(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.
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.
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.
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.
We regularly have to deal with this crap to prospect vendors for tech solutions. Some companies do multiple rounds of qualifications with people punching their KPI cards wasting my time. If you’re recording the calls, listen to the recording and stop wasting my time.
If we don’t need the vendor, we ghost you. If we really need the vendor, we have a process to flag it so that someone gets ahold of a C- or founder level contact in the company. That’s gotten at least 3 sales directors fired, and with the high level sponsor, we usually grind out a significant concession to close the deal.
I kept asking for demos and getting these weird intros with non technical folks who couldn’t give a demo!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?"
Any sort of "congrats on launching/implementing our stuff" gift is at least an acknowledgment of the work put in to help the sales team land their contract, and that helps keep the relationship on a good footing.
Remember that California requires the consent of all parties on this call, so this isn't just being polite.
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.
I'm with you on the rest, maybe not all the way on (3) though.
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
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.
Almost but not quite. I came to comment on this bullet point in the article because misunderstanding about PHI is so prevalent its nearly a meme.
PHI doesn't have anything to do with willingness or sharing. PHI is not a meaningful term constructed of its component words - its a specific legal term under hipaa. Any (noncovered entity) company can ask you anything about your health and it doesn't matter - airlines, restaurants, event venues, etc. They're allowed and it doesn't have anything to do with hipaa and they are not collecting/storing PHI.
HIPAA applies specifically to covered entities under its law. Its basically health care providers and health insurance companies. If you aren't one of those covered entities and youre not telling that info to a covered entity, there is no PHI.
If you want to boycot somewhere asking about covid or whatever - get down with your bad self. It just doesn't have anything to do with HIPAA.
A specific example: I work on an app that does include HIPAA-regulated PHI, and sometimes I'll demo stuff in production by demoing my own personal account. I usually preface it by saying "This is my account, so it's OK to share" so folks know I haven't just pulled up someone else's data. If I had pulled up someone else's data and shared it without their consent, that would be a HIPAA violation.
An excellent point. Which is why I don't share my Fitbit data (uninstalled the app after set up, no syncing of data) with Fitbit (now Google) and will (assuming it works as advertised) likely be moving to a MiBand with GadgetBridge[0] in the near future. And thanks to vanous[1] for posting[2] here about it a couple weeks ago.
I have no interest in sharing my health (exercise regimes, sleep cycles, heart rate, etc.) information with folks whose raison d'etre is to snarf up as much data as possible. What's more, since these folks aren't "covered entities" under HIPAA, they aren't required to put in the special safeguards for your health data.
And more's the pity.
[0] https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vanous
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32965166
Edit: Fixed typo.
The reason I commented is because there is a ton of misunderstanding in the real world that confuses "Joe isn't on the call today because he's got COVID" with the legal responsibilities that, say, your doctor has when sending you your COVID results.
To be honest, I think there is a lot of unnecessary concern over health information due to this misunderstanding. Obviously there is a ton of information that people prefer to keep private, but in those cases, they keep it private, or would at least tell you not to tell anyone. Due to the misunderstanding about PHI, I think people mistakenly confuse any banal health information as inherently requiring a higher level of protection/discretion, and this isn't really true. Frankly, there is a ton of other info that people probably want to keep more private than whether or not they had COVID (these days, who hasn't?) or whether someone is pregnant (usually makes itself self-evident in any case).
Then again, a ton of practices described in the article are probably blatant violations of the GDPR like scraping LinkedIn to track the titles and job changes of champions. I guess a PII request under the GDPR would include data stored in Salesforce, which would make the result fairly awkward depending on what information sales people decide to keep in there.
Given that I've seen companies having to explain to sales people that they can't just repurpose dodgy e-mail lists for direct sales outreach without having any records suggesting the victi-... err... "prospects" consented to that use, I wouldn't be surprised if most sales teams are violating the GDPR left and right on a daily basis.
That information is tainted with the restrictions and keeps them regardless of where it goes. If it gets disclosed outside of that it becomes a violation.
