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.
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.
So that’s a problem with how the incentives are set up I’d say. Not the BDR’s or their manager’s fault, rather a high level incentive problem which should be fixed.
What’s HN’s opinion on sales commissions anyway? I always thought that research showed that any job that requires creative thinking doesn’t make people work harder if they are compensated based on bonuses / commissions.
Have any large organizations ever experimented with getting rid of the whole commission based compensation for sales? If so, how did it work out?
I think at least from sales orgs, bonuses are very easy to justify. Sales orgs are very data-driven – typically their CRMs measure everything from the time it took to close a deal to how much each rep brought in a quarter. If just paying a regular salary worked to motivate reps enough, you'd find lots of companies doing that, but they're pretty rare.
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.
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.
After doing dev work for nearly two decades, I've been in presales for the last six years. I've definitely had a one or two intro calls with tech-savvy people who bullied their way past the BDR. These were smart people with good ideas, who had no idea what procurement at the enterprise company they just started working for even begins to look like, and it was 60-90 minutes none of us will ever get back, for a project that's never going to happen anyway.
I worked at a company where we jumped at every opportunity that we got, it's real nice to be somewhere now where there's a little more of a vetting process.
As some one running growth for a low code/no code platform for internal tools - we would want a qualification call to help the demo team with info that can then allow
demo team to prep a demo which can make the call really relevant. Given how crowded our space is most of the times customer would have seen atleast 2-3 tools before and learning what they liked or didn’t like is very important.
If you insist on scheduling two calls with me where it’s a guarantee one of the two is completely fucking useless and irrelevant for me then you’ve maxed out your potential mean highest average relevance of a sales call to 50%. That’s your best case.
Maybe just work on a couple common use cases and get your team able to pivot and share the more relevant examples on a demo in the first call and aim a little higher.
Your software’s various applications are probably not each the special precious unique snowflakes you think they are. Just a guess.
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.
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.
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
I'm a bit like you, I prefer published list prices. It really helps me if I know my budget is somewhere near your list price.
But I'm also in a business where we don't. And the reason we don't is because hardware is involved, and so prices can vary by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude.
In other words it takes time to gather up your requirements, which include hardware, software and crucially install and support services. From this we can generate a quote.
I'm not involved in the sales side, but I expect there's at least some demo as part of this process because it's helpful when reading the quote if the user has some idea of what they are buying. I don't think it's a terribly long demo though.
That all said, it is helpful to both parties if budget is mentioned early. With software-only projects I will often give the caller some idea of budget very early just to make sure we're playing in the same ballpark. That saves a lot of time.
> But I'm also in a business where we don't. And the reason we don't is because hardware is involved, and so prices can vary by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude.
> In other words it takes time to gather up your requirements, which include hardware, software and crucially install and support services. From this we can generate a quote.
IOW, if the customer were afforded just a little bit of price discovery the business would tank.
Lots of companies have interactive websites where I can input all my requirements and it outputs exactly how much I'm going to pay, with no human in the loop involved.
That is still not a reason to hide price. At a minimum publish the range, but in the modern age these is very little reason a matrix or wizard could not be created to get that price.
A F150 is almost infinitely configurable, yet I can walk through the website and configure my dream truck I will never actually buy because it is the price of a home and I don't want to live in it....
Further still most of the time when I see companies hiding behind 'install and support' my Spidey sense star tingling
'install and support' starts to feel like buying a car where at the last step they start tacking on all these extra fees and 'services' and try to bleed you dry.
3 different times I've used a product, either via freeware or sales lead and when I went to go buy the spent so long getting back to us on a price we had written around it on the engineering team. One small team had not sold a copy before and so they took 3 weeks to settle on a price (but they had a sales staff), in which time I had learned enough 3d math to just re-write the system.
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.
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.
That's a quick way to lose sales. It's like asking a backend dev to make a pretty frontend website to impress a visually oriented client. Roles are stratified for a reason.
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.
> opportunities that progressed past that demo are much less than 50%
Any sense of what industry norms are? 50% sounds astonishingly high to me. For most products I would have expected a pre-sales demo to be a pretty early step. 50% basically means everyone you talk to is committed to buy something and is only looking at 2 vendors.
