BitcoinAddict

AE

Instead of attacking angry prospects, can we call out bad sales orgs and managers?

Who knows where this lands me here but I empathize with some prospects. The reason is, I have been a part of crappy sales orgs where the motto was pure "smile and dial", "handle objections", "be persistent" and "get that meeting". Oftentimes, we were coached to force people into meetings and it was treated like some silly little game. Cue the Bro Manager who wants you to treat cold-calling prospects like a sport where you must tackle and deliver a hard hit on the prospects so they submit to your meeting!

It's time we called out the bad practices that exist in sales today.

If you have done no research on your prospect, have zero knowledge of their day-to-day lives, no knowledge of their industry, and no knowledge of what their company is going through, then you deserve to get hung up on.

Instead, a lot of sales orgs simply try to get SDRs and salespeople to make 60+ calls a day, throwing crap at a wall until something sticks. They coach these young sales reps into being annoying little imbeciles who try to force people into buying something that is not a fit. Then we wonder why most prospects rather deal with a chatbot than some kid fresh out of calling pounding the phones.

Maybe we should put the onus on sales orgs to teach reps to be strategic, learn about the industry, and deliver value-driven messaging. That is a far better use of time than roasting a prospect that, like most sane people, is tired of an annoying SDR being pressured by his overcompensating manager to cold call them and "get that meeting!".

🔎 Prospecting

📞 Cold Calling

☁️ Software Tech

16

19 comments

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Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

8

ERP Sales

Imagine being extremely busy, potentially having to layoff members of your org. Then a 20-something calls you out of nowhere and continues to "over-come" your objection. It would get old real quick.

BitcoinAddict

Executive

3

AE

Hey BRO! Always Be Closing BRO! OVERCOME THAT OBJECTION BBBBBRRRROOOOO!

ZVRK

Politicker

3

Enterprise Account Executive

Got a call the other day from my health insurance company, some young dude surveying satisfaction with existing customers.

He was not even selling anything but i swear i had the feeling i was talking to a not so advanced robot 😀

Lord have mercy on our prospects if even half the calls they get are like the one i had…

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

3

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

That’s because half the time these surveys do turn into sales pitches. :)

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

6

☕️

The number of poorly trained SDRs due to poorly trained or managed sales teams is out of control due to the VC Rx of “grow at all costs”.

True B/SDR leaders are hard to come by in that it’s so hard to find one that wasn’t just a top performing rep thrust into the role by default. The skill set of coaching and development also needs to be coached and developed, a shortcut that is often made.

Don’t blame the loss on the opponent, blame it on your lack of prep, talent, or sheer will to improve.

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

2

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

It’s not limited to start ups. Big Tech went through a phase of ensuring the marketplace was saturated - ICP be damned, call everyone, value prop be damned. I sure hope they’re scaling back on that strategy.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

3

🦊

Fucking Marketo bullshit...😒

BitcoinAddict

Executive

0

AE

I want to hear more about this.

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

3

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Personal anecdote: went from "proving a concept" with my team one year, which involved having a huge territory selling a valuable, popular solution to anything that wasn't a named account. There was no account list, no limitations on what you could sell to if it wasn't named and was in your geo. The following year, the company told us they were going to add more structure and more reps due to our overwhelming success, but changed far too many things. Not only did they add reps, they added too many. This ended up with very limited territories. In my case, it went from many to part of only one state for me, with specific account lists in largely greenfield. There were a handful of accounts with existing company tech, but those accounts were extremely small and unlikely to buy. They'd done an "analysis" of potential ARR but utterly failed to read the data correctly. One of my target accounts, for a solution that was MAYBE $200K/year if you really cut the cost, was a father/son company that had been paying $3K/year for a very small solution. No way in hell were they going to pay any more than that for anything, regardless of "value" that the company was pushing. Those accounts were meant to offset the education and outreach to the greenfield accounts that would take many months to penetrate. Turns out the other thing the company got horribly wrong was the sales cycle. They thought it was 3-5 mos based only on the closed/won opportunities they looked at - completely failing to notice those won deals often followed many years of education and closed/lost opportunities because the accounts weren't ready to buy at the time, or we didn't have what they needed. It was an incredibly painful year to be a rep.

