Case Studies cplace
>Customer Story · cplace
No Time to Sharpen the Saw
How cplace built a PreSales measurement system from zero — with no baseline, no CRM history, and a team that never had room to get better at the work.
- cplace — project & portfolio management software
- PreSales at a Series A scale-up
- Christoph Huber, Team Lead PreSales
- Trusted Advisor Academy since Q1 2026
80%+
Opportunities with qualification data, the three qualification questions — up from no usable data at all
70%+
Discovery field completion, PreSales-owned fields, including Cost of Inaction
1 / quarter
Committed module cadence, the minimum the team signed up for, reviewed against its KPIs
Lagging metrics are deliberately absent — see “Why there are no revenue numbers here — yet”.
>Two minutes with Christoph
The whole story, in his own words.
Prefer to read? The full story continues below.
>The Challenge
Felling trees with no time to sharpen the saw.
That’s how Christoph describes the problem to his CRO, every time. The team had more than enough work — what it didn’t have was room to get better at the work. Discovery, the foundation the whole function rests on, was the shakiest part; quantification barely existed as a concept.
The measurement problem was worse: no real CRM, only a home-built one that didn’t work — and the migration to HubSpot wiped the historical data. No evidence base at all. Nothing to argue from, in either direction.
We simply did everything. We walked into every meeting and said yes. We did so much of it that quality suffered somewhere else — instead of qualifying properly and actually quantifying.
Team Lead PreSales, cplace
>Inside the Programme
Start narrow. Then build the pyramid.
01
Three questions first
Rather than design a metrics framework, the team started almost embarrassingly small: get three qualification questions filled in. What began as voluntary became mandatory, with a fixed format behind it.
02
One layer at a time
PreSales added its own discovery fields, Cost of Inaction among them — the hardest one to fill, and the one that exposed the most. Quarterly reviews used call transcripts to find where it broke down.
03
Wired into the workflow
The Academy content went into an AI-augmented workflow: every month the team reviews which skills it has built; each new module gets built in, tested by everyone, and adjusted.
>What Changed
Qualification became a decision, not a reflex.
The team stopped saying yes to everything
Qualification became a decision with criteria behind it rather than a reflex.
Cost of Inaction went from absent to expected
Still the hardest field to complete honestly — which is exactly why it’s the one worth tracking.
AI grades the answers against the team’s own catalogue
When urgency or why-us is weakly answered, it comes back for another pass — and the standard is the team’s, not a generic one.
Quality rose with quantity, not instead of it
The team does more, measures more, and works to a visibly higher standard than before.
>Why the Academy
“We couldn’t apply any of this without the content — we’d be scraping something together off the internet. Now we have real methods and a real toolkit. We don’t work without it any more.”
Christoph Huber — Team Lead PreSales, cplace
>Measurement
Why there are no revenue numbers here — yet
cplace sells into 9–12 month sales cycles. Two quarters in, any win-rate or deal-size claim would be noise dressed up as evidence, and Christoph says so plainly: nothing significant yet, a clearly positive trend, and he’d rather stay cautious about how much until the data earns it.
That is what the first two quarters of enablement actually look like. Adoption moves first, behaviour follows, and business impact shows up a quarter or more later. A programme that promises revenue movement inside six months on a twelve-month cycle is selling something other than measurement.
>Christoph’s Advice to SE Leaders
Get out of your own kitchen.
Ask for real commitment earlier
Not “here’s the content”, but: this is what we want to have done by then, can we do it, what do you need. Where leadership goes quiet early on, it shows up in the adoption numbers.
Capture your status quo on day one
Christoph’s one regret. Without a before-picture, the first quarter’s progress is invisible even when it’s real.
Get out of your own kitchen
“When I only ever work in my own juice, it always tastes good to me. Having someone judge it from another perspective is genuinely valuable.”
Most PreSales teams can’t prove what they’re worth.
Because nobody set up the measurement before the work started. Every engagement begins with your goals — and the KPIs that should show whether it’s working.
100% free | No commitment required