In many SAP consultancies, the ability to contribute to the early stages of client engagement has become just as important as technical or functional expertise. Pre-sales is not about selling in the narrow sense. It is about shaping conversations so that clients make informed choices, avoiding costly missteps, and laying the groundwork for projects that are both viable and sustainable.
Consultants who understand this craft often find themselves playing more influential roles in projects, with career options that extend beyond configuration or project management.
In recent years, SAP’s own changes to how it goes to market have highlighted the growing importance of pre-sales. The introduction of RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP has shifted expectations around the advisory work needed before projects begin.
For consultants, this has created opportunities to step into pre-sales discussions armed with both technical knowledge and practical delivery experience.
This article from IgniteSAP discusses how pre-sales is becoming a more important area in SAP consulting client relationships.
Pre-sales in SAP is the set of practices that happen before a contract is signed, often long before a project team is assembled. It includes discovery sessions, value discussions, solution demonstrations, and proposal shaping.
Many consultants hesitate to step into pre-sales because they equate it with persuasion or pressure, but pre-sales is actually closer to consultancy in its purest form: listening carefully, drawing out priorities, and suggesting approaches that fit the client’s context.
It is the stage where realistic expectations are set, which later determine whether delivery teams succeed or struggle. A consultant who brings delivery experience into this stage often adds credibility, because clients can sense when a discussion is grounded in lived project experience.
For SAP consultants, pre-sales is an extension of their expertise into the earliest client conversations. It is a way to influence scope, to highlight risks while they can still be addressed, and to make sure business value is part of the discussion rather than just system capability.
Consultants who acquire pre-sales skills become more versatile. They can contribute to shaping the deal, they can explain the delivery realities of proposed options, and they can help connect technical capability to business outcomes.
Some consultants choose to specialize in solution advisory, value engineering, or bid management. Others continue working in delivery but with the added ability to step into pre-sales when needed.
In many consultancies, those who can move between delivery and pre-sales are viewed as highly valuable because they bridge two sides of the business that are often disconnected.
Understanding SAP’s current commercial models helps explain why pre-sales conversations have become more complex.
With RISE with SAP, the focus is on large organizations moving away from on-premise ECC into managed S/4HANA environments. The discussions here tend to be lengthy and involve multiple stakeholders, because they involve infrastructure, operations, custom code, and long-term total cost of ownership.
Consultants in pre-sales must be prepared to speak about the trade-offs of retaining legacy customizations, adopting clean core principles, and building business cases for a shift from capital expenditure to operating expenditure: moving from one-off investments to ongoing subscription models.
GROW with SAP is directed at smaller firms, subsidiaries, or new adopters. Here, the cycle is shorter, and the emphasis is on rapid adoption of fit-to-standard processes and best practices. In this context, pre-sales often revolves around demos and accelerators rather than lengthy business case modeling.
These are just the two most prominent arrangements among many, meaning consultants must be comfortable adjusting their approach.
Pre-sales in SAP typically runs through discovery, shaping, proposal, and handover.
Discovery involves learning about the client’s situation, their priorities, and their pain points.
Shaping is about translating those into a solution approach, showing how processes can be supported or improved, and building a business case around measurable benefits.
Proposal turns that approach into a document that is commercially viable, covering scope, cost, and delivery model.
Finally, handover passes the opportunity into delivery in a way that avoids surprises or disconnects.
Discovery is about gathering requirements, but also revealing the metrics executives care about, such as days sales outstanding, inventory turns, or time to close. It also requires understanding constraints, such as regulatory reporting or industry-specific processes.
Shaping then turns this into a coherent story: how SAP best practices address gaps, what extensions are required, and what value improvements are possible compared to peer benchmarks.
Consultants entering pre-sales should expect to request baseline artifacts: process maps, KPIs, and system landscape diagrams. Even if these are incomplete, they help ground conversations.
A workshop where executives are asked about working capital goals or compliance deadlines will yield more relevant outcomes than one that only reviews IT systems.
Discovery also requires sensitivity to friction points. Fit-to-standard workshops, for example, often surface resistance from users attached to legacy customizations. Consultants in pre-sales can help by reframing these discussions toward value and future maintainability.
An assumption log, a KPI baseline, and a documented value hypothesis are strong indicators of pre-sales progress. Consultants who treat discovery as a disciplined process rather than a casual conversation make it much easier for the next phases of pre-sales to proceed without confusion.
Once discovery has created a picture of the current situation, shaping begins. This involves using tools like SAP Value Lifecycle Manager to compare a client’s metrics to industry benchmarks.
The gap between the client’s performance and peer averages becomes the foundation of the business case. If the client closes books in twelve days while peers average seven, the improvement potential is clear, and the monetary value of automating reconciliations and journal postings can be quantified.
In shaping, consultants need to help distinguish between processes that can be adopted as standard and those that require extensions. Clean core principles guide this conversation: recommending in-app tools for small adaptations, ABAP Cloud for logic that must sit within S/4, and BTP for side-by-side innovation. By framing extensions this way, pre-sales creates a forward-looking scope that balances current needs with future upgrade flexibility.
Consultants moving into pre-sales quickly discover that their effectiveness depends on skill but also on the content and accelerators they bring into conversations. SAP provides a large set of resources that partners and consultants can draw from, and many consultancies have built their own libraries on top. The aim is always the same: shorten the time between a customer question and a meaningful answer.
