16 ms·

I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

487 points by asyncscrum 4y ago

dusted 4y ago
> It's men. Almost all men. 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 4y ago
  I think you misread the article: >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.
  - dusted 4y ago
    You are right, I did misread it, thank you for pointing that out :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
notaclevername 4y ago
The advice for sales reps to stop talking and listen certainly rings true in my experience. I see a lot of sales materials that are geared towards a scripted pitch: generic powerpoint decks, exhaustive demos, and boilerplate feature description flyers. There's probably a lot of value in sales teams having access to that kind of collateral, but I would wager that there's even more value in knowing how to step away from that material and follow the customer's lead in what to showcase.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  I'm in a sales related role for the first time and it seems like half the customers expect and want a 'deck' and the other half balk at a deck. Right now we're tending to stick with just talking on a call rather than presenting glitzy materials.
  - perlgeek 4y ago
    So, prepare a deck and ask at the start if they want to see one? Just make clear what the alternatives are (interactive demo, just talking, ...)
    - throwaway432897 4y ago
      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.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    That’s a technique to throw you off your process and actually provide information. When you’ve validated that you’re not an idiot, I want to see the architecture or whatever that should be in your deck. All of these processes are about control.
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  I’m a founder, not a sales person, but we don’t have any sales staff. So I, along with my CEO, do all of our demos. We split the responsibility. Our product does many things, and I could just speed talk through a demo. But I don’t. I directly ask the person what they want to see, and how they feel we can help them. If they don’t know, that’s fine, I have material prepared. But I’d much rather you tell me how I can help you, and then we drive the call from there.
  - solo754 4y ago
    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
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      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.
- rcoc 4y ago
  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.
mannyv 4y ago
Having been an Enterprise SE in the past, I love any data about sales and the process. Do you have data that shows whether 'letting the customer talk' produces more wins? Or faster wins? The consensus seems to be 'customer talking' is better, probably because that shows the customer is more engaged. This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored.
- wpietri 4y ago
  > This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Parts of the organization are in direct contact with customers, and are in a position to learn a lot. And those parts are often only connected to the decide-what-to-make parts either informally or via going all the way up to the C-level and then back down. It's maddening. At one client, I got them to try a cross-functional team for an innovative new set of features. One of the people we roped in was one of the best customer support people. She was hugely helpful. She was very good at spotting potential problems before we shipped. And once we started the test rollouts, she knew what to look for and would get us important customer feedback right away. It was great, and I wish more companies would do it.
  - spaniard89277 4y ago
    I one of those tech support guys who always wonder why our company make such bad decisions, if they only listened to us...
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    If only companies would actually do agile :-).
    - wpietri 4y ago
      If only! At this point I don't even think they know what it is. Or rather, the term has changed meaning so much that it's almost unrecognizable to me.
- 4y ago
netfortius 4y ago
Another US centric, MBAs produced by the "college of du mall" driven sales processes (a lot of such degrees given by colleges on the side of the highway, right outside shopping malls, mostly suburbs of large cities).
seanherron 4y ago
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.
- robomartin 4y ago
  > "qualify" me as a lead 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.
- holografix 4y ago
  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. Gimme a break!
mtmail 4y ago
> 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.
- s1k3 4y ago
  Sales calls are recorded for a number of reasons. Most of them good for the customer. You should be happy people want them recorded it means they care
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Please explain how I as a customer benefit when sales records a meeting. Usually it is rarely shared to me.
    - asyncscrum 4y ago
      At companies that are very customer centric, often times the calls are shared with customer success and implementation teams ensuring your goals as expressed during the buying phase are aligned with the implementation. This allows shorter implementation timeframes and higher likelihood of you achieving your goals and having a positive impact on your company. However, I'm sure that the majority of time the recordings sit in cloud cold storage until they expire and are deleted, never to be heard again.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        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.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
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.
- bagels 4y ago
  Is anyone who is not a health care provider even bound by any PHI rules?
  - rish1_2 4y ago
    Any working professional that is handles PHI is bound by it and not just health care professionals. This could also be managers in a hospital. An individual is not.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Yes, lots of data storage companies are - that's why these companies sign BAAs (Google HIPAA BAA for info). There are some carve outs. For example, financial services companies don't have any additional privacy requirements if you buy a prescription with your Visa instead of cereal. That carve out was specifically added to the HIPAA legislation.
  - manv1 4y ago
    Yes. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-regulations/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg... Note that this is a high-level summary.
    - 4y ago
captainmuon 4y ago
As someone who was accidentially thrust into an IT role and had to do some purchasing... I absolutely hated sales cales and B2B selling. The simple act of buying a server means finding an "authorized reseller", going through some sales calls, proving that you are a worthy customer, then they want to know all about your other setup to make sure it is "supported" (which turns out to have no consequence whatsoever). The quoted price is completely different from what is listed, and there are arbitrary surcharges. Isn't there an easier way? Yes, but the pointy haired boss decided we have to go the proper route. Funnily the reseller had a very trustworthy name like "usedserverdiscount24.de" or something. The worst one was when I was trying to get some antivirus licenses. We were willing to spend a lot on Sophos, because it had good reviews, we were happy with the trial, and so on. But the reseller tried to upsell us, insisted we buy matching firewalls, and so on. So in the end we stuck with Windows Defender (we got a bunch of licenses for Advanced Threat Protection from MS for free).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aksss 4y ago
  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.
- snuxoll 4y ago
  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!
jedberg 4y ago
