I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

I wish the people in charge of New Relic would read this

Buying from New Relic became so insanely difficult on an enterprise level that we just moved to Datadog.

Yeah but qualify them by showing them the fucking software.

It's gotten so bad out there that I've gotten to the point where I just refuse to do qualifying calls. When I can smell one brewing I just email and say I'd like my first call to be one where I can see someone using the software via screen share, or be given the opportunity to log in or have a test account myself. I don't care if I'm talking to a high school intern feel free to screen your big swinging dick's sales guy's schedule but then get your intern show me the fucking thing, the features, the screens, what it does, the basics of how it works.

If I start a call and it's happening I just ask if they're able to show me the software. If they say no, we'll schedule a future call for that I say great press the button in that CRM that qualifies me for that call and I'll log off now.

If they don't want my business good for them, they can run things how they like, but my time is valuable too and I'm the customer so if you can't show me the product fuck off.

As a customer who has been on a number of these calls, the thing I dislike the most is getting "yes" for every question I have. Just be honest with me.

Realistically I'm on the call with your business because I've put in a huge amount of research about your product or service, I likely narrowed things down to your service and maybe 1 or 2 others. I know a lot about the individual technical features of your service and your main competitors but didn't spend enough time to put it all together to solve every use case I might have -- only that your service so far looks promising.

I can't count the number of times where I'll bring something up and the person on the call (usually a business sales along with someone who is more technical) will flat out lie to us about something (even in a group call scenario), in which case I'll politely question that and reference their docs about it. They try to save grace by saying "oh yeah, our documentation must be out of date, sorry about that" or they directly lie about their competitors often saying so and so can't do xyz when they can and the easy out there is "oh, perhaps they added that recently".

It happens way too often to always have outdated documentation or information. Even after a 15 minute remote call you can get to know someone's mannerisms and the cadence of how they speak. It's not hard to tell when someone is lying or has much less confidence in what they're saying. I've gone with competitors for nearly 6 figure annual contracts because of these things multiple times when the decision has been pretty close.

If you're planning to be a customer, it's worth doing your due diligence to research things in a solid amount of detail before going into these calls. All it takes is maybe 2-3 full days of hardcore research to be super prepared. That's time very well spent to understand if a product looks like it will work for you as a first pass, especially so if you plan to bring other devs or a CTO into a future call to get contracts prepared and signed.

So this is something we're massively focused on at our startup (Comtura.ai) we integrate with Gong or can support teams/zoom/google meets to collect the transcript than allow it to update their CRM so they can focus on helping the customer / writing better notes to solve for problems with more accuracy & collect detailed product info (and ergo, consequently sell more).

So, prepare a deck and ask at the start if they want to see one? Just make clear what the alternatives are (interactive demo, just talking, ...)