To operate effectively in a pre-sales role detailed product knowledge is a must.  You can not truly understand how a product works and it’s functionality without having some experience of it working on a real system.  At the very least installing a demo or test environment will bring you closer to the capabilities of a product, but where possible get involved in  real implementations, in real customer environments.  Occasional secondments to the service delivery arm of your organisation can give you the opportunity to build some real world experience which can be applied to your current and future customer opportunities.

Practical experience is particularly useful in environments where you are working with multiple products and multiple product components. Understanding the underlying requirements of each component and how they will integrate with the other components can be of vital importance when proposing a solution.  You may find that two of your components have conflicting requirements and simply can not fit together in the configuration you have designed.  It is better to understand as much as possible about these dependencies early in the sales cycle as these can become show stopping issues which may become critical at the later stages of a sale.

Simple advice on this would be read the manuals, install your virtual machines, install the products, configure the products and run through some mock scenarios.