> The only people who were in a gray area around promising product functionality that didn’t exist were founders. I'd like to expand that to CxOs as well. I sat in lot of sales meetings with small startups where the founder or other non-founding CxO would promise new features, and then when we met with the engineers to do the requirements, they would tell us the feature was impossible or would take a year+ to build.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  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.
mnemotronic 4y ago
One of the most interesting things I've read in a while.
tmaly 4y ago
I think the title should be edited to add "so you didn't have to"
O__________O 4y ago
Sales industry is full of stats like this, author mentions businesses that focus on sale rep call analysis and training like Zoom, Gong, and Chorus; here’s example of bunch of call stats from Gong: https://www.gong.io/blog/cold-call-stats/ 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 4y ago
  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.
Yizahi 4y ago
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:).
donedealomg 4y ago
I wish the people in charge of New Relic would read this Buying from New Relic became so insanely difficult on an enterprise level that we just moved to Datadog.
- ewwhite 4y ago
  Truth. And they scared much of their customer base away.
lucasfcosta 4y ago
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.
- HectorComtura 4y ago
  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).
- HatchedLake721 4y ago
  It’s just good sales really. Sales is about listening, not talking.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    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.
nickjj 4y ago
As a customer who has been on a number of these calls, the thing I dislike the most is getting "yes" for every question I have. Just be honest with me. Realistically I'm on the call with your business because I've put in a huge amount of research about your product or service, I likely narrowed things down to your service and maybe 1 or 2 others. I know a lot about the individual technical features of your service and your main competitors but didn't spend enough time to put it all together to solve every use case I might have -- only that your service so far looks promising. I can't count the number of times where I'll bring something up and the person on the call (usually a business sales along with someone who is more technical) will flat out lie to us about something (even in a group call scenario), in which case I'll politely question that and reference their docs about it. They try to save grace by saying "oh yeah, our documentation must be out of date, sorry about that" or they directly lie about their competitors often saying so and so can't do xyz when they can and the easy out there is "oh, perhaps they added that recently". It happens way too often to always have outdated documentation or information. Even after a 15 minute remote call you can get to know someone's mannerisms and the cadence of how they speak. It's not hard to tell when someone is lying or has much less confidence in what they're saying. I've gone with competitors for nearly 6 figure annual contracts because of these things multiple times when the decision has been pretty close. If you're planning to be a customer, it's worth doing your due diligence to research things in a solid amount of detail before going into these calls. All it takes is maybe 2-3 full days of hardcore research to be super prepared. That's time very well spent to understand if a product looks like it will work for you as a first pass, especially so if you plan to bring other devs or a CTO into a future call to get contracts prepared and signed.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- throwaway432897 4y ago
  > 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.
HectorComtura 4y ago
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)
- ayewo 4y ago
  How do you compare to Fathom.video?
  - azmodeus 4y ago
    This is Chris, co-founder of Comtura. 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.
- benjilb 4y ago
  Isn't this what Gong does too - syncing talking points back into Salesforce
  - azmodeus 4y ago
    This is Chris, Comtura co-founder. 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
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anthomtb 4y ago
What do BDR and RevOps mean? The former is clearly a role in a sales organization. The latter rhymes with DevOps but I’ve no idea whether Dev and Rev become related when appended with Ops.
- mmerlin 4y ago
  BDR = business development representative RevOps = revenue operations / operators i.e. sales ops / salespeople
odysseus 4y ago
> When a [customer] champion leaves [to a new job] this puts ARR at risk. Unless you’re being proactive and inserting yourself into the conversation with the replacement, it’s likely that come renewal time that your product will be at a high risk of churn. I've seen this happen a lot. By the way - this is also (sometimes) true with managers. You might have a manager that's championing you now, but leaves. When you get a new manager, unless you're proactive and finding out what projects/goals are really important to your new manager (and your manager's manager), it's likely that come layoff time that you will be the first to go.
- scarface74 4y ago
  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
  - extragood 4y ago
    > 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.
chopete3 4y ago
>> 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.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  > It changed my perspective on what direction really means for products. I didn’t understand this part.
hacknews20 4y ago
Another “I did x so you don’t have to” post.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The best kind I guess
MaintenanceMode 4y ago
Where did the author get these recordings? A very interesting read.
- asyncscrum 4y ago
  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.
iFire 4y ago
For fun, I tried summarizing the article with copy.ai's explain like I am five and did some hand tuning. I removed the sections on personal information, paying list price, product led growth, the salesforce automation / data collection, and a few others. https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT Let me if I should do more of these publicly.
JaggerFoo 4y ago
Great article. Not what I was expecting. The article was informative, actionable and concise. I learned several things, and laughed at the "When You're Asked To Update Salesforce" meme, which I observed first hand after implementing SFDC and customizing workflows designed by Sales and Product Managers. I'll be taking a look at Scratchpad and Dooly for sure. I wonder if the sales teams followed any particular method as depicted in books like Spin Selling or Cracking the Sales Management Code. Thanks for sharing your insights.
- azmodeus 4y ago
  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)
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
I may be being dumb here, but why not make a simple demo site the first qualification hurdle? I mean the only thing SaaS users care about is the saas system - give them a hand on version - I mean people are going to lie anyway about the qualification questions (do you have the budget? I mean who says no?) Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w many user accounts shall we create?
- grvdrm 4y ago
  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.
- statictype 4y ago
  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.
samiam_iam 4y ago
yawn
indymike 4y ago
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.
salesynerd 4y ago
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.
wackget 4y ago
According to uMatrix, there's 7 third-party domains loading stuff just to display a simple blog article on this site. If your site can't load a page of text without multiple third-party domains, that's not good.

