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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 th

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!
- nxmnxm99 4y ago
  Weird comment. Tough shit? That’s sales. The OP is just telling you what works if you actually want to sell. We do most of what he said because it works. So what if you have to humour some dick? Don’t be a sales rep then.
  - holografix 4y ago
    You missed my point. I’m telling you it _doesnt_ work. If you’re a small startup and no one knows you, sure, give everyone a demo, but it’s not scalable. For people that want to see a demo and just wanna know price there’s the website and recorded demos.
thehappypm 4y ago
Omg, #1! I had to buy a product in the big data space last year. Company was all in on “buy” after some build vs buy discussion. I kept asking for demos and getting these weird intros with non technical folks who couldn’t give a demo!
zippergz 4y ago
A while back I wanted to become a customer of a company I had formerly worked at. I reached out via an executive-level friend and former co-worker who made a warm intro to sales. And STILL they first scheduled a call with a brand new to the job BDR who knew less about the product than I did. Not that person's fault, and I felt bad for them, but it was a complete waste of everyone's time.
- vorador 4y ago
  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.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    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?
    - leaflets2 4y ago
      I'd like to know, too:-)
    - vorador 4y ago
      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.
cercatrova 4y ago
As someone that's done sales, it is very important to qualify even incoming leads. I can't count how many times I wasted my time because the person who thought they wanted the product actually wasn't a good fit. After I implemented a lead qualification pipeline, that number dropped dramatically and the leads that did qualify were, predictably, much more likely to buy.
- CPLX 4y ago
  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.
  - mbesto 4y ago
    > Yeah but qualify them by showing them the fucking software. As a potential buyer, I immediately ask to get a pre-sales person on the call otherwise I'm not joining the call. Get's them to move pretty quickly.
    - fphhotchips 4y ago
      The fact that you know to say that is a good enough qualifier in my mind. Only people who know how to buy know what presales even is.
      - 4y ago
azmodeus 4y ago
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
duxup 4y ago
> Offer to send some swag to the implementing team at your customer - not just your champion. This seems weird to me. I guess if it works to send some trinkets to people you do it… but if it makes a difference to them I’d be kinda judgmental about that fact ( not really related to the sales process). Personally I don’t want more trinket crap in my life but maybe other folks feel differently.
- seanherron 4y ago
  This is more of a post-sales item. A pivotal part of a renewal is going to be how successful implementation is - and that success is largely dependent not just on the sponsor of the project but on the team that supports them. Those folks are often the ones who don’t get the trinkets. Something like a nice jacket or even a pair of socks can go a long way to building positive sentiment there.
- Kamq 4y ago
  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?"
  - bostik 4y ago
    > Devs hate basically everyone else's code. Including their recent selves'. 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.)
- 4y ago
spoonjim 4y ago
Yes - make your product usable enough so that even a BDR can demo it
- rocmcd 4y ago
  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.
jahnu 4y ago
Just to be clear, did you learn these things from the article or you just agree with them but already knew them?
sylens 4y ago
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.
- version_five 4y ago
  > 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.
  - rocmcd 4y ago
    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.
    - fphhotchips 4y ago
      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.
      - sylens 4y ago
8note 4y ago
For 3) somebody from the same side should be able to give a detailed review of the call and answer those same questions?
jiveturkey 4y ago
(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.
grecy 4y ago
For 5, I can’t tell if you’re being serious? 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.
dehrmann 4y ago
> Ask before recording meetings Remember that California requires the consent of all parties on this call, so this isn't just being polite.

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!

nxmnxm99 4y ago
Weird comment. Tough shit? That’s sales. The OP is just telling you what works if you actually want to sell. We do most of what he said because it works. So what if you have to humour some dick? Don’t be a sales rep then.
- holografix 4y ago
  You missed my point. I’m telling you it _doesnt_ work. If you’re a small startup and no one knows you, sure, give everyone a demo, but it’s not scalable. For people that want to see a demo and just wanna know price there’s the website and recorded demos.

thehappypm 4y ago

Omg, #1! I had to buy a product in the big data space last year. Company was all in on “buy” after some build vs buy discussion. I kept asking for demos and getting these weird intros with non technical folks who couldn’t give a demo!

zippergz 4y ago

A while back I wanted to become a customer of a company I had formerly worked at. I reached out via an executive-level friend and former co-worker who made a warm intro to sales. And STILL they first scheduled a call with a brand new to the job BDR who knew less about the product than I did. Not that person's fault, and I felt bad for them, but it was a complete waste of everyone's time.

vorador 4y ago
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.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  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?
  - leaflets2 4y ago
    I'd like to know, too:-)
  - vorador 4y ago
    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.

cercatrova 4y ago

As someone that's done sales, it is very important to qualify even incoming leads. I can't count how many times I wasted my time because the person who thought they wanted the product actually wasn't a good fit. After I implemented a lead qualification pipeline, that number dropped dramatically and the leads that did qualify were, predictably, much more likely to buy.

CPLX 4y ago
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.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > Yeah but qualify them by showing them the fucking software. As a potential buyer, I immediately ask to get a pre-sales person on the call otherwise I'm not joining the call. Get's them to move pretty quickly.
  - fphhotchips 4y ago
    The fact that you know to say that is a good enough qualifier in my mind. Only people who know how to buy know what presales even is.
    - 4y ago

azmodeus 4y ago

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

duxup 4y ago

> Offer to send some swag to the implementing team at your customer - not just your champion. This seems weird to me. I guess if it works to send some trinkets to people you do it… but if it makes a difference to them I’d be kinda judgmental about that fact ( not really related to the sales process). Personally I don’t want more trinket crap in my life but maybe other folks feel differently.

seanherron 4y ago
This is more of a post-sales item. A pivotal part of a renewal is going to be how successful implementation is - and that success is largely dependent not just on the sponsor of the project but on the team that supports them. Those folks are often the ones who don’t get the trinkets. Something like a nice jacket or even a pair of socks can go a long way to building positive sentiment there.
Kamq 4y ago
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?"
- bostik 4y ago
  > Devs hate basically everyone else's code. Including their recent selves'. 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.)
4y ago

spoonjim 4y ago

Yes - make your product usable enough so that even a BDR can demo it

rocmcd 4y ago
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.

jahnu 4y ago

Just to be clear, did you learn these things from the article or you just agree with them but already knew them?

sylens 4y ago

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.

version_five 4y ago
> 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.
- rocmcd 4y ago
  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.
  - fphhotchips 4y ago
    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.
    - sylens 4y ago

8note 4y ago

For 3) somebody from the same side should be able to give a detailed review of the call and answer those same questions?

jiveturkey 4y ago

(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.

grecy 4y ago

For 5, I can’t tell if you’re being serious? 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.

dehrmann 4y ago

> Ask before recording meetings Remember that California requires the consent of all parties on this call, so this isn't just being polite.