Chaos Investigation: The Surge of Presales Influencers Selling Courses—The Pool of Presales "Green Leeks" Is Clearly Running Dry

Over the past two years, the vocational skills knowledge-payment market has been staging an absurd black comedy—hundreds of bloggers brandishing titles like "Presales Director at a Top Industry Company" have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. They flood major self-media platforms with presales content of wildly inconsistent quality, using it as a springboard to offer paid services: career-change consulting, job-hunting guidance, presales courses, and on-the-job coaching.

Numbers are the most damning evidence. A group of presales novices—who graduated less than a decade ago, have never worked for a company with more than 300 employees (barely a small-to-mid-size business?), have never read a single classic sales book, and have never earned more than 300,000 RMB in a year—are now pasting AI-generated content or plagiarizing other bloggers' articles across platforms. Wearing the homemade mask of "presales gurus," they peddle so-called "deal-winning playbooks" to presales professionals who genuinely want to break through their career ceilings.

These presales self-media influencers almost universally go to great lengths to hide their true identities: they won't reveal their real names, won't disclose their former employers, won't state their actual income from presales roles, and won't show which specific industries they have real experience in. They only wrap themselves in vague titles like "Presales Director at a Leading Company" or "Presales Expert," as if burying dirt under a thick layer of snow—leaving no way to verify any real information, just a collection of anonymous online IDs. My heart goes out to those who spend real money on these courses—they're being taken for a ride.

When even graduates from third-tier vocational colleges are pontificating on "Presales Practice for Multi-Million-Dollar Projects," the field is visibly sliding into the abyss. We shouldn't be purely credentialist, but educational background often reflects a person's knowledge system, learning ability, and professional rigor. We often joke that someone's "math was taught by the PE teacher"—now that joke seems to apply to these so-called "presales experts" as well.

The survival playbook of these "instant experts" is a textbook case of modern knowledge brokering: repackaging bid templates from third-tier vendors as industry secrets, hyping basic methodologies as strategic nuclear weapons, and using the fake persona of "annual salary of one million" to harvest anxiety. In the backend data of one knowledge-payment platform, 43% of presales course buyers were newcomers with less than two years in the field—precisely the golden period when they should be honing their fundamentals through real-world practice, not being misled into memorizing so-called "universal solution architectures."

Through observation and investigation, we've found that a typical "cash-harvesting" pipeline has become a standardized assembly line: start by venting about presales work and stirring up emotions to build a following, then use AI to rewrite and spin a few viral articles, craft the fake persona of a "former director at a top-tier company," fabricate project cases worth tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of RMB, and finally launch a 699 RMB crash-course bootcamp. More dangerously, some "presales mentors" are now teaching gray-area tricks like fabricating project experience and dressing up technical proposals. This poison-as-antidote "playbook" is mass-producing resume fraudsters. Even worse, they use real tender documents as training exercises, having students write bid-collusion proposals for free, then profit by reselling those proposals—this is a carbon copy of a shady vocational school!

The current self-media market for presales is showing a deeply distorted supply-demand dynamic. The reader base is already limited, yet the number of bloggers keeps ballooning. Presales skill development should be a vast blue-ocean market, but it's being polluted by this influx of low-quality content and unprofessional influencers. Readers who were once passionate about presales and eager to learn are now disillusioned by the chaos, and some have even begun to doubt the entire presales profession. This not only hinders the healthy growth of the presales skills market but also casts a serious shadow over the industry's reputation as a whole.

Yet, amid this chaos, there are still clear streams of professionalism. Those presales practitioners who refuse to peddle anxiety—the "regular army" of hands-on experts—have built a practical, standardized presales skill system grounded in proven sales and presales methodologies and best practices that span industry cycles. From core career insights for presales, to granular control in requirement discovery, to differentiated technical solution design, to customer communication that delivers value—these hard-won lessons, paid for with real money and real experience, are the true path to breaking through career ceilings.

As the curtain is pulled back on these shady practices, we shouldn't just leave a mess behind. Every practitioner should clearly recognize: the essence of presales capability is creating value for customers by solving their problems through technical communication. There has never been room for shortcuts in this field.

Choosing professionalism or choosing illusion will determine whether you end up on the winner's podium—or among the ranks of the unemployed.