487 points by asyncscrum 4y ago

> It's men. Almost all men. 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 4y ago
I think you misread the article: >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.
- dusted 4y ago
  You are right, I did misread it, thank you for pointing that out :)
deleted 4y ago
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notaclevername 4y ago

The advice for sales reps to stop talking and listen certainly rings true in my experience. I see a lot of sales materials that are geared towards a scripted pitch: generic powerpoint decks, exhaustive demos, and boilerplate feature description flyers. There's probably a lot of value in sales teams having access to that kind of collateral, but I would wager that there's even more value in knowing how to step away from that material and follow the customer's lead in what to showcase.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
I'm in a sales related role for the first time and it seems like half the customers expect and want a 'deck' and the other half balk at a deck. Right now we're tending to stick with just talking on a call rather than presenting glitzy materials.
- perlgeek 4y ago
  So, prepare a deck and ask at the start if they want to see one? Just make clear what the alternatives are (interactive demo, just talking, ...)
  - throwaway432897 4y ago
    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.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That’s a technique to throw you off your process and actually provide information. When you’ve validated that you’re not an idiot, I want to see the architecture or whatever that should be in your deck. All of these processes are about control.
ryanSrich 4y ago
I’m a founder, not a sales person, but we don’t have any sales staff. So I, along with my CEO, do all of our demos. We split the responsibility. Our product does many things, and I could just speed talk through a demo. But I don’t. I directly ask the person what they want to see, and how they feel we can help them. If they don’t know, that’s fine, I have material prepared. But I’d much rather you tell me how I can help you, and then we drive the call from there.
- solo754 4y ago
  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
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    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.
rcoc 4y ago
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.

mannyv 4y ago

Having been an Enterprise SE in the past, I love any data about sales and the process. Do you have data that shows whether 'letting the customer talk' produces more wins? Or faster wins? The consensus seems to be 'customer talking' is better, probably because that shows the customer is more engaged. This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored.

