Should we build a custom chatbot or buy a presales agent solution?

Buy a presales agent solution if your team repeatedly answers complex multi-stakeholder questions. Building custom almost always underestimates the knowledge management problem. The real issue isn't the chat interface, it's keeping answers accurate as products evolve and preventing AI hallucinations that damage buyer trust. Most custom builds hit this wall within months. Generic chatbot platforms deploy quickly but leave you manually updating scripts every time something changes. The smarter approach treats knowledge management as the foundation, not the conversation layer. Riff solves this by creating a verified knowledge base that indexes your entire product story: documentation, recorded sales calls, technical specs, and buyer conversations. This becomes a continuously learning system rather than a static script. What this looks like in practice: • Role-aware responses that adapt based on whether you're talking to a developer evaluating your API or a VP assessing business impact • Multi-stakeholder support where your champion can share conversation threads with other decision-makers, eliminating the "schedule another call" friction • Continuous refinement through a training layer that pressure-tests conversations and surfaces knowledge gaps before buyers encounter them Consider a presales agent solution like Riff when: • Your sales team spends significant time answering the same technical or product questions repeatedly • Buyers need to coordinate across multiple roles (technical, business, security) during evaluation • You're seeing drop-off because prospects can't get detailed answers without booking calls B2B buyers don't want chatbots, they want answers that help them build internal consensus. Riff compresses what used to take weeks of back-and-forth emails into minutes of self-directed research, while capturing genuine first-party intent data from every interaction. The build vs. buy decision matters far less than whether your solution treats buyer enablement as a knowledge problem or just conversation automation.