One of the most widely used resources is the Best Practices Explorer, now increasingly integrated into the Signavio Process Navigator. These provide ready-to-use process flows, configuration guides, and test scripts across areas like order-to-cash or record-to-report. In discovery sessions, showing a client a process model from these libraries helps ground the discussion. Instead of debating abstractly about how a purchase order should be approved, the conversation can focus on whether the best practice fits and what modifications, if any, are genuinely required.
Integration is a big part of discovery conversations, especially when clients run a mixed landscape.
The Business Accelerator Hub offers pre-built integration content: API definitions, event models, and packaged flows for connecting S/4HANA to Ariba, SuccessFactors, or third-party systems like Salesforce.
Referencing these in pre-sales demonstrates that integration effort is not an open-ended risk but a manageable part of the project. When clients see that an integration has already been modeled and tested, their concern about project uncertainty reduces.
Value Lifecycle Manager plays a different role. It provides a structured way to baseline current KPIs and compare them against peer benchmarks. Consultants can use it to build financial narratives around value creation. This moves conversations from features to measurable business results. For executives, this is often the point where interest solidifies into intent, because the discussion is anchored in familiar business metrics.
A central theme in almost every pre-sales conversation today is the question of extensions.
Consultants must help clients understand the modern framework: keep the digital core clean and build extensions in controlled ways.
In-app tools handle straightforward needs such as adding fields or adjusting approval rules. ABAP Cloud is available when business logic must sit inside the core system but must do so in a way that is upgrade-safe. The Business Technology Platform provides a side-by-side environment for building apps, workflows, or AI-driven services that interact with but do not compromise the stability of the ERP core.
By framing extension decisions within this structure, consultants help clients see a long-term path. The clean core principle is about giving future projects room to adopt new releases without the cost of retrofitting broken customizations. In pre-sales, this is often the point in scope discussions when clients accept that some long-standing customizations may need to be retired or rebuilt in a different way, and so the project becomes more sustainable from the outset.
No discovery session today is complete without questions about data and AI. Clients want to know how reporting will be handled, how predictive models fit into operations, and how AI assistants like SAP Joule will affect daily work. Consultants must answer these questions without drifting into speculation.
Datasphere, as the enterprise data fabric, often enters discussions as the mechanism for connecting SAP and non-SAP data sources. By highlighting its role in providing lineage, governance, and a semantic layer, consultants can show how clients avoid creating fragmented reporting environments.
Analytics Cloud can be recommended as the tool for day-one dashboards, financial planning, and predictive scenarios. Framing these two together shows a pathway where executives have visibility across the enterprise immediately from go-live.
When the topic turns to AI, consultants need to distinguish between embedded AI delivered within SAP applications and custom AI built on BTP.
Embedded examples such as automated invoice matching, guided buying, or predictive cash flow are safe to present as immediately available.
Custom AI, such as using AI Core to train models for industry-specific scenarios, should be described as achievable and valuable, but requiring additional work. This distinction avoids overselling capabilities that are not truly ready. Clients appreciate candor here, and it builds trust for the later phases of engagement.
Pre-sales influence is powerful because it defines both customer decisions and delivery outcomes.
With that influence comes responsibility. As with AI, consultants in pre-sales must present other capabilities truthfully, describe risks openly, and avoid overpromising: in other words, persuading through clarity rather than pressure.
SAP’s Partner Code of Conduct underlines this by requiring accuracy, compliance with laws, and respect for customer data. This means being transparent about what is standard and what requires extensions, never using real customer data in demos without permission, and treating every piece of information gathered during discovery as confidential.
For consultants, pre-sales can be a career specialism or a complement to delivery work.
The main roles include solution advisors who lead conversations, demo engineers who prepare systems, value engineers who quantify business cases, and bid managers who package proposals.
In practice, these roles overlap, and consultants often find themselves wearing more than one hat, especially in smaller firms.
Compensation structures differ from sales. Base salaries tend to make up most of the package, with smaller variable components tied to influenced revenue, successful deals, or customer satisfaction.
In larger consultancies, progression can follow a technical path into principal advisory roles, a value path into director-level positions, or a management path leading pre-sales teams.
For those considering pre-sales as a specialism, shadowing is the fastest entry point. Sitting in on discovery workshops and demos provides exposure to client dynamics. Some firms run short-term rotations where delivery consultants can contribute to strategic pursuits.
Safe practice opportunities also exist, such as demo jams, internal role-plays, or pro-bono projects with nonprofits. These create environments where consultants can practice questioning, storytelling, and demo navigation without the pressure of a live deal.
Learning resources support this journey. Certifications in S/4HANA, BTP, or industry-specific solutions provide credibility, and SAP Learning Journeys, the Pre-Sales Academy, and value engineering courses build advisory skills.
Community participation, whether in SAP Community forums or analyst-led discussions, helps consultants stay informed about evolving trends. Over time, combining delivery experience with these pre-sales skills produces professionals who can both shape opportunities and deliver them, making them indispensable to clients and employers alike.
Pre-sales craft for consultants is about much more than early involvement in sales cycles. It is a discipline that combines discovery, shaping, and ethical influence to create projects that are executable, valuable, and trusted.
For SAP consultants, learning this craft expands both their immediate impact and their long-term career potential. It brings delivery knowledge into the earliest conversations, creates value cases executives can support, and protects clients from expensive missteps.
As the industry continues to shift toward subscription models, cloud services, and AI-driven processes, the importance of skilled pre-sales will only increase.
Consultants who treat it as part of their professional development, rather than a separate track, will find themselves better equipped to guide clients and become more visible within their firms.
Pre-sales may once have been considered the domain of salespeople, but in today’s SAP world, it has become a craft where consultants can thrive, contribute, and create future projects.
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