It varies drastically by the business but I would say that it’s more on the magnitude of 10% or less (for enterprise sales, IME).
If you’re getting a 50% conversion on your demos then either your sales org has _really_ dialed in the target persona (qualifying everyone else out early) or your market is very wide.
I would suggest that there's a subtle difference between "progressed past the demo" and "converted". 50% progression past the demo is reasonable. 50% conversion would be amazing.
Yes, this is what I meant. I would say that for over half the demos I gave, that was my last time talking to that prospect. For the rest, some of them would go a few more meetings and fizzle out, and some would convert to actual sales.
I hate companies that do this bullshit, as it’s fundamentally disrespectful of customers.
We regularly have to deal with this crap to prospect vendors for tech solutions. Some companies do multiple rounds of qualifications with people punching their KPI cards wasting my time. If you’re recording the calls, listen to the recording and stop wasting my time.
If we don’t need the vendor, we ghost you. If we really need the vendor, we have a process to flag it so that someone gets ahold of a C- or founder level contact in the company. That’s gotten at least 3 sales directors fired, and with the high level sponsor, we usually grind out a significant concession to close the deal.
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.
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?"
The gentle way of expressing this is well known: if you are not embarrassed by code you wrote a year ago, you have not improved at all.
As far as I am aware, coders and artists are the only two groups of people who routinely describe their own creations as "shit", "crap", "garbage" or "disgusting". How could one even begin to appreciate someone else's work when the primary feeling we have of our own is self-loathing?
(If you haven't looked at a piece of code, gone "what kind of idiot...?" and discovered via git-blame that it was you, you have not been in this profession long enough.)
Yea, maybe not a shirt, but hell, send them some nice coffee or some snacks or something. My current job is probably at least 50% implementing stuff my company bought, and for one of them, they had an on-site meeting about the implementation/proof of value stuff and they offered to buy everyone coffee/tea/whatever at a coffee shop by our office before the meeting and that definitely helped me be a bit less grumpy about the work.
Any sort of "congrats on launching/implementing our stuff" gift is at least an acknowledgment of the work put in to help the sales team land their contract, and that helps keep the relationship on a good footing.
A few companies I have worked for have had a strict no gifts policy. Many of our customers had similar policies, to the point that we couldn't even pay for a customer's coffees if we have a meeting at a cafe.
These policies are aimed at preventing even the whiff of bribes or favoritism wrt purchasing or awarding of contracts.
Mostly this was in the Oil and Gas industry. We had a few mining clients that were less strict wrt gifts/swag. I now work in the banking industry where there are strict regulations against bribery, facilitation payments and many types of gifts.
So I find it a bit weird to hear that sellers provide "swag".
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.
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.
That sounds nice, but it simply is not possible for very technical products (many kinds of databases, low-level infra, dev tools, etc). You won’t be able to find BDRs that can talk to devs the way another dev would.
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.
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.
>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.
An excellent point. Which is why I don't share my Fitbit data (uninstalled the app after set up, no syncing of data) with Fitbit (now Google) and will (assuming it works as advertised) likely be moving to a MiBand with GadgetBridge[0] in the near future. And thanks to vanous[1] for posting[2] here about it a couple weeks ago.
I have no interest in sharing my health (exercise regimes, sleep cycles, heart rate, etc.) information with folks whose raison d'etre is to snarf up as much data as possible. What's more, since these folks aren't "covered entities" under HIPAA, they aren't required to put in the special safeguards for your health data.
I get what you’re saying but that data isn’t meaningfully protected by HIPAA, and is pretty trivially derived based on available data.
Data brokers for pharmacy have your prescription data, your doctor is not protected information and other aspects of your care are available to many entities for purposes like insurance subrogation that also create data products.
HIPAA protects you from gossiping clerks at health facilities and HR. It prevents the use of some bad IT practices, and forces you to sign lots of disclosures. That’s about it.
If you want that type of information to be private, don’t collect it or don’t share it with 3rd parties in an accessible form.
