[HN Gopher] I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls
___________________________________________________________________
I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls
Author : asyncscrum
Score : 286 points
Date : 2022-10-08 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sofuckingagile.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sofuckingagile.com)
| mnemotronic wrote:
| One of the most interesting things I've read in a while.
| iFire wrote:
| For fun, I tried summarizing the article with copy.ai's explain
| like I am five and did some hand tuning. I removed the sections
| on personal information, paying list price, product led growth,
| the salesforce automation / data collection, and a few others.
|
| https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT
|
| Let me if I should do more of these publicly.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I may be being dumb here, but why not make a simple demo site the
| first qualification hurdle? I mean the only thing SaaS users care
| about is the saas system - give them a hand on version - I mean
| people are going to lie anyway about the qualification questions
| (do you have the budget? I mean who says no?)
|
| Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w
| many user accounts shall we create?
| grvdrm wrote:
| My experience is this is a double-edged sword. They want the
| site and the access but then they don't step through your
| product in a managed way. So, they might come away with a
| negative impression that could've been avoided with a guided
| process instead. I don't think you're wrong overall on hands-
| on, but there's nuance to the way you make that work.
| hacknews20 wrote:
| Another "I did x so you don't have to" post.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The best kind I guess
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| What the author mentions about sales reps having to listen more
| than they speak is the most important point in the whole piece
| IMO.
|
| I think that's the precise reason why founders doing sales can
| increase success so dramatically. Because they want to improve
| their product, they tend to listen more. Therefore, they build
| better products, solve problems with more accuracy, and,
| consequently, sell more.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| It's just good sales really. Sales is about listening, not
| talking.
| HectorComtura wrote:
| So this is something we're massively focused on at our startup
| (Comtura.ai) we integrate with Gong or can support
| teams/zoom/google meets to collect the transcript than allow it
| to update their CRM so they can focus on helping the customer /
| writing better notes to solve for problems with more accuracy &
| collect detailed product info (and ergo, consequently sell
| more).
| chopete3 wrote:
| >> these calls are FULL of insights for product direction. >>
| There's a good chance almost none of these insights will reach
| product and engineering
|
| I am head of engineering at a small Enterprise Saas company.
| During COVID, I ran the pre-sales for the company. I joined some
| SDR calls too. It changed my perspective on what direction really
| means for products. We not only increased our revenue but our go-
| live time went down significantly.
|
| That is a non-scalable solution to address the issue of
| information loss but it shows there is more value to realize if
| there is an efficient way to tap into that information.
| O__________O wrote:
| Sales industry is full of stats like this, author mentions
| businesses that focus on sale rep call analysis and training like
| Zoom, Gong, and Chorus; here's example of bunch of call stats
| from Gong:
|
| https://www.gong.io/blog/cold-call-stats/
|
| What none of these sales businesses want you to know is that
| while sales will never go away, reality is buyers increasingly
| have more and more information and sales is increasingly less and
| less relevant. Customer education prior to reaching a sales rep
| and customer success after onboarding are though increasingly
| important.
| nickjj wrote:
| As a customer who has been on a number of these calls, the thing
| I dislike the most is getting "yes" for every question I have.
| Just be honest with me.
|
| Realistically I'm on the call with your business because I've put
| in a huge amount of research about your product or service, I
| likely narrowed things down to your service and maybe 1 or 2
| others. I know a lot about the individual technical features of
| your service and your main competitors but didn't spend enough
| time to put it all together to solve every use case I might have
| -- only that your service so far looks promising.
|
| I can't count the number of times where I'll bring something up
| and the person on the call (usually a business sales along with
| someone who is more technical) will flat out lie to us about
| something (even in a group call scenario), in which case I'll
| politely question that and reference their docs about it. They
| try to save grace by saying "oh yeah, our documentation must be
| out of date, sorry about that" or they directly lie about their
| competitors often saying so and so can't do xyz when they can and
| the easy out there is "oh, perhaps they added that recently".
|
| It happens way too often to always have outdated documentation or
| information. Even after a 15 minute remote call you can get to
| know someone's mannerisms and the cadence of how they speak. It's
| not hard to tell when someone is lying or has much less
| confidence in what they're saying. I've gone with competitors for
| nearly 6 figure annual contracts because of these things multiple
| times when the decision has been pretty close.
