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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

#61

Post by manv1 »

bagels wrote: post #16
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,…

Is anyone who is not a health care provider even bound by any PHI rules?

Yes.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...

Note that this is a high-level summary.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#62

Post by Kamq »

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.

The devs integrating with your solution are going to hate it at a certain point. This may or may not be your fault (underlying technical limitations you've papered over will look like your fault from the outside at a certain point).

Devs hate basically everyone else's code.

A t-shirt (or jacket, or water bottle, or whatever) is a surprisingly cost-effective way to turn "I hate this" into "Sure it has some quirks, but have you seen the other options?"

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#63

Post by manv1 »

asyncscrum wrote: post #35
gmfawcett wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting use of the word hygiene... can you expand on what salesforce hygiene means to you?

It basically refers to data in salesforce being complete, accurate and input in a consistent way. It's a term used around software apps that drive decision making and are useless without the criteria I mentioned.

It's funny how much people hate Salesforce. People used to say the same thing about ACT back in the day. I mean, SF is a total POS, but whatever.

I'm not sure why these sales tools have to be so crappy. I guess there's a market for good sales tools. The Marketing CRM tools (hubspot et al) are much nicer.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#64

Post by HatchedLake721 »

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#65

Post by 0x457 »

jedberg wrote: post #31
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't that depend on how they know that information? If that's Jenny's boss on the phone and she shared that with her boss so she could claim FMLA benefits and days off for health reasons, doesn't her boss have a duty to keep it private?

No. HIPAA is about sharing PHI between covered entities. P stands for Portability. Unless Jenny is working in one of those covered entities and Jenny's boss learned about her covid and pregnancy by pulling PHI - then no, it's no under HIPAA.

Her boss doesn't have a duty to keep it private in any legal sense. Jenny can ask not to tell anyone, but legally, it doesn't matter.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#67

Post by throwaway432897 »

asyncscrum wrote: post #11
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 is a good question. Regarding letting customers talk, the teams that were most successful had great salesforce hygiene, and teams with great salesforce hygiene were required to fill in certain data points. This means that there are commonly asking questions and listening more than talking. Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of the data that they provided in salesforce as wel…

> Regarding letting customers talk, the teams that were most successful had great salesforce hygiene,

CRM hygiene is not correlated with sales success in my experience, but I’ll grant that might be different depending on the market segmentation a given sales rep works in (specifically, it is more important the smaller and thus more numerous a set of customers that a sales rep covers.) I’m a sales manager of a team that has consistently, over a period of several years, been the #1 revenue producer for a large cybersecurity company. Our reps have atrocious CRM hygiene. I spend a ridiculous amount of time chasing them to do the bare minimum to keep the people who care about CRM hygiene off our backs and to handle the one part of the CRM data set that is actually important (accurate opportunity forecast categories are commonly used to drive product demand/manufacturing/capacity planning forecasts.)

> Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of the data that they provided in Salesforce as well as quota attainment.

Sales reps are judged on things like “quality of data provided in Salesforce” only when their quota attainment is poor. There’s a reason nobody on my team has been fired or seriously reprimanded for basically ignoring the CRM for years. It would be like firing Tom Brady for not writing down a play by play analysis of each game.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#68

Post by solo754 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #8
notaclevername wrote: post #2

The advice for sales reps to stop talking and listen certainly rings true in my experience. I see a lot of sales materials that are geared towards a scripted pitch: generic powerpoint decks, exhaustive demos, and boilerplate feature description flyers. There's probably a lot of value in sales teams having access to that kind of collateral, but I would wager that there's even more value in knowing how to step away fro…

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 first call I would've almost pushed to buy it right away but at the end we decided we'll just do a light weight solution in house with a few devs

Not that this works all the time. But the point is to listen to your customer instead of just taking a single approach and sticking to it

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#69

Post by colechristensen »

bagels wrote: post #16
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,…

Is anyone who is not a health care provider even bound by any PHI rules?

When information comes out of a relationship with a healthcare provider, it's PHI.

That information is tainted with the restrictions and keeps them regardless of where it goes. If it gets disclosed outside of that it becomes a violation.

So nobody working for a hospital you get care for can disclose things. Nobody the hospital hires to provide services or handle your data, etc.

You can sign away those rights or give your own information away.

If the data doesn't come up through a relationship with a healthcare provider, it's not PHI.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#70

Post by throwaway432897 »

perlgeek wrote: post #49
calvinmorrison wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a sales related role for the first time and it seems like half the customers expect and want a 'deck' and the other half balk at a deck. Right now we're tending to stick with just talking on a call rather than presenting glitzy materials.

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, ...)

That’s a nice theory that works better in theory than practice. Specifically, launching into a demo without having a common framework of understanding — terms, how the solution works at a high level, etc. is risky. Sometimes your prospective customer will understand the space where your product fits and you can safely conduct a demo (if that’s what the customer wants,) and sometimes they won’t know what they won’t know, say they “just want to see a demo and not a bunch of marketing slides” and will smile and nod during a demo of which they have little understanding and the meeting will be a waste of everyone’s time.

I’m not advocating for “show up and throw up”, but connecting with your prospect and giving them just the information they need/want is an art form, and simply asking them produces…mixed… results.

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