wpietri 4y ago
> This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Parts of the organization are in direct contact with customers, and are in a position to learn a lot. And those parts are often only connected to the decide-what-to-make parts either informally or via going all the way up to the C-level and then back down. It's maddening. At one client, I got them to try a cross-functional team for an innovative new set of features. One of the people we roped in was one of the best customer support people. She was hugely helpful. She was very good at spotting potential problems before we shipped. And once we started the test rollouts, she knew what to look for and would get us important customer feedback right away. It was great, and I wish more companies would do it.
- spaniard89277 4y ago
  I one of those tech support guys who always wonder why our company make such bad decisions, if they only listened to us...
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  If only companies would actually do agile :-).
  - wpietri 4y ago
    If only! At this point I don't even think they know what it is. Or rather, the term has changed meaning so much that it's almost unrecognizable to me.
4y ago

netfortius 4y ago

Another US centric, MBAs produced by the "college of du mall" driven sales processes (a lot of such degrees given by colleges on the side of the highway, right outside shopping malls, mostly suburbs of large cities).

seanherron 4y ago

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.

robomartin 4y ago
> "qualify" me as a lead 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.
holografix 4y ago
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. Gimme a break!

mtmail 4y ago

> 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.

s1k3 4y ago
Sales calls are recorded for a number of reasons. Most of them good for the customer. You should be happy people want them recorded it means they care
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Please explain how I as a customer benefit when sales records a meeting. Usually it is rarely shared to me.
  - asyncscrum 4y ago
    At companies that are very customer centric, often times the calls are shared with customer success and implementation teams ensuring your goals as expressed during the buying phase are aligned with the implementation. This allows shorter implementation timeframes and higher likelihood of you achieving your goals and having a positive impact on your company. However, I'm sure that the majority of time the recordings sit in cloud cold storage until they expire and are deleted, never to be heard again.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      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.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

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.

bagels 4y ago
Is anyone who is not a health care provider even bound by any PHI rules?
- rish1_2 4y ago
  Any working professional that is handles PHI is bound by it and not just health care professionals. This could also be managers in a hospital. An individual is not.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Yes, lots of data storage companies are - that's why these companies sign BAAs (Google HIPAA BAA for info). There are some carve outs. For example, financial services companies don't have any additional privacy requirements if you buy a prescription with your Visa instead of cereal. That carve out was specifically added to the HIPAA legislation.
- manv1 4y ago
  Yes. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-regulations/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg... Note that this is a high-level summary.
  - 4y ago

captainmuon 4y ago

As someone who was accidentially thrust into an IT role and had to do some purchasing... I absolutely hated sales cales and B2B selling. The simple act of buying a server means finding an "authorized reseller", going through some sales calls, proving that you are a worthy customer, then they want to know all about your other setup to make sure it is "supported" (which turns out to have no consequence whatsoever). The quoted price is completely different from what is listed, and there are arbitrary surcharges. Isn't there an easier way? Yes, but the pointy haired boss decided we have to go the proper route. Funnily the reseller had a very trustworthy name like "usedserverdiscount24.de" or something. The worst one was when I was trying to get some antivirus licenses. We were willing to spend a lot on Sophos, because it had good reviews, we were happy with the trial, and so on. But the reseller tried to upsell us, insisted we buy matching firewalls, and so on. So in the end we stuck with Windows Defender (we got a bunch of licenses for Advanced Threat Protection from MS for free).

deleted 4y ago
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aksss 4y ago
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.
snuxoll 4y ago
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!

jedberg 4y ago

> The only people who were in a gray area around promising product functionality that didn’t exist were founders. I'd like to expand that to CxOs as well. I sat in lot of sales meetings with small startups where the founder or other non-founding CxO would promise new features, and then when we met with the engineers to do the requirements, they would tell us the feature was impossible or would take a year+ to build.

makeitdouble 4y ago
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.

mnemotronic 4y ago

One of the most interesting things I've read in a while.

tmaly 4y ago

I think the title should be edited to add "so you didn't have to"

O__________O 4y ago

Sales industry is full of stats like this, author mentions businesses that focus on sale rep call analysis and training like Zoom, Gong, and Chorus; here’s example of bunch of call stats from Gong: https://www.gong.io/blog/cold-call-stats/ 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 4y ago
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.

Yizahi 4y ago

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:).

donedealomg 4y ago

I wish the people in charge of New Relic would read this Buying from New Relic became so insanely difficult on an enterprise level that we just moved to Datadog.

ewwhite 4y ago
Truth. And they scared much of their customer base away.

lucasfcosta 4y ago

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.