|
| If you're planning to be a customer, it's worth doing your due
| diligence to research things in a solid amount of detail before
| going into these calls. All it takes is maybe 2-3 full days of
| hardcore research to be super prepared. That's time very well
| spent to understand if a product looks like it will work for you
| as a first pass, especially so if you plan to bring other devs or
| a CTO into a future call to get contracts prepared and signed.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| throwaway432897 wrote:
| > As a customer who has been on a number of these calls, the
| thing I dislike the most is getting "yes" for every question I
| have. Just be honest with me.
|
| Joke: what's the difference between a used car dealer and a
| software salesperson? The used car dealer _knows_ when he's
| lying to you.
|
| Having been in B2B sales for a while now, if I was on the
| buying side I would _never_ listen to an answer about a product
| feature /function from an account manager (the "business sales"
| person in your example) -- only their sales engineer (the
| "someone who is more technical".) If the SE lied, I'd never buy
| anything from their company for any reason.
|
| Now, that said, documentation is sometimes out of date
| (although a better way of answering in those scenarios is for
| the SE to say something like "we didn't do that until version
| x.y which came out/will come out last week/next month, etc. and
| our documentation isn't up to date." And, sometimes,
| prospective customers do "2-3 full days of hardcore research"
| and aren't nearly as "super prepared" or knowledgeable as they
| _think they are._
|
| So, I guess be open to the idea that your SE understands their
| product better than you do, but if they really are slinging BS,
| run. Expect the account manager to be wrong about the details
| of their product (there is a reason SEs exist, and it isn't
| because tech companies enjoy an artificially high cost of
| sales.) so don't listen to much they have to say about product
| features.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Just thought the call out for "Protected Health Information" was
| weird, and it's _wrong_. If you 're just having small talk with
| someone on a zoom call and you say "Yeah, that last COVID booster
| really wiped me out, I was in bed for 2 days", that doesn't mean
| the call contains "PHI".
|
| First of all, _you_ shared it. The whole reason for protecting
| PHI in the first place is limiting what others can do with your
| information, not what you can do with it. And if you share it
| willingly, and not for medical purposes, it doesn 't mean that
| the person you shared it with suddenly has a higher burden of
| security/privacy with that info.
|
| Just calling this out because so often see people that
| fundamentally misunderstand what "PHI" means in a legal sense,
| and specifically what the HIPAA regulations require.
| hnbad wrote:
| HIPAA aside, this is PII under the GDPR and fits the definition
| of "health information" which (like political affiliations,
| religion, etc) is given special protections under the GDPR.
| Typical social media profiles are actually a minefield.
|
| Then again, a ton of practices described in the article are
| probably blatant violations of the GDPR like scraping LinkedIn
| to track the titles and job changes of champions. I guess a PII
| request under the GDPR would include data stored in Salesforce,
| which would make the result fairly awkward depending on what
| information sales people decide to keep in there.
|
| Given that I've seen companies having to explain to sales
| people that they can't just repurpose dodgy e-mail lists for
| direct sales outreach without having any records suggesting the
| victi-... err... "prospects" consented to that use, I wouldn't
| be surprised if most sales teams are violating the GDPR left
| and right on a daily basis.
| bagels wrote:
| Is anyone who is not a health care provider even bound by any
| PHI rules?
| rish1_2 wrote:
| Any working professional that is handles PHI is bound by it
| and not just health care professionals. This could also be
| managers in a hospital. An individual is not.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yes, lots of data storage companies are - that's why these
| companies sign BAAs (Google HIPAA BAA for info).
|
| There are some carve outs. For example, financial services
| companies don't have any additional privacy requirements if
| you buy a prescription with your Visa instead of cereal. That
| carve out was specifically added to the HIPAA legislation.
| manv1 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-
| reg...
|
| Note that this is a high-level summary.
| colechristensen wrote:
| When information comes out of a relationship with a
| healthcare provider, it's PHI.
|
| That information is tainted with the restrictions and keeps
| them regardless of where it goes. If it gets disclosed
| outside of that it becomes a violation.
|
| So nobody working for a hospital you get care for can
| disclose things. Nobody the hospital hires to provide
| services or handle your data, etc.
|
| You can sign away those rights or give your own information
| away.
|
| If the data _doesn 't_ come up through a relationship with a
| healthcare provider, it's not PHI.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think it was more along the lines of "Jenny isn't on the call
| today because she's out with COVID, which is extra bad because
| she's pregnant".
|
| It's not HIPAA protected because that person isn't Jenny's
| doctor, but it's still PHI.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| No, it's not. That information may be "HI", but it's not
| "PHI", that is the "protected" part has a specific legal
| definition under HIPAA, and nobody in that call has any
| additional legal requirements based on the fact that someone
| said Jenny is pregnant.
