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I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

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Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#101

Post by scarface74 »

odysseus wrote: post #76

> 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. 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 ge…

I’ll take it a step further. Four jobs ago and my first where i was brought in to be “an agent of change”, I failed miserably.

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

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#102

Post by sylens »

seanherron wrote: post #6

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. (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 yo…

Wanted to reply to this as somebody's who bounced between pre-sales and engineering roles in the past.

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#103

Post by grvdrm »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #95

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?) Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w many user accounts shall we create?

My experience is this is a double-edged sword. They want the site and the access but then they don't step through your product in a managed way. So, they might come away with a negative impression that could've been avoided with a guided process instead. I don't think you're wrong overall on hands-on, but there's nuance to the way you make that work.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#104

Post by psteitz »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #15

Just thought the call out for "Protected Health Information" was weird, and it's wrong . 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". 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,…

I think you're kind of missing the point. The author was just pointing out that lots of personal health-related info was being recorded in the calls. When you know a call is being recorded it is kind to steer the conversation away from content that the person you are talking to may not want broadly shared. Prospects may be told that the calls are being recorded but they may not realize the implications of that.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#105

Post by quickthrower2 »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #64
lucasfcosta wrote: post #44

What the author mentions about sales reps having to listen more than they speak is the most important point in the whole piece IMO. 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.

It’s just good sales really. Sales is about listening, not talking.

There is also communication overhead as there are many roles wrapped into one in a founder but if a seperate sales person, seperate customer success etc. they need to talk but they may not fully understand everything each other knows.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#106

Post by statictype »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #95

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?) Just slip the qualification questions into the "wizard" - he w many user accounts shall we create?

B2B saas products are often complex and not intuitive enough for end users to navigate through on their own without some onboarding help.

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#107

Post by quickthrower2 »

wpietri wrote: post #7
mannyv wrote: post #3

Having been an Enterprise SE in the past, I love any data about sales and the process. 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 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 g…

If only companies would actually do agile :-).

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#108

Post by version_five »

sylens wrote: post #102
seanherron wrote: post #6

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. (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 yo…

Wanted to reply to this as somebody's who bounced between pre-sales and engineering roles in the past. 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…

> opportunities that progressed past that demo are much less than 50%

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#109

Post by nobody9999 »

kryogen1c wrote: post #23
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #15

Just thought the call out for "Protected Health Information" was weird, and it's wrong . 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". 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,…

> 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. 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 const…

>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.

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#110

Post by 8note »

seanherron wrote: post #6

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. (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 yo…

For 3) somebody from the same side should be able to give a detailed review of the call and answer those same questions?
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