SgtAE

AE

OG Sales Savage

Enterprise AE's are slowing down deal velocity?

Hey team, having some trouble with deal velocity at the moment.

Hybrid inbound and outbound, have been booking meetings with clients and doing initial qualifying meetings.

AE's don't want me to book in on their calendar, so they ask for an email introduction.

The last three meetings I've had I introduced my AE's via email but the reply emails from the AE's are coming >72 hours later. So at a minimum it's 3 days before the client even hears back vs me being able to book time on the calendar directly for the next step.

I've got one in the pipeline at the moment waiting for the introduction, but am looking to get 3-4 before i approach my manager again for this.

Currently doing:

Tagging my manager via bcc on the introduction emails
Messaging my AE's on slack to ask them for bandwidth and to introduce themselves
Tagging my manager on opportunities generated via salesforce

My Ae's are used to inbound qualifications, but introduction calls with stakeholders with no buying intent initially but are open to a discovery call they are murky on.

Advice on how to work with this?

🔎 Prospecting

☑️ Qualification Calls

9

11 comments

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Diablo

Politicker

6

Sr. AE

That's sad. Reaching out in 72 hrs is not a great memory for prospects. Why don't you ask your manager to set up an automation where when you create a opp, an auto email from your AE goes to the prospects?

CuriousFox

WR Officer

5

🦊

Calls get booked in SFDC as well as an intro email sent. As an Enterprise AE I can tell you we are constantly moving in other deals and prospecting. So yes it's annoying AF when we get a "qualified" lead that the buyer has zero intent. On the other hand, it only takes a few minutes to call the lead to see what's up. I have no problem with it or with marking the lead as invalid.

LordBusiness

Politicker

4

Chief Revenue Officer

Find a new company. Nothing annoys me more than "AE's" who think they are bigger than the job. If I had an AE who didn't respond to a client potential meeting in 3 days, and wouldn't take a meeting unless the customer had "buying intent"........lets just say I wouldn't have an AE. When did this happen, when did the profession of selling that I love so dearly become glorified order taking?

braintank

Politicker

1

Enterprise Account Executive

I'm still baffled why your AE's don't want you to book them meetings?

What you're describing sounds like the worst possible outcome.

You've done the work of getting the prospect to commit but are asked to throw it over the fence to before the prospect actually commits.

It's going to impact your metrics (assuming you're paid based on meetings/pipeline and it's poor form for the AEs and ultimately impacts their funnel too.

SalesBeast

Politicker

1

Sales Leader

72 HRS???!? My VP Sales is on my ass after 7.2 minutes of not replying to these inbound inquiries, or he will do it for me and follow up if I am on calls within minutes.
No way is 72 hrs acceptable.
Early bird gets the worm and sets the pace.

DungeonsNDemos

Big Shot

1

Rolling 20's all day

this is like sales 101..
Time is everything. Do you have any idea why they are dragging their feet to send an email that takes 20 seconds? Are they truly that busy or is it apathy?
As an AE myself, I want to pack my pipeline as full as possible to make more money.
I would definitely recommend asking them first after this happens 3 times to see what is actually going on.

I wouldn't immediately blind copy your manager as that might cause bad blood between you and the AEs. But down the road if they keep doing this after having the discussion then YES, I would look him/her in on emails.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

1

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Time kills deals. I can't imagine not even reaching out to a prospect in three days - qualified or not. It takes very little time.

PhlipOut

Politicker

0

Account Executive

please book them in MY calendar

SQL

Contributor

0

Senior Manager of Sales

This is insane. The manager of the AE’s should be correcting this immediately.
Same AE or multiple that act this way?
You could ghost write something for the AE and send to them for each email intro. Something simple that doesn’t take you long and the AE just has to hit send on. Helps you in the short term but this is a major red flag.

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