What marketers can learn from pre-sales

Coming back into corporate life after running my own business, I knew that what wouldn't change was that I’d be diving into campaigns, content, and lead nurturing. What I didn’t expect was to also inherit a pre-sales team under the marketing umbrella.

Normally, pre-sales sits with sales. But because my team here in Mexico is early in their careers and needs close guidance, and our sales team is in the US, the pre-sales team reports into me. And honestly, it’s been eye-opening to see how differently they work compared to a typical, sensible, and "safe" marketing function.

Work harder, not smarter

Here’s the first big surprise: persistence can work better than finesse. By simply holding out longer and sending more nudges, this team started closing leads at a rate none of us expected. In marketing, we talk a lot about automation and “the right message at the right time,” but sometimes it’s just about the human being who follows up one more time who gets the big fish.

The challenge? Data, or the lack of it. We all live in HubSpot, but without historic performance data to draw on, every decision felt like starting from scratch. It made me appreciate just how much we rely on benchmarks and past learnings when optimising campaigns. Now, we've built up a few months of decent data, barring human errors of noting lead sources and so on, and we can build on this information going forward.

As long as it's legal...

Then there’s the legal landscape. In marketing, outreach is tightly governed by permissions—GDPR in Europe, CASL in Canada, and opt-in requirements in most places. Pre-sales, however, can build relationships one-to-one through channels like LinkedIn or by using publicly available contact details. In the US and Mexico, there’s more room for that kind of outreach, while Europe and Canada take a far stricter line. The result is that our North American pre-sales unlocks a lead base that our global marketing team, on its own, simply can’t reach.

At a startup, I used to blur these lines—we’d test every method we could (always legal, of course). Now, in a corporate setting, the division is much clearer. But having marketing and pre-sales sit side by side has reminded me that growth often comes from blending marketing strategy with sales persistence.

What marketers can learn from pre-sales

Stepping into this dual role has been a reminder that marketing doesn’t have a monopoly on growth. Pre-sales brings a scrappy, persistent energy that marketers can learn a lot from.

Three things stand out:

1. Persistence wins as much as polish. Marketing often obsesses over messaging, segmentation, and automation. Pre-sales shows that sometimes the extra follow-up is what moves the deal forward.
   

2. Data is a shared asset. Without historic benchmarks, pre-sales felt like they were flying blind. The same is true in marketing: whether you’re optimising nurture flows or call scripts, the faster you build reliable data, the smarter your next move becomes.
   

3. Boundaries shape opportunity. Marketing is hemmed in by regulations; pre-sales has more room to explore direct, one-to-one outreach. When both teams understand each other’s limits and strengths, they expand the total addressable playing field.

   
   

Marketers can sharpen their craft by borrowing from pre-sales’ persistence, discipline with data analytics, and the ability to push on doors that marketing alone can’t open. Growth happens faster when both teams learn from each other instead of staying in their lanes.

Enjoy reading this piece? You can see more marketing musings from me, the editor of this blog, here.