| jedberg wrote:
| Doesn't that depend on how they know that information? If
| that's Jenny's boss on the phone and she shared that with
| her boss so she could claim FMLA benefits and days off for
| health reasons, doesn't her boss have a duty to keep it
| private?
| [deleted]
| 0x457 wrote:
| No. HIPAA is about sharing PHI between covered entities.
| P stands for Portability. Unless Jenny is working in one
| of those covered entities and Jenny's boss learned about
| her covid and pregnancy by pulling PHI - then no, it's no
| under HIPAA.
|
| Her boss doesn't have a duty to keep it private in any
| legal sense. Jenny can ask not to tell anyone, but
| legally, it doesn't matter.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| PHI is a technical term that means you are talking about
| HIPAA restrictions. Other laws can very well limit what
| you can share, but that doesn't get referred to as being
| PHI.
| sceutre wrote:
| I don't think the acronym helps. I should know better but
| still read it as Personal Health Information in my head
| asyncscrum wrote:
| True, will update the article. I still found it somewhat
| surprising.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > And if you share it willingly, and not for medical purposes,
| it doesn't mean that the person you shared it with suddenly has
| a higher burden of security/privacy with that info.
|
| Almost but not quite. I came to comment on this bullet point in
| the article because misunderstanding about PHI is so prevalent
| its nearly a meme.
|
| PHI doesn't have anything to do with willingness or sharing.
| PHI is not a meaningful term constructed of its component words
| - its a specific legal term under hipaa. Any (noncovered
| entity) company can ask you anything about your health and it
| doesn't matter - airlines, restaurants, event venues, etc.
| They're allowed and it doesn't have anything to do with hipaa
| and they are not collecting/storing PHI.
|
| HIPAA applies specifically to covered entities under its law.
| Its basically health care providers and health insurance
| companies. If you aren't one of those covered entities and
| youre not telling that info to a covered entity, there is no
| PHI.
|
| If you want to boycot somewhere asking about covid or whatever
| - get down with your bad self. It just doesn't have anything to
| do with HIPAA.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks, you're correct. I didn't mean to imply that PHI was
| defined by willingness to share it, I meant that the whole
| reason for "protecting" HI in the first place is for giving
| control over that information to the people it's about.
|
| A specific example: I work on an app that _does_ include
| HIPAA-regulated PHI, and sometimes I 'll demo stuff in
| production by demoing my _own_ personal account. I usually
| preface it by saying "This is my account, so it's OK to
| share" so folks know I haven't just pulled up someone else's
| data. If I _had_ pulled up someone else 's data and shared it
| without their consent, that would be a HIPAA violation.
| manv1 wrote:
| The HIPAA privacy doesn't apply to employers, unless that
| employer is self-insured. There are a bunch of rules around
| that.
|
| But PHI as a concept doesn't need HIPAA. In fact, it's probably
| good practice to isolate PHI, even if you don't need to be
| HIPAA-compliant. The PHI is only one join away anyway.
| asyncscrum wrote:
| One on my major takeaways from the calls was how many people
| were visibly sick yet still working and getting on calls. WFH
| has really destroyed the concept of stay home and get some
| rest.
| wlonkly wrote:
| I think that's always been the case, unfortunately. Quotas
| don't have sick days.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Stay home and get some rest was destroyed long ago. They used
| to just show up to the office visibly sick.
| netfortius wrote:
| Another US centric, MBAs produced by the "college of du mall"
| driven sales processes (a lot of such degrees given by colleges
| on the side of the highway, right outside shopping malls, mostly
| suburbs of large cities).
| seanherron wrote:
| I didn't expect to learn much from this article - but it actually
| really resonated with me. I often am responsible for purchasing
| decisions and found much of the advice to sales reps really
| insightful.
|
| (1) The number one thing that bothers me is when I reach out to a
| company to explore their product and I get scheduled with a BDR
| who's sole job is to "qualify" me as a lead. I know BDRs are in a
| tough spot - but if you have someone _reaching out and interested
| in your product_ , take advantage of that and get them straight
| to the person who can demo and answer questions. I'm shocked at
| how many companies make me want to prove myself as a customer
| before spending time on demoing.
|
| (2) Ask before recording meetings, and if someone doesn't want to
| be recorded make sure you actually have the ability to turn that
| recording off. I've been on calls where the person who set up the
| Zoom/Gong wasn't on the call, and so no one had the ability to
| stop recording.
