throwaway432897's comments

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.

> 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Now, that said, documentation is sometimes out of date (although a better way of answering in those scenarios is for the SE to say something like “we didn’t do that until version x.y which came out/will come out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.

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.

> 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.