Environment & Evidence
Map the customer's current state and gather evidence that grounds your approach in reality.
From Chapter 5 of Modern Presales
Overview
Environment & Evidence is about deeply understanding the customer's existing world before proposing changes to it. This means mapping their technical architecture, organizational structure, data flows, and — critically — the political landscape that shapes how decisions actually get made. The evidence you gather here prevents you from building on assumptions and gives you the credibility to recommend a path forward.
Why it matters
Environment & Evidence is the element that separates rigorous presales work from surface-level engagement. Too many SEs treat discovery as a checkbox — ask a few questions, fill in a template, move on to the demo. The result is a solution narrative built on incomplete information and a POC that tests the wrong scenarios.
This element demands that you go deeper. You're not just asking about the tech stack; you're understanding why it looks the way it does, who chose it, what constraints shaped those decisions, and what's changed since. You're mapping the organizational chart of influence — who has budget authority, who has technical veto power, who will be responsible for implementation, and who will measure success.
The "evidence" part is equally important. Every claim your champion makes about pain points, bottlenecks, or broken processes should be backed up with data, examples, or stakeholder validation. When you walk into a demo and say "Your team told us they spend 4 hours every Friday building compliance reports manually, and here's what that looks like with our platform," you're demonstrating a level of preparation that competitors rarely match.
Practically, this element produces two artifacts: a current-state architecture summary and a stakeholder map. Together, they give you the foundation to design a demo that resonates, a POC that tests what matters, and a proposal that addresses the right people with the right message.
Key discovery questions
- 1Walk me through your current architecture for this workflow. Where does data originate and where does it end up?
- 2What's your tech stack for this area? Which pieces work well and which cause friction?
- 3What monitoring and alerting do you have in place? When something breaks, how quickly do you know?
- 4What workarounds has your team built to compensate for limitations in the current tool?
- 5When was the last time this system caused an incident? What happened?
Common mistakes
- Skipping current-state discovery because the customer 'already told us what they want.'
- Relying on a single stakeholder's perspective instead of mapping the full technical and political landscape.
- Accepting architectural diagrams at face value without asking about the gaps and workarounds.
- Not documenting findings in a way that can be referenced throughout the deal cycle.
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Read more about this topic on the blog: Read the full article →
This element is covered in detail in Modern Presales (Chapter 5), including real-world examples, templates, and implementation guidance.