|
| (3) The details of what is shared on calls is often completely
| lost. Every time a new person gets on the call, they ask the
| exact same questions that have already been answered. Make the
| customer feel as though you're interested in their business, have
| discussed their pain points, and have a _plan_ ready to help
| them.
|
| (4) Discounting discussions are always a pain. It's a game that
| no one likes to play.
|
| (5) Offer to send some swag to the implementing team at your
| customer - not just your champion. It's a nice gesture and goes a
| surprisingly long way towards building positive sentiment.
| cercatrova wrote:
| As someone that's done sales, it is very important to qualify
| even incoming leads. I can't count how many times I wasted my
| time because the person who thought they wanted the product
| actually wasn't a good fit. After I implemented a lead
| qualification pipeline, that number dropped dramatically and
| the leads that did qualify were, predictably, much more likely
| to buy.
| CPLX wrote:
| Yeah but qualify them by showing them the fucking software.
|
| It's gotten so bad out there that I've gotten to the point
| where I just refuse to do qualifying calls. When I can smell
| one brewing I just email and say I'd like my first call to be
| one where I can see someone using the software via screen
| share, or be given the opportunity to log in or have a test
| account myself. I don't care if I'm talking to a high school
| intern feel free to screen your big swinging dick's sales
| guy's schedule but then get your intern show me the fucking
| thing, the features, the screens, what it does, the basics of
| how it works.
|
| If I start a call and it's happening I just ask if they're
| able to show me the software. If they say no, we'll schedule
| a future call for that I say great press the button in that
| CRM that qualifies me for that call and I'll log off now.
|
| If they don't want my business good for them, they can run
| things how they like, but my time is valuable too and I'm the
| customer so if you can't show me the product fuck off.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| mbesto wrote:
| > Yeah but qualify them by showing them the fucking
| software.
|
| As a potential buyer, I immediately ask to get a pre-sales
| person on the call otherwise I'm not joining the call.
| Get's them to move pretty quickly.
| seanherron wrote:
| Often BDR calls don't even focus on if the product is a good
| fit - it's "how much budget do you have?" "Are you the
| decision maker?" "When are you looking to make a purchase?".
| That's, frankly, a waste of time for me. It's one thing to
| have an initial call to show off core functionality and see
| if there's a good fit - but if the focus is just trying to
| determine how much money I have, then it's going to leave me
| fairly annoyed that I spent time on the call.
| CallMeJim wrote:
| These calls exist because companies have learnt from
| wasting their time talking to people who can't afford it,
| aren't the decision maker and aren't interested in
| purchasing any time soon. The conversion rate of the sales
| profession is really low, and it can easily get an order of
| magnitude worse without qualification.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Which is ironic because often times companies refuse to
| give budget numbers unless I sit through a damn demo
| first....
|
| At this point I strongly disfavor companies that do not
| publish their retail prices. everyone from Microsoft to
| SpaceX can do it, there is ZERO excuse for companies not
| doing it today
| CPLX wrote:
| They're still talking to them.
|
| They're just wasting everyone's time.
| FredPret wrote:
| A lower ranked salersperson does the qualifying. The more
| trained ones do the selling. They are optimizing their
| resources and for a big purchase, the buyer is expecting
| a more involved process than one-click checkout.
| CPLX wrote:
| Yeah I get it it's just annoying. Train some entry level
| people to show some basic software features instead of
| training them to waste people's time asking questions.
| bstpierre wrote:
| These kinds of calls should really just be emails.
| Forcing a synchronous meeting to essentially fill in a
| form is dumb.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Yes - make your product usable enough so that even a BDR can
| demo it
| azmodeus wrote:
| Shameless self promototion at comtura.ai we are working on 3.
|
| With Comtura we plug into call transcriptions and recommend
| conversational suggestions to push the customer's voice into
| Salesforce.
|
| We have come across so many companies spending hundreds of
| thousands on Salesforce data entry with very poor quality data
| captured. This also results in sales management potentially
| spending 8h a week just watching Gong recordings to understand
| their pipeline.
|
| I am Chris, one of the cofounders of Comtura if you are
| interested to learn more about we do email me at
| chriss[at]comtura.ai
| jahnu wrote:
| Just to be clear, did you learn these things from the article
| or you just agree with them but already knew them?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Omg, #1! I had to buy a product in the big data space last
| year. Company was all in on "buy" after some build vs buy
| discussion.
|
| I kept asking for demos and getting these weird intros with non
| technical folks who couldn't give a demo!
