Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time

minutes.technology

37 pointsbhd_ltk40 comments

Hey everyone, I wanted to share something I've been working on that I think could be really helpful for sales teams. Minutes is a startup that utilizes OpenAI technology to automate the transcription and summarization of sales calls.

What Minutes is doing can be described in 3 steps: 1. Taking your audio or video and transcribing it to text 2. Taking the most important and relevant information and creating a summary, including key points and the next tasks 3. Creating a follow-up email, including the summary points and next steps

Story behind it: As an entrepreneur who handles sales and marketing, I noticed a common challenge: the amount of time managers spend on creating call summaries and writing follow-up emails. Not only is it time-consuming, but it's also often a hassle to ensure accuracy. To tackle this issue, I decided to delve deeper and spoke with several sales directors. Turns out, this problem is widespread, and even salespeople themselves dislike the administrative burden it brings. Inspired by these insights, I created Minutes.

Call to action: Here's where you come in. Sign up for Minutes using the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service. I genuinely value your feedback and insights, as they will help us refine Minutes and tailor it to the specific needs of sales teams everywhere.

Thank you for your support, and I'm eagerly looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Warm regards, Bogdan, founder of Minutes

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I have a great method for keeping sales calls short, and pretty much 90% of my meetings are 30 minutes or less.

* Agendas: I do not take a meeting request without an agenda. 50% of the time this eliminates the meeting because either it's a few questions than can be an email, or they cancel the request because doing that is too much work. This is ideal when people are using meetings to transfer cognitive loads to other people.

* Time cap: All sales calls are capped at 30 minutes, no exceptions.

* Know yourself: I do research on the product/company beforehand in my own time, and know my needs so that during the call we can skip the parts I don't care about. This alone takes 60 minute meetings generally to the 30 minute mark.

* Take charge: I never let the salesperson lead the call. They're not the most important person on the call, I am. I'm the one with the need and the money.

* Limit the scope: I skip all the prelim questions where they "learn about your business" which is just looking for other opportunities to pitch me things. I know my business, I know my need, let's talk about how your product fits that.

While generally in the first few minutes it's a bit unsettling for the salesfolks, generally when I explain that my goal is to make this as quick as possible, the vast majority wind up appreciating my approach as they get off the meeting in 20 minutes most of the time.

The problem isn't how much time salespeople waste on summaries, it's how much time they waste overall. Too much glad-handing and not enough focus. I'd much rather see a tool like this help salespeople cut their pitches in half than simply making a summary email I'll ignore.

In general, MOST calls should be 30 minutes.

There are valid exceptions but with the increasing default to video calls one of the trends I favor is a general shift to 30 minute calls for most purposes.

Long pre-pandemic, as an analyst, I found that most topics could be covered in 30 minutes. If you were a client I'd cut some slack but otherwise 30 minutes.

Yeah, since I hit upper management in healthcare IT about a decade ago, I've been pretty firm about 30 minute limits and only RARELY do we go over. It's actually really great. After the initial shock they tend to like it a lot.

> I skip all the prelim questions where they "learn about your business" which is just looking for other opportunities to pitch me things. I know my business, I know my need, let's talk about how your product fits that.

The only way for the sales folks to tailor a demo or presentation for you is to learn about your business. Your method here comes across as very transactional and impersonal, you need a relationship with your sales rep as much as they need one with you so they will have your back or give you discounts. It's how the game is played.

>The only way for the sales folks to tailor a demo or presentation for you is to learn about your business. Your method here comes across as very transactional and impersonal, you need a relationship with your sales rep as much as they need one with you so they will have your back or give you discounts. It's how the game is played.

My POV:

Most of the time none of these things are only value-detractors, not value-adders. 95+% of the time I know what I want I just need a price and someone to hand me a credit card form for it. Very occasionally I have a specific need and am fishing for a solution. As for relationship and trust? There is a complete divergence of interests between me and people selling me stuff, there is not and cannot be 'trust'. Sure it is nice to small talk once in a while but that's really not why I'm calling.

Accordingly I divert my spend to the largest extent possible towards suppliers with transparent pricing, transparent technical data, and a friction-less sales process (Read: no synchronous communication requirements).

As an engineer, I am the same way. Since I’ve been working more closely with sales I have learned the overwhelming majority of people are not like this.

> The only way for the sales folks to tailor a demo or presentation for you is to learn about your business.

Yes and it's their job to do that, not waste the buying decisionmaker's time doing their homework for them.

Yeah, I work at a company that has a VERY clear website showing exactly what we do and what it's limited to. If you ask me what we do, that tells me you literally didn't even look at our website.

No we don’t need a relationship. It is transactional, and the fact that they think they need a relationship wastes time and aggravates me.

Yes it’s better for them if they “build a relationship” because it better enables them to upsell, but it’s not at all necessary or advantageous for the person buying the product.

I don’t need them to “tailor their experience” to me. I need them to be transparent about their functionality and the technical details so I can scope value and integration efforts. The sales people never want this because it easily exposes that they’re trying to sell me a lemon.

If you are a salesperson and trying to build a relationship with me then you need to stop. You are being a sociopathic douchebag, flat out. You are not actually interested in me or my problems beyond making the sale so stop pretending.

> The only way for the sales folks to tailor a demo or presentation for you is to learn about your business.

I know my business better than they ever will, and I care about it more too.

