01 · Presales & kickoff · Visit and quote
The meeting room wants the full suite. The dock only needs one purchase order
The presales consultant stands in front of the contract. He has to understand the floor, and he has to take anything he did not hear clearly out of the quote.
Why a presales consultant has to know the business, not only the demo
First learn how the customer actually gets through a day. Then decide which stretch is worth turning into a system. Only then open the demo. If the translation happens before the survey, the proposal becomes a product pitch. A DaXi Technology presales consultant does not open with a feature menu. He does not fill in keep, build, read, write. That table belongs to the solution consultant. He asks three questions, and all three have to land on a named person. Who works overtime on this every day. Do they patch it with WeChat, Excel, or a leftover system. If it goes wrong once, do they lose goods, lose the books, or lose a customer. The boss says “go live with ERP”. Purchasing means a WeChat chain across thirty stores. The plant means producing from the last message. If those three sentences do not match, he will not quote “full digitalisation”. Those four characters contain no document. The project manager cannot schedule. Engineering cannot size interfaces. At acceptance anyone can say something was left out.
What he actually takes away on visit day
A visit that counts leaves with four things. Missing one, he does not quote. First, document samples: a blank template does not count; they have to be filled for yesterday or last week. Second, the people who operate them: job, shift, whether they wear gloves, whether they sit in a truck. Third, the list of systems already in use: finance, access control, membership, courier — which one owns master data. Fourth, the sentences for what this phase will not do, preferably spoken by the customer. Presales writes them into the meeting notes, not into his own notebook.
The demo only serves the document already heard. If the customer wants to see ordering, click it with their store names, their case pack, yesterday's stockouts. Do not use a generic account that mixes bakery, manufacturing, and retail. A generic demo can get the meeting room to nod. It cannot let the purchasing supervisor match it against the old chain. When the demo does not match, presales stops. He does not paper over the room with more screens.
Quote by document, not by module name
A quote line has to point at one state change on one document. Example: “the store submits next-day orders, the plant locks at order cutoff, variance closes on the day goods arrive.” Membership points, an operations board, a supplier portal: if nobody on site works overtime for them every day, they go into not this phase, with the reason that there is no daily operator, not that the tech cannot do it. If the customer wants them later, that is a change. It is not reverse-engineered from “we said the full suite at the time”.
Presales also marks dependencies. Item codes live in Kingdee. Prices live on another sheet. Store logins are the store manager's personal WeChat. If nobody owns any one of those three, the project will stall mid-development. Dependencies sit on the cover of the proposal, not in a footnote. Internally he hands them to the Solution consultant: keep in the old system, build new, read only, write back. A contract does not proceed with those four columns empty.
How a thirty-store bakery chain quote was closed
The boss wrote six lines on the whiteboard: store ordering, central kitchen, membership, board, finance, store inspection. The purchasing supervisor later said the thing that exploded every day was the chain. Store managers changed quantities in the group. The plant produced from the last message. When arrivals did not match, nobody could say how many times the number had been changed. Finance vouchers already lived in Kingdee. Store inspection was the area manager's own spreadsheet. Membership was another vendor's mini program.
Presales went with purchasing to two stores. He watched the store manager change the order in front of the cold cabinet. He watched the plant copy WeChat screenshots onto a production document. Back at the table the quote closed to three lines: store ordering, plant intake, arrival variance close. Membership, the board, and store inspection went into not this phase. Finance would not be rebuilt. The only agreement was that later the order number must be findable in Kingdee. That line went in as an interface dependency, not as a function in this phase. The purchasing supervisor matched the order fields against the old chain and confirmed this was the daily work. The contract was signed on these three documents, not on six wish lines.
If presales had quoted along the whiteboard, three “must-haves” would have shown up mid-project: the board had no data source, membership could not match phone numbers, store inspection had no definition of fail. Engineering time would have gone into functions with no daily user, and ordering would have been reworked because order-cutoff rules were never written down. The presales job is to force that rework to happen in the meeting room, before the contract.
Decisions he does not make for the next hand
Presales draws the scope and the samples. He does not draw a four-layer architecture. He does not write the decision table for approval rules. He does not schedule development weeks. Which systems stay in the architecture is the solution consultant's work. How rules become sentences a test can judge is the requirements analyst's work. Who has the right to add the board back mid-project is something the project manager must write down at kickoff. Presales hands over meeting notes, photos of documents, the not-doing list, and the dependencies. Notes without a not-doing list will let the next hand treat all six whiteboard lines as a promise.