| sylens wrote:
| Wanted to reply to this as somebody's who bounced between pre-
| sales and engineering roles in the past.
|
| For #1, what is most likely happening is that they are trying
| to maximize the use of the pre-sales engineer's time. I can't
| tell you how many demos I gave as a sales engineer, but I can
| tell you that the opportunities that progressed past that demo
| are much less than 50%. After a while, sales engineers can even
| grow resentful of their BDR or AE for what they view as wasting
| their time. You could probably maximize your chances of getting
| a pre-sales engineer on the call to demo it by clearly stating
| your pain up front and emphasizing you have a rapidly
| approaching deadline to narrow your options down to a final 2
| or 3.
|
| I completely agree with you on the rest of your points. It can
| be hard to find sales reps that do the fundamentals well.
| zippergz wrote:
| A while back I wanted to become a customer of a company I had
| formerly worked at. I reached out via an executive-level friend
| and former co-worker who made a warm intro to sales. And STILL
| they first scheduled a call with a brand new to the job BDR who
| knew less about the product than I did. Not that person's
| fault, and I felt bad for them, but it was a complete waste of
| everyone's time.
| vorador wrote:
| Sadly that's how incentives works in modern sales orgs - BDRs
| get paid on the number of calls they convert to the next
| stage and you were a guaranteed conversion since you already
| knew and wanted to buy the product.
| duxup wrote:
| > Offer to send some swag to the implementing team at your
| customer - not just your champion.
|
| This seems weird to me. I guess if it works to send some
| trinkets to people you do it... but if it makes a difference to
| them I'd be kinda judgmental about that fact ( not really
| related to the sales process).
|
| Personally I don't want more trinket crap in my life but maybe
| other folks feel differently.
| seanherron wrote:
| This is more of a post-sales item. A pivotal part of a
| renewal is going to be how successful implementation is - and
| that success is largely dependent not just on the sponsor of
| the project but on the team that supports them. Those folks
| are often the ones who _don't_ get the trinkets. Something
| like a nice jacket or even a pair of socks can go a long way
| to building positive sentiment there.
| Kamq wrote:
| The devs integrating with your solution are going to hate it
| at a certain point. This may or may not be your fault
| (underlying technical limitations you've papered over will
| look like your fault from the outside at a certain point).
|
| Devs hate basically everyone else's code.
|
| A t-shirt (or jacket, or water bottle, or whatever) is a
| surprisingly cost-effective way to turn "I hate this" into
| "Sure it has some quirks, but have you seen the other
| options?"
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| Where did the author get these recordings? A very interesting
| read.
| asyncscrum wrote:
| Worked at a company that had a business line offering a
| professional service to saas firms. We got into the saas game
| ourselves and leaned on our existing customers to analyze their
| calls. I was the 'machine' in our machine learning lol.
| HectorComtura wrote:
| I was just reading this article and noticed that they were
| talking about salesforce data hygiene.
|
| So, we take transcription and use it to empower the reps to
| update salesforce to fix this (Comtura.ai). One of the things we
| noticed from user interviews was that they'd actually just be
| ctrl + F'ing through gong or zoom transcripts to find the right
| information.
|
| Whilst the overlay (Dooly/SP) is something we offer. We actually
| find that most usage comes from just the "notepad" feature.
|
| Reps who handwrote notes had to duplicate it into salesforce,
| those that typed notes (bad demo practise because you just piss
| off your prospect with tip tapping + it doesnt support your
| memory like handwriting does, fun fact!)
|
| hence we started working on this problem.
|
| If anyone wants to try it out by all means go for it
| (contact@comtura.ai)
| benjilb wrote:
| Isn't this what Gong does too - syncing talking points back
| into Salesforce
| ayewo wrote:
| How do you compare to Fathom.video?
| JaggerFoo wrote:
| Great article. Not what I was expecting. The article was
| informative, actionable and concise.
|
| I learned several things, and laughed at the "When You're Asked
| To Update Salesforce" meme, which I observed first hand after
| implementing SFDC and customizing workflows designed by Sales and
| Product Managers.
|
| I'll be taking a look at Scratchpad and Dooly for sure.
|
| I wonder if the sales teams followed any particular method as
| depicted in books like Spin Selling or Cracking the Sales
| Management Code.
|
| Thanks for sharing your insights.
| samiam_iam wrote:
| yawn
| mtmail wrote:
| > In most sales orgs, calls are being recorded by Zoom, > Gong or
| Chorus. To my surprise these calls are littered > with countless
| discussions of health.
