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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

#21

Post by jedberg »

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 it was more along the lines of "Jenny isn't on the call today because she's out with COVID, which is extra bad because she's pregnant".

It's not HIPAA protected because that person isn't Jenny's doctor, but it's still PHI.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#22

Post by asyncscrum »

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,…

True, will update the article. I still found it somewhat surprising.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#23

Post by kryogen1c »

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 constructed of its component words - its a specific legal term under hipaa. Any (noncovered entity) company can ask you anything about your health and it doesn't matter - airlines, restaurants, event venues, etc. They're allowed and it doesn't have anything to do with hipaa and they are not collecting/storing PHI.

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.

If you want to boycot somewhere asking about covid or whatever - get down with your bad self. It just doesn't have anything to do with HIPAA.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#24

Post by captainmuon »

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 quoted price is completely different from what is listed, and there are arbitrary surcharges. Isn't there an easier way? Yes, but the pointy haired boss decided we have to go the proper route. Funnily the reseller had a very trustworthy name like "usedserverdiscount24.de" or something.

The worst one was when I was trying to get some antivirus licenses. We were willing to spend a lot on Sophos, because it had good reviews, we were happy with the trial, and so on. But the reseller tried to upsell us, insisted we buy matching firewalls, and so on. So in the end we stuck with Windows Defender (we got a bunch of licenses for Advanced Threat Protection from MS for free).

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#25

Post by jedberg »

> The only people who were in a gray area around promising product functionality that didn’t exist were founders.

I'd like to expand that to CxOs as well. I sat in lot of sales meetings with small startups where the founder or other non-founding CxO would promise new features, and then when we met with the engineers to do the requirements, they would tell us the feature was impossible or would take a year+ to build.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#26

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jedberg wrote: post #21
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 it was more along the lines of "Jenny isn't on the call today because she's out with COVID, which is extra bad because she's pregnant". It's not HIPAA protected because that person isn't Jenny's doctor, but it's still PHI.

No, it's not. That information may be "HI", but it's not "PHI", that is the "protected" part has a specific legal definition under HIPAA, and nobody in that call has any additional legal requirements based on the fact that someone said Jenny is pregnant.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#28

Post by cercatrova »

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…

As someone that's done sales, it is very important to qualify even incoming leads. I can't count how many times I wasted my time because the person who thought they wanted the product actually wasn't a good fit. After I implemented a lead qualification pipeline, that number dropped dramatically and the leads that did qualify were, predictably, much more likely to buy.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#29

Post by asyncscrum »

ipaddr wrote: post #14
s1k3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales calls are recorded for a number of reasons. Most of them good for the customer. You should be happy people want them recorded it means they care

Please explain how I as a customer benefit when sales records a meeting. Usually it is rarely shared to me.

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 sit in cloud cold storage until they expire and are deleted, never to be heard again.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#30

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

Thanks, you're correct. I didn't mean to imply that PHI was defined by willingness to share it, I meant that the whole reason for "protecting" HI in the first place is for giving control over that information to the people it's about.

A specific example: I work on an app that does include HIPAA-regulated PHI, and sometimes I'll demo stuff in production by demoing my own personal account. I usually preface it by saying "This is my account, so it's OK to share" so folks know I haven't just pulled up someone else's data. If I had pulled up someone else's data and shared it without their consent, that would be a HIPAA violation.

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