HectorComtura 4y ago
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).
HatchedLake721 4y ago
It’s just good sales really. Sales is about listening, not talking.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  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.

nickjj 4y ago

As a customer who has been on a number of these calls, the thing I dislike the most is getting "yes" for every question I have. Just be honest with me. Realistically I'm on the call with your business because I've put in a huge amount of research about your product or service, I likely narrowed things down to your service and maybe 1 or 2 others. I know a lot about the individual technical features of your service and your main competitors but didn't spend enough time to put it all together to solve every use case I might have -- only that your service so far looks promising. I can't count the number of times where I'll bring something up and the person on the call (usually a business sales along with someone who is more technical) will flat out lie to us about something (even in a group call scenario), in which case I'll politely question that and reference their docs about it. They try to save grace by saying "oh yeah, our documentation must be out of date, sorry about that" or they directly lie about their competitors often saying so and so can't do xyz when they can and the easy out there is "oh, perhaps they added that recently". It happens way too often to always have outdated documentation or information. Even after a 15 minute remote call you can get to know someone's mannerisms and the cadence of how they speak. It's not hard to tell when someone is lying or has much less confidence in what they're saying. I've gone with competitors for nearly 6 figure annual contracts because of these things multiple times when the decision has been pretty close. If you're planning to be a customer, it's worth doing your due diligence to research things in a solid amount of detail before going into these calls. All it takes is maybe 2-3 full days of hardcore research to be super prepared. That's time very well spent to understand if a product looks like it will work for you as a first pass, especially so if you plan to bring other devs or a CTO into a future call to get contracts prepared and signed.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
throwaway432897 4y ago
> 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.

HectorComtura 4y ago

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)

ayewo 4y ago
How do you compare to Fathom.video?
- azmodeus 4y ago
  This is Chris, co-founder of Comtura. 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.
benjilb 4y ago
Isn't this what Gong does too - syncing talking points back into Salesforce
- azmodeus 4y ago
  This is Chris, Comtura co-founder. 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

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anthomtb 4y ago

What do BDR and RevOps mean? The former is clearly a role in a sales organization. The latter rhymes with DevOps but I’ve no idea whether Dev and Rev become related when appended with Ops.

mmerlin 4y ago
BDR = business development representative RevOps = revenue operations / operators i.e. sales ops / salespeople

odysseus 4y ago

> When a [customer] champion leaves [to a new job] this puts ARR at risk. Unless you’re being proactive and inserting yourself into the conversation with the replacement, it’s likely that come renewal time that your product will be at a high risk of churn. I've seen this happen a lot. By the way - this is also (sometimes) true with managers. You might have a manager that's championing you now, but leaves. When you get a new manager, unless you're proactive and finding out what projects/goals are really important to your new manager (and your manager's manager), it's likely that come layoff time that you will be the first to go.

scarface74 4y ago
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
- extragood 4y ago
  > 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.

chopete3 4y ago

>> 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.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
> It changed my perspective on what direction really means for products. I didn’t understand this part.

hacknews20 4y ago

Another “I did x so you don’t have to” post.

quickthrower2 4y ago
The best kind I guess

MaintenanceMode 4y ago

Where did the author get these recordings? A very interesting read.

asyncscrum 4y ago
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.

iFire 4y ago

For fun, I tried summarizing the article with copy.ai's explain like I am five and did some hand tuning. I removed the sections on personal information, paying list price, product led growth, the salesforce automation / data collection, and a few others. https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT Let me if I should do more of these publicly.

JaggerFoo 4y ago

Great article. Not what I was expecting. The article was informative, actionable and concise. I learned several things, and laughed at the "When You're Asked To Update Salesforce" meme, which I observed first hand after implementing SFDC and customizing workflows designed by Sales and Product Managers. I'll be taking a look at Scratchpad and Dooly for sure. I wonder if the sales teams followed any particular method as depicted in books like Spin Selling or Cracking the Sales Management Code. Thanks for sharing your insights.

azmodeus 4y ago
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)

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

I may be being dumb here, but why not make a simple demo site the first qualification hurdle? I mean the only thing SaaS users care about is the saas system - give them a hand on version - I mean people are going to lie anyway about the qualification questions (do you have the budget? I mean who says no?) Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w many user accounts shall we create?

grvdrm 4y ago
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.
statictype 4y ago
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.

samiam_iam 4y ago

yawn

indymike 4y ago

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.

salesynerd 4y ago

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.

wackget 4y ago

According to uMatrix, there's 7 third-party domains loading stuff just to display a simple blog article on this site. If your site can't load a page of text without multiple third-party domains, that's not good.