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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

#111

Post by extragood »

ipaddr wrote: post #42
asyncscrum wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At companies that are very customer centric, often times the calls are shared with customer success and implementation teams ensuring your goals as expressed during the buying phase are aligned with the implementation. This allows shorter implementation timeframes and higher likelihood of you achieving your goals and having a positive impact on your company. However, I'm sure that the majority of time the recordings…

Isn't it more about finding patterns to find a script for sales to use to get better at closing the sale? Things like people keep bring up the price.. here is what works at shifting the conversation or customers are impressed with the report page but hate the homepage.. start the demo off on the report pages. Things that help the company but not really customer in any direct way.

I can't speak for all companies, but from what I've observed at my past few employers, recordings aren't generally analyzed in that way.

This comes from the context of Sales or Success at B2B SaaS, but I've seen recordings used in the following ways:

  * Keep a record of what was said/agreed upon during a meeting for future reference e.g. we will deliver X on Y date to Z contact
  * Share with someone who should have been there, but was unable to attend the meeting
  * Share a relevant snippet with people outside of the meeting attendees. e.g. product feedback, services opportunity, etc.
  * Capture customer praise so everyone feels good about themselves/the product
The vast majority of recordings are never viewed again to my knowledge.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#112

Post by rocmcd »

version_five wrote: post #108
sylens wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It varies drastically by the business but I would say that it’s more on the magnitude of 10% or less (for enterprise sales, IME).

If you’re getting a 50% conversion on your demos then either your sales org has _really_ dialed in the target persona (qualifying everyone else out early) or your market is very wide.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#113

Post by rocmcd »

spoonjim wrote: post #81
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…

Yes - make your product usable enough so that even a BDR can demo it

That sounds nice, but it simply is not possible for very technical products (many kinds of databases, low-level infra, dev tools, etc). You won’t be able to find BDRs that can talk to devs the way another dev would.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#114

Post by TecoAndJix »

asyncscrum wrote: post #39
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,…

One on my major takeaways from the calls was how many people were visibly sick yet still working and getting on calls. WFH has really destroyed the concept of stay home and get some rest.

I preach ”don’t be a martyr” to anyone and everyone that listens, especially when I’m on a call and they mention they are not feeling well. Sure - there are meetings and engagements you really don’t want to miss (stuff like the boss’s boss will be on the call) but as long as you are not calling in sick all the time, no one cares! They usually say “oh shit I hope they feel better” and stop thinking about you.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#115

Post by extragood »

scarface74 wrote: post #101
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 “t…

> The lesson I learned from that is to always create relationships outside of your team and respect what came before you got there.

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#116

Post by indymike »

When I started my software development career, sales paid 2x what engineering did, so I started in sales and did it for about five years... until I could make a living coding. This article is excellent!

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#117

Post by noirbot »

duxup wrote: post #55
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…

> Offer to send some swag to the implementing team at your customer - not just your champion. 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.

Yea, maybe not a shirt, but hell, send them some nice coffee or some snacks or something. My current job is probably at least 50% implementing stuff my company bought, and for one of them, they had an on-site meeting about the implementation/proof of value stuff and they offered to buy everyone coffee/tea/whatever at a coffee shop by our office before the meeting and that definitely helped me be a bit less grumpy about the work.

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#118

Post by noirbot »

asyncscrum wrote: post #39
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,…

One on my major takeaways from the calls was how many people were visibly sick yet still working and getting on calls. WFH has really destroyed the concept of stay home and get some rest.

That said, I've definitely called in to things while sick because I didn't have anything better to do. Watching TV all day wasn't going to make me get healthier faster than watching a business presentation, and as long as my team understood that I was a little out of it, the normalcy of being "at work" helped me not just feel lazy and terrible.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#119

Post by wpietri »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #107
wpietri wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :-).

If only! At this point I don't even think they know what it is. Or rather, the term has changed meaning so much that it's almost unrecognizable to me.
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