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The 4 Best Sales Engineering Tools for 2025
December 11, 2024
Table of Contents
Why are Sales Engineers Struggling Nowadays?
Sales engineers (SEs) are crucial members of enterprise sales teams, combining technical product knowledge with a deep understanding of how to sell. On any given day, SEs are involved in tasks such as creating live sales demos, customizing product demos, handling technical inquiries and proof-of-concepts (PoCs), and supporting account executives (AEs) in driving deals to closure.
Yet, despite their important role, SEs are challenged and torn in too many directions to be their most efficient and effective. As a result, presales teams often struggle to prove their strategic value to the organization, and end up being viewed as a reactive resource, rather than a trusted advisor or revenue-driver.
Here are just a few common frustrations SEs highlighted in the 2025 Presales Landscape Report:
- Time-consuming demo environment maintenance: 79% of SEs surveyed spend more than an hour a week cleaning and maintaining their demo environment, while 16% spend between 3-10 hours. On the high end, that’s a massive 21 days per year wasted for these valuable employees!
- Demo customization: Many SEs have to build new demos for each prospect. Customization demands — such as creating custom datasets — can add hours or even days to demo preparation.
- Dealing with unqualified leads: 23% of SEs said more than half of their demos are unqualified. SEs also cited frustrations about collaboration, with 39% saying sales isn’t sharing information from discovery soon enough, and 31% wishing for adequate time and background information to prepare for a prospect meeting in advance.
These challenges highlight the need for better tools, processes, and support structures to enable SEs to maximize their impact on the sales process.
How to Enable Your Sales Engineering Team
To address these challenges, organizations must create an environment where SEs can focus on high-impact activities. Here are a few of the best ways to enable your sales engineering team.
Fostering Collaboration and Teamwork
One way to achieve this is by fostering collaboration and teamwork. By aligning SEs with account executives (AEs), organizations can encourage co-development of discovery questions and improve the identification of prospect pain points before calls. Cross-functional feedback loops provide SEs with a formal process to give feedback on lead quality, while collaborative approaches like a demo program can help reduce repetitive work and standardize demo approaches.
Nurturing a Culture of Innovation
Adopting a maturity model is one approach to nurturing a culture of presales innovation. By advocating for a shift in presales influence, teams can extend their reach and improve cross-functional alignment without necessarily owning every process. This concept of “influential ownership” allows pre-sales teams to impact business outcomes without shouldering full operational responsibility.
Equipping Them with Powerful Demo Software
Equipping SEs with powerful demo software is a great way to scale presales resources and accelerate sales cycles. Adopting an interactive demo platform like Reprise allows SEs to create, customize, and maintain demos more efficiently. SEs can create a centralized demo library that provides pre-built, reusable demo templates and custom datasets for common use cases, enabling sales reps to handle first calls on their own.
Creating Metrics to Measure Success
It’s important to track metrics that are focused on revenue-related outcomes — such as customer retention, reduced acquisition costs, and faster deal closures. This helps justify budget requests and secure support from executives. In addition, companies should track their demo-to-close ratio to measure how many demos convert to closed deals. Monitoring the time SEs spend building demos each week can highlight areas for efficiency improvement. Evaluating the lead qualification rate and tracking the technical win rate provides further insight into how often SEs are able to win over technical buyers with a demo.
4 Best Sales Engineering Tools in 2025
Fortunately, a variety of sales engineering tools are available to help streamline collaboration, improve demo creation, track sales outcomes, and more. Here’s a breakdown of the most impactful tools for SEs in 2025.
Demo Software
Reprise is a leading demo creation platform, allowing SEs to create live sales demos, product demos and product tours, custom demos, and sales leave-behinds that can be used throughout the entire enterprise buying cycle.
As one G2 reviewer says, “The Reprise product allows our teams to highlight functionality in our app a lot easier and tell a story to potentially interested buyers. Whether it be the top of the funnel where we’re spotlighting what our product does and the value we can bring to the table, or the middle of the funnel where we want to highlight specific features for specific stakeholders, Reprise allows us to tell our story in a much more engaging fashion.”
With Reprise, SEs can build a demo program made up of templates and sample datasets, enabling their sales counterparts to inject custom data into a reliable, self-contained demo environment. The platform’s demo analytics track prospect engagement on interactive demos like product tours and sales leave-behinds, providing valuable insights for follow-ups.
Reprise’s demo software is enterprise-ready, with security features such as role-based access control (RBAC) and the ability to scale demos for hundreds (or even thousands) of concurrent users.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
The Homerun Presales Platform is a CRM specifically designed for presales teams. It centralizes presales workflows and tracks all activities, providing visibility into the status of demos, proposals, and technical PoCs and more.
As one G2 reviewer said, “As a presales leader, it’s my job to be able to provide salient information at a moment’s notice about any opportunity that my team is working on. With CRMs most often geared only toward what information the Seller needs to input, there is often a plethora of different solutions for the presales team, from spreadsheets to homegrown databases and project management tools. What Homerun Presales does is consolidate all of the information that is important to Presales engineers as well as Presales leaders into a single, easy to implement, integrate, and use single pane of glass.”
The platform integrates with other CRMs used by sales and marketing teams, such as Salesforce, Hubspot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, making it easier to maintain one system of record.
Communication/Collaboration Tools
Prelay is a collaboration platform for revenue teams, including SEs. It centralizes team collaboration on deals, tracking internal discussions, requests, and notes for presales engagements including PoCs. As one G2 reviewer put it, “Prelay has dramatically improved the effectiveness of our POCs. It speeds up and simplifies the creation of test plans and makes it easy for all parties involved to have a clear understanding of the POCs status. Our customers appreciate the clear visibility into next steps and progress at all layers of their org. As a manager I appreciate being able to quickly view the status of all the POCs being run by my team.”
Prelay’s deal analytics enhance cross-functional alignment, improving collaboration between sales, SEs, and customer success teams. By providing a unified platform for deal-related communications, Prelay reduces missed follow-ups and enables smoother handoffs. SEs use Prelay to maintain visibility into deal progress, request information from AEs, and align efforts with post-sales teams.
Workflow Automation Tools
Monday.com offers automation and workflow management for sales and presales teams. The platform’s customizable projects can help SEs manage internal activities and progress. Automated reminders for follow-ups reduce the need for manual tracking, while centralized dashboards provide visibility into project status for project management.
SEs can also use Monday.com’s CRM to track demo requests, schedule calls, and ensure they never miss follow-ups. One G2 reviewer said, “I like how I can easily centralize sales pipeline effectively using API and numerous native integrations with popular software applications like Outlook, Gmail, Excel, etc. I like how easily I can store and manage each lead with Monday CRM. The best thing started happening after I’ve been using Monday CRM to keep data organized. Now I also can collaborate with my team members seamlessly with this software.”
Empower Your Sales Engineers in 2025 and Beyond
Dedicated presales tooling like the products mentioned above can help relieve sales engineers from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus their time on technical prospects and strategic revenue-generating efforts. From streamlining demo creation, to improving collaboration, to tracking deal flows and workflows, these are the presales tools your team should check out in 2025!