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Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

minutes.technology

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Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

#1
Hey everyone, I wanted to share something I've been working on that I think could be really helpful for sales teams. Minutes is a startup that utilizes OpenAI technology to automate the transcription and summarization of sales calls.

What Minutes is doing can be described in 3 steps: 1. Taking your audio or video and transcribing it to text 2. Taking the most important and relevant information and creating a summary, including key points and the next tasks 3. Creating a follow-up email, including the summary points and next steps

Story behind it: As an entrepreneur who handles sales and marketing, I noticed a common challenge: the amount of time managers spend on creating call summaries and writing follow-up emails. Not only is it time-consuming, but it's also often a hassle to ensure accuracy. To tackle this issue, I decided to delve deeper and spoke with several sales directors. Turns out, this problem is widespread, and even salespeople themselves dislike the administrative burden it brings. Inspired by these insights, I created Minutes.

Call to action: Here's where you come in. Sign up for Minutes using the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service. I genuinely value your feedback and insights, as they will help us refine Minutes and tailor it to the specific needs of sales teams everywhere.

Thank you for your support, and I'm eagerly looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Warm regards, Bogdan, founder of Minutes

Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time
minutes.technology

Re: Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

#2
It is an interesting idea. Transcription isn't new, but the extraction of a list of actions and bullet points is intriguing. It would need to be better than what a sales guy could get by copy/pasting a transcription into ChatGPT, not because sales guys are going to start doing that, but because Salesforce could whip out a wrapper for such things fairly quickly easily, so you need to be wary of having a strategy that is easily repeatable by a big player who already has a vast amount of sales people on their platform.

Re: Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

#5
post #4

I was looking to sign up and see if it could work for our sales team but it looks like that is not possible without an invite code?

So it turns out that any keyboard mash will work as an invite code. You might want to make that a non mandatory field, it it's not required.

Re: Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

#6
This is interesting.

Are you familiar with products like Gong and Chorus.ai for call recording, and outreach.io for automated emails?

If I look at products like Gong it is very much a pain killer. It makes it possible for managers to coach their salespeople by reviewing sales calls and therefore close more deals. This however strikes me as more like a vitamin. It saves sales people some time from doing salesforce admin.

I'm in enterprise sales and don't see the immediate benefit. However a more transactional sale I could see this may be more useful, but then I wonder if in a transactional sale are salesforce notes important?

If you want a customer interview my email is in my bio.

Re: Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

#9
I have a great method for keeping sales calls short, and pretty much 90% of my meetings are 30 minutes or less.

* Agendas: I do not take a meeting request without an agenda. 50% of the time this eliminates the meeting because either it's a few questions than can be an email, or they cancel the request because doing that is too much work. This is ideal when people are using meetings to transfer cognitive loads to other people.

* Time cap: All sales calls are capped at 30 minutes, no exceptions.

* Know yourself: I do research on the product/company beforehand in my own time, and know my needs so that during the call we can skip the parts I don't care about. This alone takes 60 minute meetings generally to the 30 minute mark.

* Take charge: I never let the salesperson lead the call. They're not the most important person on the call, I am. I'm the one with the need and the money.

* Limit the scope: I skip all the prelim questions where they "learn about your business" which is just looking for other opportunities to pitch me things. I know my business, I know my need, let's talk about how your product fits that.

While generally in the first few minutes it's a bit unsettling for the salesfolks, generally when I explain that my goal is to make this as quick as possible, the vast majority wind up appreciating my approach as they get off the meeting in 20 minutes most of the time.

The problem isn't how much time salespeople waste on summaries, it's how much time they waste overall. Too much glad-handing and not enough focus. I'd much rather see a tool like this help salespeople cut their pitches in half than simply making a summary email I'll ignore.

Re: Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

#10

What do you recommend to record meetings in non-intrusive ways?

I'd suggest you don't. If I found out a salesperson was recording my calls without me knowing I'd not only cancel any business with the company, I'd blast them to high heaven and back. Knowing a call is being recorded isn't "intrusive".
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