Executive Summary

AI has changed the economics of RFP response software. When a well-built AI solution handles the same work at a fraction of the cost, presales budget opens up. The answer to where it should go, from deep in the presales trenches, is clear: put it where deals are actually won or lost. Put it into technical evaluations.

The Red-Headed Stepchild of the Revenue Organization

A recent conversation with Steve Davis, CEO of Provarity AI, brought this into sharp focus.

Presales is the red-headed stepchild of the revenue organization.

There. I said it. Every SE reading this just nodded.

We’re expected to be technical experts, product experts, industry experts, storytellers, project managers, problem solvers, and trusted advisors. We influence an enormous amount of revenue. In many organizations, we become the face of the company during the most important stage of the buying process.

Yet when budget season rolls around? Sales gets tools. Marketing gets tools. Customer Success gets tools. Presales gets a handful of Salesforce fields and a wing and a prayer.

The Budget Nobody Really Questioned

For years, most presales teams had an RFP response tool. We bought them because we needed them. We maintained them because we had to. And we complained about them because, well, that’s what presales teams do.

Then AI showed up.

More and more presales teams have replaced dedicated RFP platforms with a shared custom GPT, loading in approved content, positioning, competitive responses, and institutional knowledge. The results are rarely perfect or revolutionary. Just good enough that nobody wants to go back.

When AI replaces a dedicated RFP tool at a fraction of the cost, something interesting happens. Budget opens up. The question is where it goes.

No Criteria, No Close

Presales teams run a lot of technical evaluations or POCs (proof of concepts).. Some last a week. Some last six months. Some should never have happened in the first place.

The best POCs all had one thing in common. Everybody knew what winning looked like. The customer knew. The SE knew. The account executive knew. When that happens, technical evaluations tend to move quickly. When it doesn’t, strange things happen. The customer asks for one more use case. Then another. Then another. New stakeholders appear. Requirements change. The finish line moves. Six months later everyone’s exhausted and nobody knows whether the evaluation was successful.

Deals don’t get lost because an RFP response arrived a day late. They get lost because nobody agreed on what success looked like. The demo gets you invited back. The technical evaluation determines whether the deal gets signed.

 

A POC without defined success criteria isn’t a sales motion. It’s a consulting engagement you’re running for free.

 

The Most Important Workflow Nobody Owns

What stood out in the conversation with Steve wasn’t the software itself. It was the fact that somebody was finally trying to solve a problem presales teams have simply learned to live with.

Growth-stage software companies track pipeline, forecast, bookings, and customer health. But somehow, the part of the sales cycle that most often determines whether a deal gets signed or not, gets managed through spreadsheets, email and Slack threads, project management tools, and institutional memory.

That works right up until it doesn’t. An SE leaves. A champion changes jobs. A quarter’s on the line. Suddenly everybody’s chasing status updates and trying to reconstruct what happened. Most technical evaluations are being managed by whoever happens to have the cleanest spreadsheet. That’s not a strategy.

Why Provarity Instynx Matters

What’s interesting about Provarity Instynx is that it approaches the POC as a business process rather than a collection of activities. The impact runs well beyond the SE team. For individual SEs, it brings structure and visibility to concurrent POCs: success criteria, stakeholder engagement, and deal health in one place. For presales leaders, it surfaces at-risk deals before they blow up at the end of the quarter and, for the first time, gives presales the ability to walk into a CRO review with data that actually means something. Not anecdotes. Numbers.

Surface at-risk deals before they blow up at the end of the quarter.

Instynx integrates directly with Salesforce, surfacing real buyer signals and POC health data into existing workflows. The forecast is confidently backed by data, not gut feel. The Jira integration turns field feedback from technical evaluations into structured, trackable product intelligence. The field-to-product feedback loop, one of the most valuable and most broken processes in enterprise software, finally works the way it should.

Customer Success teams benefit as well. Instynx carries success criteria, stakeholder context, and validated use cases directly forward to the CS Manager at the moment of close ensuring they know what was promised. No lost context. No rehashing of requirements or chasing down data. Provarity customers report as much as 35% faster onboarding and 23% improvement in retention.

Your RFP Tool Budget Just Found a Better Home

That conversation with Steve reinforced something the presales community has understood for a long time. Presales teams are expected to do more with less. Always have been. The difference today is that AI may finally be creating an opportunity to reinvest some of that budget into a part of the sales cycle that’s been underserved for decades.

The demo gets you invited back. The technical evaluation is where deals are won or lost and what gets the contract signed. If you’re a presales leader, an SE, a CRO, or anyone who’s ever watched a well-run technical evaluation fall apart because the process couldn’t keep up, consider Instynx. Schedule a demo. Have the conversation.

The red-headed stepchild finally has a seat at the table. It’s about time.

About the Author

Jamie L. Moore, P.Eng. is a Value Translation Leader and Presales / Solutions Engineering executive with extensive experience building and leading global presales teams across growth-stage SaaS companies. He’s experienced multiple acquisition cycles, worked with Global 2000 clients across four continents, and spent a career at the intersection of complex enterprise software and the art of the technical win.