Hi War Room, this is my first post so please be gentle.
I recently started at my new company, a software vendor that is [WORLD'S BEST SEARCH ENGINE] first ever channel partner for [WHERE YOU PUT YOUR EMAILS] and [WHERE DEVOPS BOYS WORK] in Indonesia. Ever since then, we expanded our inventory to [THAT OTHER DEVOPS PRODUCT], [THE ONE THAT HAS TEAMS], [A LIVING FOSSIL ERP], and some PLG products like [THAT ONE FAMOUS WORK MANAGEMENT PRODUCT]. For 10+ years, they have been reaping the rewards of selling [SEARCH ENGINE] products and it has shown. I think we average around $1-2M MRR just from [THAT SEARCH ENGINE PRODUCT WHERE YOU PUT EMAILS]. Other products? They are doing okay.
I was hired through a product's (a very famous work management, number 1 on G2) AE (which is a separate post in its own right), the down-low was that [THE WORK MANAGEMENT PLATFORM] is not happy with my company's performance as a Channel Partner. The AE liked me and made it his/her mission to embed me with my current company just to handle this product.
My thought was, "How bad would it be?"
And ooh boy, was it bad.
Not to brag, but I came from a modern sales organization where there's SDRs, BDRs, everything is in HubSpot and every AE (which is me) works on important things on the day-to-day. I am used to the modern hypergrowth sales settings. Seeing my current company now, I am very dissappointed.
Before I get into the details, my question is:
How do I tell my management that our current sales practice is not even scratching the standards of modern tech sales? And how do I propose reworks and revamps of workflows?
So, on to the deets:
- My company does not have a centralized CRM. Every rep tracks their own leads with a spreadsheet, every product team syncs every week to "catch-up" about clients and prospects.
- Since there are no CRMs, Account Managers' function is reduced to Renewal Chasers. Whereas their day-to-day job is to navigate a 9000+ line of customer data in Google Sheet and find out which one needs to chase for renewals. No, we do not automate quotations and renewals.
- All Asana customers are churning since there are no CSM/AM cadence. They cross-sell, sign a contract, and poof disappear.
- Did I tell you that there is no visibility on any deals and customers as a result of an absence of a CRM? Yep, every one communicates personally to get insight of any deal.
- Communication is officially done via Google Chat (which is pretty lightweight, I like it), but since there's no reinforcement for communications then everyone defaults to WhatsApp. (I got this on lock though, I don't respond to WhatsApp messages except from prospects or customers).
- Head of Marketing is quitting due to the inability of proper deal admin in HubSpot (which we failed to adapt), he has no idea what the ROI is and how any channel is performing. Management does not care (is what I heard), as long as it makes money.
- I don't use any sales tool such as LI Sales Nav, Lemlist/Apollo/Lusha for sequencing, and HubSpot is on their free tier. I create workarounds via Asana, which gives visibility to leaders and management. So far I've impressed them with my efficient work.
- It takes me 30-40 minutes to create follow-ups on five prospects and hours to send follow-ups on current deals. At the end of the day, I don't have time to do actual meaningful sales work like: Reading use cases, creating custom Asana boards for demos,
These are the details that is striking and on top of my mind right now. I'm sure there are more but thinking about it is stressful enough. I've only started last month and I'm just imagining the compounding stress I will gather from the scale-up of my small team.
War Room, help!
Edit 1 : I redacted multiple product names for safety. Sorry, community team!
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