|
| IMHO that sales calls are recorded is the bigger issue. People
| talk about their health in video chat because they feel it's a
| private conversation. I wouldn't shame people for talking about
| private matters but rather question why 1000 sales calls were
| (long-term?) recorded and transcribed.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I am always amazed when people talk about personal things on
| business calls
|
| I would NEVER do that. Outside of generics like "I went to the
| beach for vacation" I do not even talk about health or deeply
| personal things with co-workers I have worked with for over a
| decade. let alone some random salesperson I just meet.
|
| It is crazy.... of course I have no social media presence under
| my own name, and can not even conceive of posting my life on
| said social media growing up in the 80's in grained into me
| that desire for anonymity
| s1k3 wrote:
| Sales calls are recorded for a number of reasons. Most of them
| good for the customer. You should be happy people want them
| recorded it means they care
| ipaddr wrote:
| Please explain how I as a customer benefit when sales records
| a meeting. Usually it is rarely shared to me.
| asyncscrum wrote:
| At companies that are very customer centric, often times
| the calls are shared with customer success and
| implementation teams ensuring your goals as expressed
| during the buying phase are aligned with the
| implementation. This allows shorter implementation
| timeframes and higher likelihood of you achieving your
| goals and having a positive impact on your company.
| However, I'm sure that the majority of time the recordings
| sit in cloud cold storage until they expire and are
| deleted, never to be heard again.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Isn't it more about finding patterns to find a script for
| sales to use to get better at closing the sale? Things
| like people keep bring up the price.. here is what works
| at shifting the conversation or customers are impressed
| with the report page but hate the homepage.. start the
| demo off on the report pages.
|
| Things that help the company but not really customer in
| any direct way.
| spoonjim wrote:
| LOL. They're recorded so they can find the firmware hack into
| the customer's mind where if you say "cybersecurity" the
| chance of your sale goes up 20%. You don't need to lie and
| say it's for the customer, it's so you can get your wife a
| GLS550 instead of a GLS450
| throwaway432897 wrote:
| I have never heard of B2B sales teams _routinely_ recording
| sales calls (we would only do it if the customer asked,
| typically because they had someone who wanted to listen in to
| the call but who couldn't make it) and am having a hard time
| thinking of good reasons to do this that would be a)
| productive and b) positive.
| HectorComtura wrote:
| They're recorded to improve process to deliver a better
| buying journey, improve products etc etc.
|
| We use them (transcripts) to power our platform so we collect
| the customers voice and make it reportable to deliver into
| the CRM. Multiple usecases like product improvements,
| business strategy and understand WHY you're winning deals.
|
| Tools like gong/chorus etc are great for coaching, recommend
| them highly.
| [deleted]
| captainmuon wrote:
| As someone who was accidentially thrust into an IT role and had
| to do some purchasing... I absolutely hated sales cales and B2B
| selling. The simple act of buying a server means finding an
| "authorized reseller", going through some sales calls, proving
| that you are a worthy customer, then they want to know all about
| your other setup to make sure it is "supported" (which turns out
| to have no consequence whatsoever). The quoted price is
| completely different from what is listed, and there are arbitrary
| surcharges. Isn't there an easier way? Yes, but the pointy haired
| boss decided we have to go the proper route. Funnily the reseller
| had a very trustworthy name like "usedserverdiscount24.de" or
| something.
|
| The worst one was when I was trying to get some antivirus
| licenses. We were willing to spend a lot on Sophos, because it
| had good reviews, we were happy with the trial, and so on. But
| the reseller tried to upsell us, insisted we buy matching
| firewalls, and so on. So in the end we stuck with Windows
| Defender (we got a bunch of licenses for Advanced Threat
| Protection from MS for free).
| [deleted]
| aksss wrote:
| I hesitate to make blanket statements, but at this point, by
| and large and for most companies, Windows Defender
| (particularly with supplemental services from Microsoft like
| OneDrive backup, and Intune (some way to enforce
| configuration), etc) are more than fine for most companies.
| Spending money on third party AV solutions, particularly those
| that MSPs are making margin on with complementary hardware
| solutions (cough, sophos), are a rip-off.
| tmaly wrote:
| I think the title should be edited to add "so you didn't have to"
| jedberg wrote:
| > The only people who were in a gray area around promising
| product functionality that didn't exist were founders.