So nobody working for a hospital you get care for can disclose things. Nobody the hospital hires to provide services or handle your data, etc.
You can sign away those rights or give your own information away.
If the data doesn't come up through a relationship with a healthcare provider, it's not PHI.
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.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
Note that this is a high-level summary.
But PHI as a concept doesn't need HIPAA. In fact, it's probably good practice to isolate PHI, even if you don't need to be HIPAA-compliant. The PHI is only one join away anyway.
It's not HIPAA protected because that person isn't Jenny's doctor, but it's still PHI.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t understand this part.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have data that shows whether 'letting the customer talk' produces more wins? Or faster wins? The consensus seems to be 'customer talking' is better, probably because that shows the customer is more engaged.
This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored.
This 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.
CRM hygiene is not correlated with sales success in my experience, but I’ll grant that might be different depending on the market segmentation a given sales rep works in (specifically, it is more important the smaller and thus more numerous a set of customers that a sales rep covers.) I’m a sales manager of a team that has consistently, over a period of several years, been the #1 revenue producer for a large cybersecurity company. Our reps have atrocious CRM hygiene. I spend a ridiculous amount of time chasing them to do the bare minimum to keep the people who care about CRM hygiene off our backs and to handle the one part of the CRM data set that is actually important (accurate opportunity forecast categories are commonly used to drive product demand/manufacturing/capacity planning forecasts.)
> Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of the data that they provided in Salesforce as well as quota attainment.
Sales reps are judged on things like “quality of data provided in Salesforce” only when their quota attainment is poor. There’s a reason nobody on my team has been fired or seriously reprimanded for basically ignoring the CRM for years. It would be like firing Tom Brady for not writing down a play by play analysis of each game.
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.
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.
https://fire.posthaven.com/hhQ0kYwTXbwhUFxjAqQu8IlT
Let me if I should do more of these publicly.
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.
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)
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.
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.
We use them (transcripts) to power our platform so we collect the customers voice and make it reportable to deliver into the CRM. Multiple usecases like product improvements, business strategy and understand WHY you're winning deals.
Tools like gong/chorus etc are great for coaching, recommend them highly.
I would NEVER do that. Outside of generics like "I went to the beach for vacation" I do not even talk about health or deeply personal things with co-workers I have worked with for over a decade. let alone some random salesperson I just meet.
It is crazy.... of course I have no social media presence under my own name, and can not even conceive of posting my life on said social media growing up in the 80's in grained into me that desire for anonymity
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.
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
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.
Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w many user accounts shall we create?
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.
So, we take transcription and use it to empower the reps to update salesforce to fix this (Comtura.ai). One of the things we noticed from user interviews was that they'd actually just be ctrl + F'ing through gong or zoom transcripts to find the right information.
Whilst the overlay (Dooly/SP) is something we offer. We actually find that most usage comes from just the "notepad" feature.
Reps who handwrote notes had to duplicate it into salesforce, those that typed notes (bad demo practise because you just piss off your prospect with tip tapping + it doesnt support your memory like handwriting does, fun fact!)
hence we started working on this problem.
If anyone wants to try it out by all means go for it (contact@comtura.ai)
We aren't a Gong competitor, we also integrate with Gong ourselves.
Gong does provide a Salesforce integration. We interviewed 10 users of this feature who mostly ended up copy pasting parts of the transcript into Salesforce.
Key differences between the Gong Salesforce integration and Comtura: 1. Beyond Gong we also support Zoom and Microsoft Teams 2. We have built specific machine learning models translating between transcripts and CRM records while Gong has been focusing on highlighting coachable moments in transcripts
Fathom allows you to leave bookmarks in parts of Zoom calls and push information based on these bookmarks.
Comtura makes suggestions based on what our AI thinks you should put in Salesforce. We also integrate with more WebEx solutions such as Zoom, MS Teams, Gong.
RevOps = revenue operations / operators
i.e. sales ops / salespeople
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"
>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.
If your site can't load a page of text without multiple third-party domains, that's not good.
Buying from New Relic became so insanely difficult on an enterprise level that we just moved to Datadog.
