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.
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.
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.
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.
No offence but you clearly have never worked for “the vendor side”!
Do you know how many thousands of time wasters you get a month? People comparing you to the competition, trying to get a master class from you so they can pose as a consultant for your technology, learning from you so they can apply for a job… the list goes on and on.
Give them all swag…?! Hahahaha there would be people lining up to waste your time and get free swag.
Thank god for the BDRs making sure you’re not some underling with no budget, authority, need or time pressure. Yep that’s BANT for you!
Discounting discussions should be simple: you buy more? You pay less. You commit for longer? You pay less. Simple.
It’s painful when the prospect start calling you expensive, saying the competition is cheaper, that there could be a “partnership” because they are the hottest newest crypto-quantum-ai to revolutionise web3.
This is very common in the US, almost to the point of being standard. It is incredibly annoying and it gets in the way of doing business. This is particularly true in the hardware front.
Interested in a connector?
No problem.
What's you estimated annual utilization rate? How many product lines is this going into? What's your current usage? What will be your MOQ? How often do you expect to reorder? Etc.
The difference with Chinese suppliers could not be greater. I can't remember the last time a Chinese supplier interrogated me this way on first contact. They are often eager to do business with anyone and have no problem selling sending you samples or selling you a small quantity for testing.
Not sure what that's about. I truly detest dealing with companies that size you up like that.
> 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.
Swag is the scourge of the earth. It’s almost always cheap junk made overseas and goes directly into landfill. It’s the kind of stuff I would never spend my own money on, so by definition I don’t need it. I literally walk away whenever I see it, avoid at all costs.
(1) The sales and SE time is very expensive in both direct and opportunity cost. If you were on the sell side you would appreciate this. Leads, even incoming, absolutely need to be qualified.
I'm with you on the rest, maybe not all the way on (3) though.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
I think you're kind of missing the point. The author was just pointing out that lots of personal health-related info was being recorded in the calls. When you know a call is being recorded it is kind to steer the conversation away from content that the person you are talking to may not want broadly shared. Prospects may be told that the calls are being recorded but they may not realize the implications of that.
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.
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.
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).
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.
JFC, as somebody that’s in a dozen different partner programs just so I can offer products if I need to doing side hustles I could probably make a decent living just being a VAR that sells you what you ask for and leaves you the hell alone. I get that sales reps want to upsell, but I just want to buy X and I know what I want!
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:
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.
I think it's much more likely that bad sales will be tooled away/become obsolete. The Salesforce hygiene points hit especially hard for me.
That said, I hear a lot about how smart customers are and how they have more info, but as tech sales in cloud, I can say for sure that helping customers understand what their real problems are is the biggest part of the job.
Sometimes the requirements are framed in their last tech's limitations. Other times they're looking at too small a piece of their overall system's challenges, trading one bottleneck for another. Other times they're stuck in a big org's bureaucracy and need help threading that needle. Still other times they ask for a genuine opinion.
Maybe it's best described as a shifting role for sales. It used to be a pure discovery-problem sales solved. The future will be more consultative, which in either case will require better skilled sales teams.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Updating Salesforce on a Friday afternoon is not fun. Salesforce hygiene is a real challenge for most companies.
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 you would like to try it out by all means go for it (contact@comtura.ai)
When I started my software development career, sales paid 2x what engineering did, so I started in sales and did it for about five years... until I could make a living coding. This article is excellent!
1. Ask for the sale.
2. Listen... and especially listen for buying signals... and when you get one STOP selling.
3. Build more than one relationship. People leave. Have a backup champion.
Only one thing I'd add: Don't linger on lost deals. In the time spent navel-gazing, you can find and least two more prospects.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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
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?
B2B saas products are often complex and not intuitive enough for end users to navigate through on their own without some onboarding help.
Part of this is because of the nature of the products or business or industry and part of it is just not investing in good UX.
Also, some of these products (especially platforms which is what all products aspire to be) have many different features and types of use cases they can be used for so you often have to tailor a demo to something the customer cares about.
Also, there’s a weird fear in a lot of orgs about showing the actual software to anyone. Part of it is about competitors seeing what you have but also, just that the UIs are crap and no one wants to show it until they can talk about the business value someone will get from it.
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.
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)
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).
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.
>It's been studied and reported that gender diversity leads to improved business outcomes, yet sales teams remain largely a boys club. Stats say that nearly 1/3 of B2B sales reps are women, but I didn’t see it. On the calls I studied, around 10% of the reps I saw were female.
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:).
Am curious to understand the socio-cultural settings of these calls. For example, were the prospects and sellers from the same region and/or culture? I would personally think that this has a bearing on the call dynamics.
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.
seanherron|3 years ago
(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.
zippergz|3 years ago
cercatrova|3 years ago
sylens|3 years ago
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.
thehappypm|3 years ago
I kept asking for demos and getting these weird intros with non technical folks who couldn’t give a demo!
holografix|3 years ago
Do you know how many thousands of time wasters you get a month? People comparing you to the competition, trying to get a master class from you so they can pose as a consultant for your technology, learning from you so they can apply for a job… the list goes on and on.
Give them all swag…?! Hahahaha there would be people lining up to waste your time and get free swag.
Thank god for the BDRs making sure you’re not some underling with no budget, authority, need or time pressure. Yep that’s BANT for you!