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.
That said, I've definitely called in to things while sick because I didn't have anything better to do. Watching TV all day wasn't going to make me get healthier faster than watching a business presentation, and as long as my team understood that I was a little out of it, the normalcy of being "at work" helped me not just feel lazy and terrible.
I preach ”don’t be a martyr” to anyone and everyone that listens, especially when I’m on a call and they mention they are not feeling well. Sure - there are meetings and engagements you really don’t want to miss (stuff like the boss’s boss will be on the call) but as long as you are not calling in sick all the time, no one cares! They usually say “oh shit I hope they feel better” and stop thinking about you.
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.
Note the author updated his post in response to my comment. It originally said "protected health information", which is what I was reacting to. PHI is a very specific thing in US law, and increased legal exposure when handling PHI only applies to very specific entities.
The reason I commented is because there is a ton of misunderstanding in the real world that confuses "Joe isn't on the call today because he's got COVID" with the legal responsibilities that, say, your doctor has when sending you your COVID results.
To be honest, I think there is a lot of unnecessary concern over health information due to this misunderstanding. Obviously there is a ton of information that people prefer to keep private, but in those cases, they keep it private, or would at least tell you not to tell anyone. Due to the misunderstanding about PHI, I think people mistakenly confuse any banal health information as inherently requiring a higher level of protection/discretion, and this isn't really true. Frankly, there is a ton of other info that people probably want to keep more private than whether or not they had COVID (these days, who hasn't?) or whether someone is pregnant (usually makes itself self-evident in any case).
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.
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.
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.
The Privacy Rule, as well as all the Administrative Simplification rules, apply to health plans, health care clearinghouses, and to any health care provider who transmits health information in electronic form... covered entities...
I think this just means health care industry and those who build systems for health care information?
Going to keep researching, but I don't think that it applies to literally every workplace.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
This is why I laugh every time I hear that salespeople are obsolete.
While some drone is pushing forward to collect their brownie points for identification of next steps, the people with agency are finding a solution to my problems.
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.
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.
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.
There is also communication overhead as there are many roles wrapped into one in a founder but if a seperate sales person, seperate customer success etc. they need to talk but they may not fully understand everything each other knows.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I can't speak for all companies, but from what I've observed at my past few employers, recordings aren't generally analyzed in that way.
This comes from the context of Sales or Success at B2B SaaS, but I've seen recordings used in the following ways:
* Keep a record of what was said/agreed upon during a meeting for future reference e.g. we will deliver X on Y date to Z contact
* Share with someone who should have been there, but was unable to attend the meeting
* Share a relevant snippet with people outside of the meeting attendees. e.g. product feedback, services opportunity, etc.
* Capture customer praise so everyone feels good about themselves/the product
The vast majority of recordings are never viewed again to my knowledge.
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.
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.
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
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
> The lesson I learned from that is to always create relationships outside of your team and respect what came before you got there.
Very valuable lesson there. I'm "old guard" at my company now. We've grown 10x since I started, and I've observed a fair number of new employees come in and try to instigate change before adequately understanding the business, whether that's the product, tools used, or the people involved.
I think it comes from a good place - they're the newbie and want to contribute in some meaningful way early on. Really show that we made the right decision to hire them. But it can come across as arrogant or condescending if you ask people to disrupt the way they work or what they're working on before having a good understanding of what the effects will be.
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)
We aren't a Gong competitor, we also integrate with Gong ourselves.
Gong does provide a Salesforce integration. We interviewed 10 users of this feature who mostly ended up copy pasting parts of the transcript into Salesforce.
Key differences between the Gong Salesforce integration and Comtura:
1. Beyond Gong we also support Zoom and Microsoft Teams
2. We have built specific machine learning models translating between transcripts and CRM records while Gong has been focusing on highlighting coachable moments in transcripts
Fathom allows you to leave bookmarks in parts of Zoom calls and push information based on these bookmarks.
Comtura makes suggestions based on what our AI thinks you should put in Salesforce. We also integrate with more WebEx solutions such as Zoom, MS Teams, Gong.
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.
(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.