|
| I'd like to expand that to CxOs as well. I sat in lot of sales
| meetings with small startups where the founder or other non-
| founding CxO would promise new features, and then when we met
| with the engineers to do the requirements, they would tell us the
| feature was impossible or would take a year+ to build.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I have been on the engineering side of this many times. I's a
| judgement call: when it happens that feature was usually only a
| checkbox to be checked, had little effect on usage, and talking
| with the client we came up with alternatives as they realized
| it will never happen.
|
| Of course, other times it was really important, and the client
| gets pretty pissed off, but I'd expect startup founders
| misreading their clients that much to not last long and get
| recycled pretty fast. Basically they didn't even bother to dig
| in to understand why the feature was requested and where it
| mattered.
| notaclevername wrote:
| The advice for sales reps to stop talking and listen certainly
| rings true in my experience. I see a lot of sales materials that
| are geared towards a scripted pitch: generic powerpoint decks,
| exhaustive demos, and boilerplate feature description flyers.
| There's probably a lot of value in sales teams having access to
| that kind of collateral, but I would wager that there's even more
| value in knowing how to step away from that material and follow
| the customer's lead in what to showcase.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I'm in a sales related role for the first time and it seems
| like half the customers expect and want a 'deck' and the other
| half balk at a deck. Right now we're tending to stick with just
| talking on a call rather than presenting glitzy materials.
| perlgeek wrote:
| So, prepare a deck and ask at the start if they want to see
| one? Just make clear what the alternatives are (interactive
| demo, just talking, ...)
| throwaway432897 wrote:
| That's a nice theory that works better in theory than
| practice. Specifically, launching into a demo without
| having a common framework of understanding -- terms, how
| the solution works at a high level, etc. is risky.
| Sometimes your prospective customer will understand the
| space where your product fits and you can safely conduct a
| demo (if that's what the customer wants,) and sometimes
| they won't know what they won't know, say they "just want
| to see a demo and not a bunch of marketing slides" and will
| smile and nod during a demo of which they have little
| understanding and the meeting will be a waste of everyone's
| time.
|
| I'm not advocating for "show up and throw up", but
| connecting with your prospect and giving them just the
| information they need/want is an _art form_ , and simply
| asking them produces...mixed... results.
| rcoc wrote:
| I am working on a project to try to quantify exactly this.
| Where are our standard assets and demos creating obstacles
| rather than opening doors? Are there opportunities to deliver
| something to the customer that will accelerate processes, based
| on all other deals that have been worked on.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I'm a founder, not a sales person, but we don't have any sales
| staff. So I, along with my CEO, do all of our demos. We split
| the responsibility. Our product does many things, and I could
| just speed talk through a demo. But I don't. I directly ask the
| person what they want to see, and how they feel we can help
| them. If they don't know, that's fine, I have material
| prepared. But I'd much rather you tell me how I can help you,
| and then we drive the call from there.
| solo754 wrote:
| Yeah, I have been in calls like those. Despite me pushing for
| "can you show me what your product can just do?" I kept
| getting "Please tell us what you want first" and that finally
| culminated into a follow up demo call. The demo was super
| generic and nothing I said (except 1 item) was really
| considered). Frankly, by the time we were done I was zoned
| out and doing other things.
|
| If the CEO had considered to demo in the first call I
| would've almost pushed to buy it right away but at the end we
| decided we'll just do a light weight solution in house with a
| few devs
|
| Not that this works all the time. But the point is to listen
| to your customer instead of just taking a single approach and
| sticking to it
| Yizahi wrote:
| Now I understand that some of the spam I got on my corporate
| email from products where I've used free tiers, probably weren't
| spam but actually sales attempts. I guess I'll remove a rule
| forwarding them to trash directory:).
| anthomtb wrote:
| What do BDR and RevOps mean? The former is clearly a role in a
| sales organization. The latter rhymes with DevOps but I've no
| idea whether Dev and Rev become related when appended with Ops.
| mmerlin wrote:
| BDR = business development representative
|
| RevOps = revenue operations / operators
|
| i.e. sales ops / salespeople
| donedealomg wrote:
| odysseus wrote:
| > When a [customer] champion leaves [to a new job] this puts ARR
| at risk. Unless you're being proactive and inserting yourself
| into the conversation with the replacement, it's likely that come
| renewal time that your product will be at a high risk of churn.
|
| I've seen this happen a lot.
|
| By the way - this is also (sometimes) true with managers. You
| might have a manager that's championing you now, but leaves. When
| you get a new manager, unless you're proactive and finding out
| what projects/goals are really important to your new manager (and
| your manager's manager), it's likely that come layoff time that
| you will be the first to go.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I'll take it a step further. Four jobs ago and my first where i
| was brought in to be "an agent of change", I failed miserably.