Discounting discussions should be simple: you buy more? You pay less. You commit for longer? You pay less. Simple.
It’s painful when the prospect start calling you expensive, saying the competition is cheaper, that there could be a “partnership” because they are the hottest newest crypto-quantum-ai to revolutionise web3.
Gimme a break!
robomartin|3 years ago
This is very common in the US, almost to the point of being standard. It is incredibly annoying and it gets in the way of doing business. This is particularly true in the hardware front.
Interested in a connector?
No problem.
What's you estimated annual utilization rate? How many product lines is this going into? What's your current usage? What will be your MOQ? How often do you expect to reorder? Etc.
The difference with Chinese suppliers could not be greater. I can't remember the last time a Chinese supplier interrogated me this way on first contact. They are often eager to do business with anyone and have no problem selling sending you samples or selling you a small quantity for testing.
Not sure what that's about. I truly detest dealing with companies that size you up like that.
duxup|3 years ago
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.
dehrmann|3 years ago
Remember that California requires the consent of all parties on this call, so this isn't just being polite.
grecy|3 years ago
Swag is the scourge of the earth. It’s almost always cheap junk made overseas and goes directly into landfill. It’s the kind of stuff I would never spend my own money on, so by definition I don’t need it. I literally walk away whenever I see it, avoid at all costs.
jiveturkey|3 years ago
I'm with you on the rest, maybe not all the way on (3) though.
spoonjim|3 years ago
8note|3 years ago
jahnu|3 years ago
azmodeus|3 years ago
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
hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago
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.
kryogen1c|3 years ago
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.
asyncscrum|3 years ago
psteitz|3 years ago
hnbad|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
manv1|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
jedberg|3 years ago
It's not HIPAA protected because that person isn't Jenny's doctor, but it's still PHI.
captainmuon|3 years ago
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).
aksss|3 years ago
snuxoll|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
O__________O|3 years ago
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.
ftwynn|3 years ago
That said, I hear a lot about how smart customers are and how they have more info, but as tech sales in cloud, I can say for sure that helping customers understand what their real problems are is the biggest part of the job.
Sometimes the requirements are framed in their last tech's limitations. Other times they're looking at too small a piece of their overall system's challenges, trading one bottleneck for another. Other times they're stuck in a big org's bureaucracy and need help threading that needle. Still other times they ask for a genuine opinion.
Maybe it's best described as a shifting role for sales. It used to be a pure discovery-problem sales solved. The future will be more consultative, which in either case will require better skilled sales teams.
chopete3|3 years ago
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.
mixmastamyk|3 years ago
I didn’t understand this part.
notaclevername|3 years ago
ryanSrich|3 years ago
rcoc|3 years ago
calvinmorrison|3 years ago
nickjj|3 years ago
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.
throwaway432897|3 years ago
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.
daniel-cussen|3 years ago
[deleted]
lucasfcosta|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
HectorComtura|3 years ago
mannyv|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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.
asyncscrum|3 years ago
jedberg|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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.
iFire|3 years ago
https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT
Let me if I should do more of these publicly.
JaggerFoo|3 years ago
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.
azmodeus|3 years ago
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 you would like to try it out by all means go for it (contact@comtura.ai)
indymike|3 years ago
1. Ask for the sale.
2. Listen... and especially listen for buying signals... and when you get one STOP selling.
3. Build more than one relationship. People leave. Have a backup champion.
Only one thing I'd add: Don't linger on lost deals. In the time spent navel-gazing, you can find and least two more prospects.
mtmail|3 years ago
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.
s1k3|3 years ago
phpisthebest|3 years ago
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
odysseus|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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
lifeisstillgood|3 years ago
Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w many user accounts shall we create?
statictype|3 years ago
Part of this is because of the nature of the products or business or industry and part of it is just not investing in good UX.
Also, some of these products (especially platforms which is what all products aspire to be) have many different features and types of use cases they can be used for so you often have to tailor a demo to something the customer cares about.
Also, there’s a weird fear in a lot of orgs about showing the actual software to anyone. Part of it is about competitors seeing what you have but also, just that the UIs are crap and no one wants to show it until they can talk about the business value someone will get from it.
grvdrm|3 years ago
HectorComtura|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
ayewo|3 years ago
netfortius|3 years ago
anthomtb|3 years ago
mmerlin|3 years ago
RevOps = revenue operations / operators
i.e. sales ops / salespeople
dusted|3 years ago
2/3 means almost all ?
I guess unless it had been women, then it was a "reasonable amount, but women could have been even better represented"
wildrhythms|3 years ago
>It's been studied and reported that gender diversity leads to improved business outcomes, yet sales teams remain largely a boys club. Stats say that nearly 1/3 of B2B sales reps are women, but I didn’t see it. On the calls I studied, around 10% of the reps I saw were female.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Yizahi|3 years ago
salesynerd|3 years ago
tmaly|3 years ago
MaintenanceMode|3 years ago
asyncscrum|3 years ago
mnemotronic|3 years ago
wackget|3 years ago
If your site can't load a page of text without multiple third-party domains, that's not good.
hacknews20|3 years ago
quickthrower2|3 years ago
samiam_iam|3 years ago
donedealomg|3 years ago
Buying from New Relic became so insanely difficult on an enterprise level that we just moved to Datadog.
ewwhite|3 years ago