> Your method here comes across as very transactional and impersonal,

This is exactly as it should be and precisely what I desire from my vendors. We can become friendly along the way and over time, but at the start I only care about what you can do for me and what it costs.

> you need a relationship with your sales rep as much as they need one with you so they will have your back or give you discounts. It's how the game is played.

It's one way the game is played. I don't play it that way and after a very short time salespeople that work with me LIKE how I do it. It's fast, efficient, and their commissions are the easiest they have because I neither need nor want lots of handholding. Imagine I send you an email asking for $40k of equipment, and to make your $2k all you have to do is enter the order. Even better, imagine you have a 60 minute presentation, and I cut in after 5, ask a handful of very specific questions, and after 20 minutes I'm ready to buy because I got the info I needed. You've made a sale, and saved over half of your hour.

Don't play the game, run it.

Just as I do not need a relationship with a grocery clerk or used car dealer, I do not need a relationship with any salesperson. Interaction is formal and transactional.

> I skip all the prelim questions where they "learn about your business" which is just looking for other opportunities to pitch me things. I know my business,

My two cents...But do you know all the best practices? Let's say the product you are evaluating is used by your peers. It would be good to know what they use the product for or customizations they have gone through. For that the sales guys will need to learn how you are doing your business.

Yes, I do know. I talk to my peers. Why would any salesperson think they are more trusted than a peer?

This is interesting.

Are you familiar with products like Gong and Chorus.ai for call recording, and outreach.io for automated emails?

If I look at products like Gong it is very much a pain killer. It makes it possible for managers to coach their salespeople by reviewing sales calls and therefore close more deals. This however strikes me as more like a vitamin. It saves sales people some time from doing salesforce admin.

I'm in enterprise sales and don't see the immediate benefit. However a more transactional sale I could see this may be more useful, but then I wonder if in a transactional sale are salesforce notes important?

If you want a customer interview my email is in my bio.

Sure! Just sent you an email

Just want to share this initiative as well, where you can do it locally:

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/jojo-transcribe/id1659864300?m...

And open source: https://github.com/schibsted/WAAS

This is just the voice to text part

It is an interesting idea. Transcription isn't new, but the extraction of a list of actions and bullet points is intriguing. It would need to be better than what a sales guy could get by copy/pasting a transcription into ChatGPT, not because sales guys are going to start doing that, but because Salesforce could whip out a wrapper for such things fairly quickly easily, so you need to be wary of having a strategy that is easily repeatable by a big player who already has a vast amount of sales people on their platform.

That's a good point, I keeping that in mind, but you have to start somewhere. I think we could build some features, that will be both hard to replicate and have strong value, but what will require first customers and cashflow. Also, the fact big players will do the same is a good sign of a market for me. But definitely, something to keep in mind.

Don't offer to save 20%, that's a minor benefit. The sales team will still be working that time. Offer to increase sales 25%. That's a serious improvement. ((100-80)/100 = 25%)

This.

You can only reduce costs by so much. And each time you reduce them, you make it harder to reduce them further.

But if you can increase sales or increase profits, then there's no limit to how high you can go.

Focus on the positive things you can bring to the upside, not the things you can do to reduce the downside.

Good point, thanks!

This is great. This is one of the key functions of a digital PA.

Something I've been wanting Siri to be able to do for .. well, since I heard about Siri.

"Hey Siri, summarize that meeting we just had and email the summary and action points to everyone."

Cool! Please sign up at https://minutes.technology using the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service

I don't know about Apple but I know Microsoft is working on this. They've spoken briefly about all that. I think it was around the latest Build event.

Interesting. Would love to try it. What is a good way to record a phone call on iPhone? Or to record a meeting done in google meet?

You can use some call recording apps. like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rev-call-recorder/id1314427915 For meets you can use some screen recording apps, for ex. I use Vimeo Screen Recording extension for Chrome.

That being said, of course it is important letting people who are on the call know they being recorded.

If you would like to test the service, please sign up at https://minutes.technology/ using the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service

I was looking to sign up and see if it could work for our sales team but it looks like that is not possible without an invite code?

So it turns out that any keyboard mash will work as an invite code. You might want to make that a non mandatory field, it it's not required.

Yes, please use the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service.

I don't think naming a product an overly generic name like 'minutes' is a good idea.

Another way to save sales people time is to wear a t shirt that says “No, I don’t want it.”

Yeah, maybe instead of salespeople saving their time they could work to save our time instead.

What do you recommend to record meetings in non-intrusive ways?

I'd suggest you don't. If I found out a salesperson was recording my calls without me knowing I'd not only cancel any business with the company, I'd blast them to high heaven and back. Knowing a call is being recorded isn't "intrusive".

I share your sentiment but the reality is that many remote calls are recorded.

In many jurisdictions it's illegal to record people without their knowledge and consent and I would argue it is always unethical to do so. If you're going to record you should ask participants whether or not that's ok unless you're in an ongoing situation where recording is the norm and people have already consented to that.

Ok yeah that makes sense! Thanks!

Seems like a super-useful service. Do you have any kind of private/gdpr-compliant hosting options? I know that will be important for some folks before they put any kind of business-confidential matters into such a service.

That's a good point, the one I am working on right now. As is today - no, but will be in several weeks.

Cool. To set expectations, I'm not in the market (although your thing looks cool), but it's a request we have made to analogous services in the past so I wanted you to know that there will be enterprise customers who will ask for such a thing.

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