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Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

training.kalzumeus.com

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Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#31
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am happy to give you information (your rough quote) in exchange for information (learning about your need). That is a fair trade because while I can scale my product or service, I cannot scale my time. If I misallocate my time on customers who are not qualified, I starve. You are uncomfortable with this because you are not serious. When you are serious, when there is a real need and real value, this isn't an issue…

He specifically say "I had zero special requirements", so you should be able to give him an answer in less than 2 min. That's a low cost for potentially cultivating a lead.

No. No. No. Successful salespeople get something in return for information they give up. Timeline, budget, application, preferences, payment method, etc. without data a salesperson cannit determine where her time should be spent. Time is her most important commodity.

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#32
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A call at this point is probably wasting my time and theirs." Most salespeople spend countless hours of time with potential customers who don't purchase - it is certainly worth their time if there is even a slight chance that you will consider the product in the distant future. You are definitely NOT wasting their time.

It's certainly wasting your time... It drives me nuts when I download a trial version of some software tool to evaluate and get phone calls from sales reps before the day is over. Calm down, I haven't had time to even try it yet...

From the software vendors' perspective, it makes good business sense to call you asap, see: http://blog.close.io/why-you-need-to-call-every-signup-user-...

From a customer perspective, ideally that call will help you to save time by: a) figuring out faster if this software is right for you or not b) helping you to learn how to use it the best way possible c) setting this up so you make the most out of your trial.

I'd rather take objection with bad sales calls, not with the fact that they call on the same day.

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#33
post #16

rather than giving Cindy the quote which she asked for, I should have asked Cindy to hop on a quick call with me to discuss how they were planning to use Appointment Reminder I get this all the time when looking for vendors for various things and have to say I usually do an internal eye-roll when it comes up - sometimes I just want a rough quote in an email that I can look at when I get the chance. Most recently we w…

I am happy to give you information (your rough quote) in exchange for information (learning about your need). That is a fair trade because while I can scale my product or service, I cannot scale my time. If I misallocate my time on customers who are not qualified, I starve. You are uncomfortable with this because you are not serious. When you are serious, when there is a real need and real value, this isn't an issue…

> customers who are not qualified

In other words, "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." That's fine and I will just assume it's true, even if it's not.

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#34
post #30

rather than giving Cindy the quote which she asked for, I should have asked Cindy to hop on a quick call with me to discuss how they were planning to use Appointment Reminder I get this all the time when looking for vendors for various things and have to say I usually do an internal eye-roll when it comes up - sometimes I just want a rough quote in an email that I can look at when I get the chance. Most recently we w…

If the vendor doesnt have pricing on the website, they dont sell to people like you. They only sell to people with big money to spend, and you should buy from someone else. If you are buying from someone like AR who _does_ have pricing on the website ( https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing ), then you must have a special requirement, and as such you should have the call or you're wasting his time and yours. Gen…

> If you're going to run AR in a hospital for 1000 emergency surgeons, vs your run a 3 person beauty salon

As you state earlier, there's some kind of bracketing going that matches certain service providers (saas or otherwise) to businesses. A 3 person beauty salon won't buy Oracle, but a hospital with 1000 emergency surgeons* would. How can AR fit both audiences then? Even if at its core it's the same service, all the other "layers" make it a completely different business.

[*] are there any hospitals that big??

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#35
post #6

Thanks for the Close.io ( http://close.io/ ) shoutouts Patrick! If anyone needs help doing similar Close.io API integrations, feel free to reach out at phil@close.io - would be happy to help.

OT, but I'm on holiday in Laos at the moment and can't open your page. Other links work fine, albeit slow. Are you blacklisting certain countries?

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#36
while I could probably have done something with Trello or a spreadsheet, those aren’t quite as scriptable as I’d like

Can't comment about close.io since it's inaccessible from where I'm at[0]. Trello is quite scriptable though and I've been using it with a couple of rough scripts to keep track of our own sales process. This was inspired by an interesting post called "A system for selling"[1] that I'd recommend reading and sounds similar to what Patrick was doing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8775958

[1] http://casjam.com/system-for-selling/

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He specifically say "I had zero special requirements", so you should be able to give him an answer in less than 2 min. That's a low cost for potentially cultivating a lead.

