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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

#131

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

I hate companies that do this bullshit, as it’s fundamentally disrespectful of customers.

We regularly have to deal with this crap to prospect vendors for tech solutions. Some companies do multiple rounds of qualifications with people punching their KPI cards wasting my time. If you’re recording the calls, listen to the recording and stop wasting my time.

If we don’t need the vendor, we ghost you. If we really need the vendor, we have a process to flag it so that someone gets ahold of a C- or founder level contact in the company. That’s gotten at least 3 sales directors fired, and with the high level sponsor, we usually grind out a significant concession to close the deal.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#132

Post by bruce511 »

phpisthebest wrote: post #87
CallMeJim wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 At this point I strongly disfavor companies that do not publish their retail prices.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

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#133

Post by snuxoll »

captainmuon wrote: post #24

As someone who was accidentially thrust into an IT role and had to do some purchasing... I absolutely hated sales cales and B2B selling. The simple act of buying a server means finding an "authorized reseller", going through some sales calls, proving that you are a worthy customer, then they want to know all about your other setup to make sure it is "supported" (which turns out to have no consequence whatsoever). The…

JFC, as somebody that’s in a dozen different partner programs just so I can offer products if I need to doing side hustles I could probably make a decent living just being a VAR that sells you what you ask for and leaves you the hell alone. I get that sales reps want to upsell, but I just want to buy X and I know what I want!

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#135

Post by dehrmann »

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…

> Ask before recording meetings

Remember that California requires the consent of all parties on this call, so this isn't just being polite.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#136

Post by grogenaut »

CallMeJim wrote: post #73
seanherron wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fair…

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.

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#137

Post by cercatrova »

CPLX wrote: post #100
FredPret wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I get it it’s just annoying. Train some entry level people to show some basic software features instead of training them to waste people’s time asking questions.

That's a quick way to lose sales. It's like asking a backend dev to make a pretty frontend website to impress a visually oriented client. Roles are stratified for a reason.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#138

Post by fian »

noirbot wrote: post #117
duxup wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abo…

A few companies I have worked for have had a strict no gifts policy. Many of our customers had similar policies, to the point that we couldn't even pay for a customer's coffees if we have a meeting at a cafe.

These policies are aimed at preventing even the whiff of bribes or favoritism wrt purchasing or awarding of contracts.

Mostly this was in the Oil and Gas industry. We had a few mining clients that were less strict wrt gifts/swag. I now work in the banking industry where there are strict regulations against bribery, facilitation payments and many types of gifts.

So I find it a bit weird to hear that sellers provide "swag".

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#139

Post by Spooky23 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #109
kryogen1c wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ad…

I get what you’re saying but that data isn’t meaningfully protected by HIPAA, and is pretty trivially derived based on available data.

Data brokers for pharmacy have your prescription data, your doctor is not protected information and other aspects of your care are available to many entities for purposes like insurance subrogation that also create data products.

HIPAA protects you from gossiping clerks at health facilities and HR. It prevents the use of some bad IT practices, and forces you to sign lots of disclosures. That’s about it.

If you want that type of information to be private, don’t collect it or don’t share it with 3rd parties in an accessible form.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#140

Post by Spooky23 »

solo754 wrote: post #68
ryanSrich wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a founder, not a sales person, but we don’t have any sales staff. So I, along with my CEO, do all of our demos. We split the responsibility. Our product does many things, and I could just speed talk through a demo. But I don’t. I directly ask the person what they want to see, and how they feel we can help them. If they don’t know, that’s fine, I have material prepared. But I’d much rather you tell me how I can he…

Yeah, I have been in calls like those. Despite me pushing for "can you show me what your product can just do?" I kept getting "Please tell us what you want first" and that finally culminated into a follow up demo call. The demo was super generic and nothing I said (except 1 item) was really considered). Frankly, by the time we were done I was zoned out and doing other things. If the CEO had considered to demo in the…

This is why I laugh every time I hear that salespeople are obsolete.

While some drone is pushing forward to collect their brownie points for identification of next steps, the people with agency are finding a solution to my problems.

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