Pre-Sales Requirements Engineering based on Miller Heiman's Sales Approach

Requirements engineering (RE) is not only part of the process while delivering or creating a service or product. In the pre-sales phase, RE activities play an important role during the offer preparation. Although this sounds like business as usual there is a major difference: the pre-sales phase entails challenges (e.g., a limited duration or the contractor’s pre-investment) having a tremendous impact on all of these activities. However, from a project manager’s perspective these challenges are nothing but risks—in the pre-sales phase usually addressed best by sales approaches like Miller Heiman’s. The latter appears to be even more interesting since it uses requirements engineering strategies to mitigate other typical sale’s risks. Therefore a joint approach appears not only feasible but worth a try. Conducting a risk analysis of the pre-sales phase and examining the performance of this joint approach reveals how well the two fit