Boosting PreSales Productivity with AI with Leah McTiernan, Docusign

AI is transforming the way PreSales teams operate. 

In this episode, Jarod Greene sits down with Leah McTiernan, Global Vice President of PreSales at Docusign, as she shares her perspective on how AI is streamlining workflows, boosting team morale, and enabling more meaningful, strategic work. Learn how AI is enhancing the PreSales role to build stronger customer relationships and deliver greater value.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How AI Transforms PreSales Efficiency: Leah explains how AI automates time-consuming tasks like demo creation and research, allowing PreSales teams to focus on more strategic activities like consultative selling and personalized customer engagements.
• The Role of AI in Boosting Morale and Innovation: Discover how AI integration improves workflows and enhances team morale by fostering innovation, leading to more excitement and engagement within the team.
• Why AI Enhances, Not Replaces, PreSales Roles: Leah addresses the common concern of AI replacing jobs, showing how AI complements PreSales by allowing professionals to spend more time on meaningful, strategic work, making their roles more valuable and fulfilling.
  
  

Things to listen for:

(00:00) Incorporating AI into PreSales workflows
(01:49) Will AI replace PreSales roles?
(03:03) Boosting morale through AI-driven innovation
(04:20) AI-powered tools used by Docusign

What is The Unexpected Lever?

The secret sauce to your sales success? It's what happens before the sale. It's the pre-sales. And it's more than demo automation. It's the work that goes on to connect technology and people in a really thoughtful way. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, pre-work centered around the human that makes the dream work, but you already know that.

The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what you already do best—combining your technical skills with your strategic insights. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to grow revenue. You're not just preparing for the sale—you're unlocking potential.

Join us as we share stories of sales engineers who make a difference, their challenges, their successes, and the human connections that drive us all, one solution at a time.

Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Five minutes. Getting on our soapbox on some of the most fiercely debated topics and concepts in PreSales and B2B sales. I am talking to Leah McTiernan, Global Vice President of PreSales at DocuSign, and she's got a fun, hot take, y'all. It's about incorporating AI into PreSales workflows. Leah, five minutes. Let's talk about it. Let's go.

Leah McTiernan [00:00:22]:
Yes, this is a topic that I am very passionate about, and I think at the core and what we're seeing, and I'm talking to a lot of my peers in the industry as well, is that AI specifically for PreSales? It's really starting to transform how we think about the role, how we think about the career, what we're seeing, and I'll share a few examples of how we're bringing this to life at DocuSign, is that AI is so powerful in automating all of those routine tasks, all of that lower value, more administrative, demo build, demo creation, research, presentation building type tasks. It's automating and streamlining that and honestly, creating much higher quality deliverables in so much shorter time periods. And it's allowing the teams to then focus on that consultative selling and how they're going to build customer relationships and how they're going to craft and deliver those personalized, tailored demonstrations and solution designs that really drive the most value for our customer. So it's kind of like all that foundational work that, you know, we have to do, it's doing for us, and then we're getting to kind of start at that 201 301 level and spend so much time there.

Jarod Greene [00:01:52]:
Yeah. Awesome. What do you say to the folks who get nervous about the notion of, you know, won't it replace me?

Leah McTiernan [00:01:58]:
It's just like I said, I mean, it's allowing us to have time and space within our day to focus on the more meaningful, strategic, interesting, problem solving challenger work. So, you know, it's not by any means going to replace the role of PreSales, but I think it's going to make the role that much more interesting and compelling and honestly enjoyable. We really embraced using AI in our organization. I would say I've been blessed to work with a few rockstars that just were early visionaries here and specifically how we could leverage OpenAI's GPT architecture to build solutions that automate those low value tasks again, to kind of free up that time. So it's been amazing to see how quick we can move. It's really inspiring and motivating for the team to work on these types of solutions. So obviously everything's always all about the customer and how we show up for the customer, how we prepare, how well we know their business, their peers business. It's allowing us to interact with our customers so much more effectively, efficiently, but also, I would say, more strategically.

Jarod Greene [00:03:15]:
It's fascinating, you talk about kind of the morale lifted. Tad, can you touch on that a little bit?

Leah McTiernan [00:03:20]:
We were just kind of highlighting like one of the areas that people could possibly be concerned about in a sense of like, hey, is this going to replace me? Which is not the case at all. To tie back to the morale. It's like when you're building internally and driving levels of innovation that makes you so excited to wake up and get to work and you see the impact that it can have that transitions over into your customer interactions as well. And so obviously, like we're internally using AI to automate and drive a lot of things, but we also, obviously in our intelligent agreement management platform and all of our solutions at DocuSignan, we're also leveraging AI. We're kind of building things internally, but we're also all day long, every day talking to our customers about it as well. So I think just the morale of the connected tissue there on wow, I'm getting put my hands on this internally I'm helping to build and crop solutions and I'll say not only for PreSales but for her field organization, that's helping me become so much more comfortable with what this is and the value it can provide. And actually we're seeing that kind of show up in how we interact with our customers, which is I think an unexpected benefit. And some of the things, and I would say some of the secret sauce that we've noticed as we're building some of these solutions.

Leah McTiernan [00:04:40]:
One for example, we call it Genius bar. It's powered by slack, accessible on your mobile phone, uses AI Salesforce data, and it automates responses to deal guidance questions, customer insights. It can automatically engage the right expert within our organization to support a particular deal or customer need. Right. And so it's connecting the field with the information and the experts they need to drive sales quickly. Another one we have is we call it the AI briefing creator. So again, AI powered tool, you can leverage it in slack. I could be like walking to a customer meeting and it's going to build and create for me briefing documents.

Leah McTiernan [00:05:22]:
It's going to highlight that companies key initiatives, their use cases, industry trends, essentially writing my talk track for me. So all of that research that might have taken an hour or two before you're getting at your fingertips in seconds. And even building on that, another solution we have, we call it the industry benchmark report, leveraging AI and automation to quickly research a company, generate peer comparisons white space because interfaces back into our snowflake data docusign use case opportunities, and then we integrate it into Google APIs to automatically build our presentations and industry point of view narratives for the customer. So it's like all of that work that, you know, you got to do that, but it gives you that baseline and then you can start. That's your starting point now, right? So a morale perspective, it's like really rude because it's like I don't have to worry about doing all this anymore. It's giving me such a strong restarting point. And then I can now use my time on the super interesting strategic, like how are we going to win and how am I going to deliver the most value for our customer?

Jarod Greene [00:06:31]:
There you go. Thank you for joining us on V5. But to our audience, if this is a topic you want to spend more time on, let us know in the comments. We'll extend a V5 to a V15 if need be because we want to keep this conversation going. Leah, thanks for your time today. We really appreciate it.

Leah McTiernan [00:06:46]:
Yeah, thanks for having me.