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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

#71

Post by throwaway432897 »

nickjj wrote: post #45

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 an…

> 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.

Joke: what’s the difference between a used car dealer and a software salesperson? The used car dealer knows when he’s lying to you.

Having been in B2B sales for a while now, if I was on the buying side I would never listen to an answer about a product feature/function from an account manager (the “business sales” person in your example) — only their sales engineer (the “someone who is more technical”.) If the SE lied, I’d never buy anything from their company for any reason.

Now, that said, documentation is sometimes out of date (although a better way of answering in those scenarios is for the SE to say something like “we didn’t do that until version x.y which came out/will come out last week/next month, etc. and our documentation isn’t up to date.” And, sometimes, prospective customers do “2-3 full days of hardcore research” and aren’t nearly as “super prepared” or knowledgeable as they think they are.

So, I guess be open to the idea that your SE understands their product better than you do, but if they really are slinging BS, run. Expect the account manager to be wrong about the details of their product (there is a reason SEs exist, and it isn’t because tech companies enjoy an artificially high cost of sales.) so don’t listen to much they have to say about product features.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#72

Post by throwaway432897 »

s1k3 wrote: post #13
mtmail wrote: post #10

> In most sales orgs, calls are being recorded by Zoom, > Gong or Chorus. To my surprise these calls are littered > with countless discussions of health. IMHO that sales calls are recorded is the bigger issue. People talk about their health in video chat because they feel it's a private conversation. I wouldn't shame people for talking about private matters but rather question why 1000 sales calls were (long-term?) r…

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

I have never heard of B2B sales teams routinely recording sales calls (we would only do it if the customer asked, typically because they had someone who wanted to listen in to the call but who couldn’t make it) and am having a hard time thinking of good reasons to do this that would be a) productive and b) positive.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#73

Post by CallMeJim »

seanherron wrote: post #59
cercatrova wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#74

Post by makeitdouble »

jedberg wrote: post #25

> 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.

I have been on the engineering side of this many times. I’s a judgement call: when it happens that feature was usually only a checkbox to be checked, had little effect on usage, and talking with the client we came up with alternatives as they realized it will never happen.

Of course, other times it was really important, and the client gets pretty pissed off, but I’d expect startup founders misreading their clients that much to not last long and get recycled pretty fast. Basically they didn’t even bother to dig in to understand why the feature was requested and where it mattered.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#76

Post by odysseus »

> 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 get a new manager, unless you're proactive and finding out what projects/goals are really important to your new manager (and your manager's manager), it's likely that come layoff time that you will be the first to go.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#77

Post by chopete3 »

>> these calls are FULL of insights for product direction. >> There’s a good chance almost none of these insights will reach product and engineering

I am head of engineering at a small Enterprise Saas company. During COVID, I ran the pre-sales for the company. I joined some SDR calls too. It changed my perspective on what direction really means for products. We not only increased our revenue but our go-live time went down significantly.

That is a non-scalable solution to address the issue of information loss but it shows there is more value to realize if there is an efficient way to tap into that information.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#78

Post by CPLX »

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.

They’re still talking to them.

They’re just wasting everyone’s time.

Re: I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

#80

Post by benjilb »

HectorComtura wrote: post #50

I was just reading this article and noticed that they were talking about salesforce data hygiene. So, we take transcription and use it to empower the reps to update salesforce to fix this (Comtura.ai). One of the things we noticed from user interviews was that they'd actually just be ctrl + F'ing through gong or zoom transcripts to find the right information. Whilst the overlay (Dooly/SP) is something we offer. We ac…

Isn't this what Gong does too - syncing talking points back into Salesforce
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