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0 pointsseanherron3y ago0 comments

Often BDR calls don’t even focus on if the product is a good fit - it’s “how much budget do you have?” “Are you the decision maker?” “When are you looking to make a purchase?”. That’s, frankly, a waste of time for me. It’s one thing to have an initial call to show off core functionality and see if there’s a good fit - but if the focus is just trying to determine how much money I have, then it’s going to leave me fairly annoyed that I spent time on the call.

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CallMeJim3y ago

These calls exist because companies have learnt from wasting their time talking to people who can't afford it, aren't the decision maker and aren't interested in purchasing any time soon. The conversion rate of the sales profession is really low, and it can easily get an order of magnitude worse without qualification.

phpisthebest3y ago

Which is ironic because often times companies refuse to give budget numbers unless I sit through a damn demo first....

At this point I strongly disfavor companies that do not publish their retail prices. everyone from Microsoft to SpaceX can do it, there is ZERO excuse for companies not doing it today

bruce5113y ago

I'm a bit like you, I prefer published list prices. It really helps me if I know my budget is somewhere near your list price.

But I'm also in a business where we don't. And the reason we don't is because hardware is involved, and so prices can vary by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude.

In other words it takes time to gather up your requirements, which include hardware, software and crucially install and support services. From this we can generate a quote.

I'm not involved in the sales side, but I expect there's at least some demo as part of this process because it's helpful when reading the quote if the user has some idea of what they are buying. I don't think it's a terribly long demo though.

That all said, it is helpful to both parties if budget is mentioned early. With software-only projects I will often give the caller some idea of budget very early just to make sure we're playing in the same ballpark. That saves a lot of time.

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bstpierre3y ago

These kinds of calls should really just be emails. Forcing a synchronous meeting to essentially fill in a form is dumb.

sneak3y ago

Just turn down the calls and ask them to use email instead. You’re the customer, you make the rules.

grogenaut3y ago

3 different times I've used a product, either via freeware or sales lead and when I went to go buy the spent so long getting back to us on a price we had written around it on the engineering team. One small team had not sold a copy before and so they took 3 weeks to settle on a price (but they had a sales staff), in which time I had learned enough 3d math to just re-write the system.

CPLX3y ago

They’re still talking to them.

They’re just wasting everyone’s time.

FredPret3y ago

A lower ranked salersperson does the qualifying. The more trained ones do the selling. They are optimizing their resources and for a big purchase, the buyer is expecting a more involved process than one-click checkout.

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