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.<p>(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 <i>reaching out and interested in your product</i>, 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.<p>(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.<p>(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 <i>plan</i> ready to help them.<p>(4) Discounting discussions are always a pain. It's a game that no one likes to play.<p>(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.
Just thought the call out for "Protected Health Information" was weird, and it's <i>wrong</i>. 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".<p>First of all, <i>you</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).
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:<p><a href="https://www.gong.io/blog/cold-call-stats/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gong.io/blog/cold-call-stats/</a><p>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.
>> these calls are FULL of insights for product direction.
>> There’s a good chance almost none of these insights will reach product and engineering<p>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.<p>That is a non-scalable solution to address the issue of information loss but it shows there is more value to realize if there is an efficient way to tap into that information.
The advice for sales reps to stop talking and listen certainly rings true in my experience. I see a lot of sales materials that are geared towards a scripted pitch: generic powerpoint decks, exhaustive demos, and boilerplate feature description flyers. There's probably a lot of value in sales teams having access to that kind of collateral, but I would wager that there's even more value in knowing how to step away from that material and follow the customer's lead in what to showcase.
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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.
What the author mentions about sales reps having to listen more than they speak is the most important point in the whole piece IMO.<p>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.
Having been an Enterprise SE in the past, I love any data about sales and the process.<p>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.<p>This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored.
> The only people who were in a gray area around promising product functionality that didn’t exist were founders.<p>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.
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.<p><a href="https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT" rel="nofollow">https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT</a><p>Let me if I should do more of these publicly.
Great article. Not what I was expecting. The article was informative, actionable and concise.<p>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.<p>I'll be taking a look at Scratchpad and Dooly for sure.<p>I wonder if the sales teams followed any particular method as depicted in books like Spin Selling or Cracking the Sales Management Code.<p>Thanks for sharing your insights.
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!<p>1. Ask for the sale.<p>2. Listen... and especially listen for buying signals... and when you get one STOP selling.<p>3. Build more than one relationship. People leave. Have a backup champion.<p>Only one thing I'd add: Don't linger on lost deals. In the time spent navel-gazing, you can find and least two more prospects.
> In most sales orgs, calls are being recorded by Zoom,
> Gong or Chorus. To my surprise these calls are littered
> with countless discussions of health.<p>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.
> 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.<p>I've seen this happen a lot.<p>By the way - this is also (sometimes) true with managers. You might have a manager that's championing you now, but leaves. When you get a new manager, unless you're proactive and finding out what projects/goals are really important to your new manager (and your manager's manager), it's likely that come layoff time that you will be the first to go.
I 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?)<p>Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w many user accounts shall we create?
I was just reading this article and noticed that they were talking about salesforce data hygiene.<p>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.<p>Whilst the overlay (Dooly/SP) is something we offer. We actually find that most usage comes from just the "notepad" feature.<p>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!)<p>hence we started working on this problem.<p>If anyone wants to try it out by all means go for it (contact@comtura.ai)
Another US centric, MBAs produced by the "college of du mall" driven sales processes (a lot of such degrees given by colleges on the side of the highway, right outside shopping malls, mostly suburbs of large cities).
What do BDR and RevOps mean? The former is clearly a role in a sales organization. The latter rhymes with DevOps but I’ve no idea whether Dev and Rev become related when appended with Ops.
> It's men. Almost all men.<p>2/3 means almost all ?<p>I guess unless it had been women, then it was a "reasonable amount, but women could have been even better represented"
Now I understand that some of the spam I got on my corporate email from products where I've used free tiers, probably weren't spam but actually sales attempts. I guess I'll remove a rule forwarding them to trash directory:).
Am curious to understand the socio-cultural settings of these calls. For example, were the prospects and sellers from the same region and/or culture? I would personally think that this has a bearing on the call dynamics.
According to uMatrix, there's 7 third-party domains loading stuff just to display a simple blog article on this site.<p>If your site can't load a page of text without multiple third-party domains, that's not good.
I wish the people in charge of New Relic would read this<p>Buying from New Relic became so insanely difficult on an enterprise level that we just moved to Datadog.