And of course, the company didn't care. Their numbers aren't tied to everyone making quota, just enough here and there. Telling me that I was lucky I had all of Northern CA - Trinity, Shasta, Modoc, Humboldt for those of you who know those are very very beautiful counties with no tech, when I lost my happy hunting grounds of the entire Bay Area - was completely tone deaf. Before 2020, that was the worst year in sales I ever had, immediately following one of the best. Not only did the company not change a damned thing after that, they doubled down on the bad plan.

Yes, Fox, totally the Marketo model of saturation and mismanagement of sales teams. All to make sure that they were scraping up every last potential sale because reps were reaching out to accounts that were never going to be able to buy, because the reps didn't have a choice.

This rep did choose - to leave!

CuriousFox

WR Officer

2

🦊

JFC - I am at a loss for words here.

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

2

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

It was insane! And of course, it was the fault of the reps if you didn’t like the plan. I mean, none of us figured the amazing experience of having huge geos and a huge number of potential accounts would last forever. What we expected was having to scale back on our geos, maybe halfway, and continue. But scaling back to around 1/8 the previous year’s geo with the added restriction of named accounts only - AND the same quota? No way in hell was anybody making quota in greenfield accounts in a year. Sales cycle was over a year - had the data been analyzed correctly, ops would have known that. <br><br>Favorite moment in that crapshow of a year: when ops came to a meeting later in the year to review data. They had a slide that stated the sales cycle of 3-5 mos. All the AEs saw that. I asked where they got that number, because it was wrong, our sales cycle was at minimum 6 mos, but was often over a year. They said “closed-won” opportunities in SFDC. Immediate pushback from the team and the valid “did you look at the account history too to find out how many previous opportunities there had been?”. Every single one had at least one prior opportunity that didn’t close - which meant the vast majority of these accounts weren’t open-to-close in under a year. They took a fair amount of time to penetrate, educate AND be ready to either roll off their existing Enterprise solution, or invest for the first time. The looks on the faces of the ops team when they realized their assumptions were completely off were priceless. AND this is also why I’m skeptical of any data-based decisions. Those are only as good as the analyst. If those ops folks had even asked the teams about their sales cycles, they’d have seen the discrepancy. A smart one would have asked why there was a discrepancy, and would have been able to figure it out and adjust expectations. Anyway, well out of that mess.

BitcoinAddict

Executive

2

AE

Plus the barrier to entry is so low in sales which I am grateful for but that is how it impacts the profession, too many guys who shouldn't have jobs have them.

ZVRK

Politicker

4

Enterprise Account Executive

I share your opinion on this, 100%. Incompetent and inconsiderate sales reps not only give sales a bad rap with prospects, but with society in general.

Movies like “The wolf of wall-street” and “the boiler room” don’t hep either 😀

It is what it is and I don’t really see how things might change for the better any time soon.

As the sales tech stack increases year on year, and as management tries to base their decisions more heavily on numbers alone, i can see how the push for meetings and high pressure sales will not loose on intensity any time soon..

oldcloser

Arsonist

3

💀

I’ll soapbox this one. I totally see it the same way. If sales managers were as good at focusing on and developing talent as sales people are at focusing on and developing business this might be different.

HVACexpert

Politicker

5

sales engineer

Just cuz you’re good at something doesn’t mean you can teach it. I’ve seen lots of good sales people fail as managers, completely different skill set.

Not many can do both

Pachacuti

Politicker

1

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

It’s a fine line between being persistent with a real business solution and being an annoying little snot.

A good sales org highly encourages a lot of prospecting and something even the best SDR/ sales person will come across as annoying. And some prospects are just too into themselves and self important to respect someone else just doing their job.

If you have a young sales org I would hope you’d provide encouragement to get to know the industry and take a little bit of time to know who you’re calling. But it’s tough when regales of the company culture you still need to fill your funnel.

Maximas

Tycoon

0

Senior Sales Executive

Do like the idea, extremely out of the box, Hats Off!
The only question I have here though is whether you've tried that actually with your pushy managers- only if you have any-and what was the outcome:) ?

cloudsecops

Member

0

Account Executive

It’s all about the guys on top. We’re just well paid pawns in their game.

detectivegibbles

Politicker

0

Sales Director

Prospect with empathy. Keeping a disgruntled person on the phone usually won't turn out well for you...why?

Say no worries, now's not a good time then hang up and keep dialing.

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