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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> Yeah but qualify them by showing them the fucking software.

As a potential buyer, I immediately ask to get a pre-sales person on the call otherwise I'm not joining the call. Get's them to move pretty quickly.

The fact that you know to say that is a good enough qualifier in my mind. Only people who know how to buy know what presales even is.

After doing dev work for nearly two decades, I've been in presales for the last six years. I've definitely had a one or two intro calls with tech-savvy people who bullied their way past the BDR. These were smart people with good ideas, who had no idea what procurement at the enterprise company they just started working for even begins to look like, and it was 60-90 minutes none of us will ever get back, for a project that's never going to happen anyway.

I worked at a company where we jumped at every opportunity that we got, it's real nice to be somewhere now where there's a little more of a vetting process.

As some one running growth for a low code/no code platform for internal tools - we would want a qualification call to help the demo team with info that can then allow demo team to prep a demo which can make the call really relevant. Given how crowded our space is most of the times customer would have seen atleast 2-3 tools before and learning what they liked or didn’t like is very important.

If you insist on scheduling two calls with me where it’s a guarantee one of the two is completely fucking useless and irrelevant for me then you’ve maxed out your potential mean highest average relevance of a sales call to 50%. That’s your best case.

Maybe just work on a couple common use cases and get your team able to pivot and share the more relevant examples on a demo in the first call and aim a little higher.

Your software’s various applications are probably not each the special precious unique snowflakes you think they are. Just a guess.

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 fairly annoyed that I spent time on the call.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

IOW, if the customer were afforded just a little bit of price discovery the business would tank.

Lots of companies have interactive websites where I can input all my requirements and it outputs exactly how much I'm going to pay, with no human in the loop involved.

But then, how can they overcharge you if they realize you're a noobie?

The problem is that some customers pay 20k,some pay 2m. The range is too broad to make it as simple as filling in a web form.

And yet I can buy a car from a website even though cars are hardware that can vary in price by 5x or more.

That is still not a reason to hide price. At a minimum publish the range, but in the modern age these is very little reason a matrix or wizard could not be created to get that price.

A F150 is almost infinitely configurable, yet I can walk through the website and configure my dream truck I will never actually buy because it is the price of a home and I don't want to live in it....

Further still most of the time when I see companies hiding behind 'install and support' my Spidey sense star tingling

'install and support' starts to feel like buying a car where at the last step they start tacking on all these extra fees and 'services' and try to bleed you dry.

These kinds of calls should really just be emails. Forcing a synchronous meeting to essentially fill in a form is dumb.

Just turn down the calls and ask them to use email instead. You’re the customer, you make the rules.

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.

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