|
| The then new Director of software was brought in to move a 10
| year old company to the modern era where the old guard
| developers and "database developers" [1] had been there since
| the beginning and couldn't get out of their own way.
|
| He subsequently hired my manager to lead the creation of a
| "tiger team" in a completely different city - a major city
| about 200 miles away from the small town where the company was
| founded. My manager proceeded to hire a bunch of experienced
| developers who were all in our 40s and had kept up with
| technology and best practices.
|
| Within a year, the old guard somehow managed to get rid of the
| director and subsequently our manager. We never went out of our
| way to make nice with the old guard and we paid the price.
|
| The lesson I learned from that is to always create
| relationships outside of your team and respect what came before
| you got there.
|
| I carried those lessons to my next job as a dev lead with the
| same type of scenario, the job after that where I was brought
| in to lead initiatives to make the company cloud native/micro
| services focused as we pivoted to selling access to the
| services to large health care companies and my current job
| working in the cloud consulting department at BigTech
| mannyv wrote:
| Having been an Enterprise SE in the past, I love any data about
| sales and the process.
|
| Do you have data that shows whether 'letting the customer talk'
| produces more wins? Or faster wins? The consensus seems to be
| 'customer talking' is better, probably because that shows the
| customer is more engaged.
|
| This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd
| guess both inputs are ignored.
| wpietri wrote:
| > This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd
| guess both inputs are ignored.
|
| This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Parts of the organization are
| in direct contact with customers, and are in a position to
| learn a lot. And those parts are often only connected to the
| decide-what-to-make parts either informally or via going all
| the way up to the C-level and then back down. It's maddening.
|
| At one client, I got them to try a cross-functional team for an
| innovative new set of features. One of the people we roped in
| was one of the best customer support people. She was hugely
| helpful. She was very good at spotting potential problems
| before we shipped. And once we started the test rollouts, she
| knew what to look for and would get us important customer
| feedback right away. It was great, and I wish more companies
| would do it.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I one of those tech support guys who always wonder why our
| company make such bad decisions, if they only listened to
| us...
| asyncscrum wrote:
| This is a good question. Regarding letting customers talk, the
| teams that were most successful had great salesforce hygiene,
| and teams with great salesforce hygiene were required to fill
| in certain data points. This means that there are commonly
| asking questions and listening more than talking. Likely they
| were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of
| the data that they provided in salesforce as well as quota
| attainment. Overall I think the act of listening and asking
| questions versus delivering a script means you're qualifying
| your leads more appropriately and they're just better
| candidates for purchase.
| throwaway432897 wrote:
| > Regarding letting customers talk, the teams that were most
| successful had great salesforce hygiene,
|
| CRM hygiene is not correlated with sales success in my
| experience, but I'll grant that might be different depending
| on the market segmentation a given sales rep works in
| (specifically, it is more important the smaller and thus more
| numerous a set of customers that a sales rep covers.) I'm a
| sales manager of a team that has consistently, over a period
| of several years, been the #1 revenue producer for a large
| cybersecurity company. Our reps have _atrocious_ CRM hygiene.
| I spend a ridiculous amount of time chasing them to do the
| bare minimum to keep the people who care about CRM hygiene
| off our backs and to handle the one part of the CRM data set
| that is actually important (accurate opportunity forecast
| categories are commonly used to drive product demand
| /manufacturing/capacity planning forecasts.)
|
| > Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based
| on the quality of the data that they provided in Salesforce
| as well as quota attainment.
|
| Sales reps are judged on things like "quality of data
| provided in Salesforce" only when their quota attainment is
| poor. There's a reason nobody on my team has been fired or
| seriously reprimanded for basically ignoring the CRM for
| years. It would be like firing Tom Brady for not writing down
| a play by play analysis of each game.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| This is an interesting use of the word hygiene... can you
| expand on what salesforce hygiene means to you?
| asyncscrum wrote:
| It basically refers to data in salesforce being complete,
| accurate and input in a consistent way. It's a term used
| around software apps that drive decision making and are
| useless without the criteria I mentioned.
| manv1 wrote:
| It's funny how much people hate Salesforce. People used
| to say the same thing about ACT back in the day. I mean,
| SF is a total POS, but whatever.
|
| I'm not sure why these sales tools have to be so crappy.
| I guess there's a market for good sales tools. The
| Marketing CRM tools (hubspot et al) are much nicer.
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