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Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

Wanted to reply to this as somebody's who bounced between pre-sales and engineering roles in the past.

For #1, what is most likely happening is that they are trying to maximize the use of the pre-sales engineer's time. I can't tell you how many demos I gave as a sales engineer, but I can tell you that the opportunities that progressed past that demo are much less than 50%. After a while, sales engineers can even grow resentful of their BDR or AE for what they view as wasting their time. You could probably maximize your chances of getting a pre-sales engineer on the call to demo it by clearly stating your pain up front and emphasizing you have a rapidly approaching deadline to narrow your options down to a final 2 or 3.

I completely agree with you on the rest of your points. It can be hard to find sales reps that do the fundamentals well.

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> opportunities that progressed past that demo are much less than 50%

Any sense of what industry norms are? 50% sounds astonishingly high to me. For most products I would have expected a pre-sales demo to be a pretty early step. 50% basically means everyone you talk to is committed to buy something and is only looking at 2 vendors.

It varies drastically by the business but I would say that it’s more on the magnitude of 10% or less (for enterprise sales, IME).

If you’re getting a 50% conversion on your demos then either your sales org has _really_ dialed in the target persona (qualifying everyone else out early) or your market is very wide.

I would suggest that there's a subtle difference between "progressed past the demo" and "converted". 50% progression past the demo is reasonable. 50% conversion would be amazing.

Yes, this is what I meant. I would say that for over half the demos I gave, that was my last time talking to that prospect. For the rest, some of them would go a few more meetings and fizzle out, and some would convert to actual sales.

Well If I demo a product and clearly see it's not fit for my org, what more is there to talk about ?

There are things that you can't really covey good in text or voice communications, but usually quick to see on the demo.

I hate companies that do this bullshit, as it’s fundamentally disrespectful of customers.

We regularly have to deal with this crap to prospect vendors for tech solutions. Some companies do multiple rounds of qualifications with people punching their KPI cards wasting my time. If you’re recording the calls, listen to the recording and stop wasting my time.

If we don’t need the vendor, we ghost you. If we really need the vendor, we have a process to flag it so that someone gets ahold of a C- or founder level contact in the company. That’s gotten at least 3 sales directors fired, and with the high level sponsor, we usually grind out a significant concession to close the deal.

Care to share stories of how you got the three sales directors fired?

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