No. No. No. Successful salespeople get something in return for information they give up. Timeline, budget, application, preferences, payment method, etc. without data a salesperson cannit determine where her time should be spent. Time is her most important commodity.

But a customer has no interest or reason to negotiate or bargain with a salesperson for information. They negotiate with a company for a product.

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the vendor doesnt have pricing on the website, they dont sell to people like you. They only sell to people with big money to spend, and you should buy from someone else. If you are buying from someone like AR who _does_ have pricing on the website ( https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing ), then you must have a special requirement, and as such you should have the call or you're wasting his time and yours. Gen…

> If you're going to run AR in a hospital for 1000 emergency surgeons, vs your run a 3 person beauty salon As you state earlier, there's some kind of bracketing going that matches certain service providers (saas or otherwise) to businesses. A 3 person beauty salon won't buy Oracle, but a hospital with 1000 emergency surgeons* would. How can AR fit both audiences then? Even if at its core it's the same service, all th…

Sometimes you can service both. GitHub, Heroku, New Relic, CircleCI, are all examples that serve 6 and 7 figure contracts while also supporting tiny 1-person contracts too.

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#39
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're going to run AR in a hospital for 1000 emergency surgeons, vs your run a 3 person beauty salon As you state earlier, there's some kind of bracketing going that matches certain service providers (saas or otherwise) to businesses. A 3 person beauty salon won't buy Oracle, but a hospital with 1000 emergency surgeons* would. How can AR fit both audiences then? Even if at its core it's the same service, all th…

Sometimes you can service both. GitHub, Heroku, New Relic, CircleCI, are all examples that serve 6 and 7 figure contracts while also supporting tiny 1-person contracts too.

Did these companies start doing both or only after getting investment? It's a genuine question, I don't know. I'm guessing you need to reach a certain mass to be able to do real Enterprise sales.

Re: Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

#40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the vendor doesnt have pricing on the website, they dont sell to people like you. They only sell to people with big money to spend, and you should buy from someone else. If you are buying from someone like AR who _does_ have pricing on the website ( https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing ), then you must have a special requirement, and as such you should have the call or you're wasting his time and yours. Gen…

> If you're going to run AR in a hospital for 1000 emergency surgeons, vs your run a 3 person beauty salon As you state earlier, there's some kind of bracketing going that matches certain service providers (saas or otherwise) to businesses. A 3 person beauty salon won't buy Oracle, but a hospital with 1000 emergency surgeons* would. How can AR fit both audiences then? Even if at its core it's the same service, all th…

There are, indeed, hospital systems that big, and bigger besides.

There is certainly some bracketing going on. When we're doing dogfights for true Enterprise accounts, we're doing them against publicly traded companies whose annual reports filed with the SEC says that > 60% of their annual revenue comes from less than 100 firms. Do the math on what that means their average account size must be for those 100 firms. It's nuts.

There are things you can say to me which will, quickly, get me to say "Look, I'll be honest: we'd love to have your business, but we're not the right fit for your organization. Can I give you the phone number of our #1 competitor? They're widely regarded as pretty trustworthy in the industry, and they're focused on helping customers who, broadly speaking, look like your organization." (Here's an example: "Does it integrate with SAP? Because we would need that." Ack, that will never happen, nope nope nope.)

That said, how can e.g. St. Jude Hospital (not a client, but representative of a few clients we have) use AR at the same time that Bugs Be Gone Exterminators (a 2 man firm) uses AR? Well, both of them also use Excel, right? Very different use cases, but same core need, and the sales model for Excel lets Microsoft offer it to both companies for an amount which is, for the exterminators, a trivial amount of money and for an amount which is, for St. Jude, so far below the noise floor it barely registers.

AR sells the same way, except it is a much narrower product than Excel is. To the extent that "It sure would be great if someone got a call from me" is the same problem for those two firms, we're equally capable of servicing it. (They have different needs, particularly with regards to privacy and compliance, which is why the hospital pays "rather more money than any of my published pricing suggests", but at the end of the day it is the same for loops executing the same state machine talking to the same Twilio APIs from the same hardware overseen by the same geek.)

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