They're not support staff. They're the difference between commoditized transactions and strategic partnerships. Between rate card negotiations and value-based pricing. Between your fair share and your unfair share of the market.
The choice is yours: Keep grabbing whoever's available and wondering why win rates won't budge. Or start treating pre-sales like the strategic weapon it should be.
Trampoline.ai turns each RFP into an actionable board so you stop assigning “whoever is free” and start routing work to the right people.
Upload an RFP. Every requirement becomes a card with section, priority, and due date.
Tag cards by industry and domain. Route them to the right SME in minutes.
Use the AI panel to filter by topic or vertical and bulk assign with simple commands.
Pull proven language from past proposals and knowledge bases in seconds. No more rewriting from scratch.
Track drafting, reviews, and approvals in one place. See where work stalls and fix it early.
Catch gaps and inconsistent answers before submission.
Compile a clean proposal from validated cards with the Writer extension. Export to the formats your client asks for.
Give sales and pre-sales the same, up-to-date answers through the browser extension for questionnaires and follow-ups.
The result is a repeatable pre-sales workflow. Experts work on the right things. Knowledge is reusable. Proposals land on time and on target.