Ownership, The Future of Sales, and Worklife 'fluidity'
Join Alex Morton as she discusses the Future of SaaS Sales and Worklife 'fluidity' with Alper Yurder, co-founder of Flowla.
Conversations with other hosts on founder-led sales, buyer engagement, LinkedIn and building a go to market engine. Watch each episode here or on YouTube, and read the transcripts below.
Join Alex Morton as she discusses the Future of SaaS Sales and Worklife 'fluidity' with Alper Yurder, co-founder of Flowla.
Alper Yurder, co-founder of Flowla, on building a minimum viable product, finding the right co-founding team, solving real problems and connecting with investors.
Alper Yurder, co-founder of Flowla, on the Scale Your Sales podcast. Alper is an expert in enterprise sales with over a decade of experience.
A masterclass with Alper Yurder, CRO and co-founder at Flowla, and Vlad Oleksiienko, VP of Growth at Reply.io, on tactics for buyer engagement at every stage of the journey.
Alper discusses the common pitfalls salespeople make and how to match buyer expectations, with Christina Brady, Hannah Ajikawo and Lisa Travnik.
A Linkedist LinkedIn audio event with a panel of speakers on selling through LinkedIn, from getting started to getting results.
On losing deals at the trial or POC stage, and how mutual action plans keep buyers engaged through to close.
Generated from YouTube captions. Punctuation, paragraphs and names were added or corrected and filler words removed; the wording is otherwise as captioned. Scale Your Sales #194 has no captions on YouTube, so it has no transcript here.
Hi, welcome to the podcast, Alper. Thank you, it's great to have you here. So just to give everyone a bit of information on your background, you're an ex sales leader turned founder at Flowla. Your sales career started way back in high school, when you were helping to grow your dad's construction business. You had a stint in consulting at, and Accenture. You then built and scaled MindGym from the ground up, so from zero to multi-million pound revenue, before moving to Witco, French company, as UK GM, helping to them to expand in the UK market. And now here you are today, having founded Flowla.
Yeah, congratulations. Thank you. So you're helping salespeople close more deals with the to Flowla. So let's jump straight into our questions. So we've got 10 questions for you today. So, Alper, you've worked for both massive blue chip companies, and obviously much smaller startups, like Flowla and Witco and MindGym. What would you say are the pros and cons of working for bigger companies and smaller companies? Let's start with the bigger companies.
Most obvious one is, like, with a big established company, it's all structured, everything is kind of there, you just go into like, let's try to figure out what's happening here, and let's be one of the other people, kind of mod, right? Versus when, in a startup, everything is new, everything is started from scratch. Yeah, so the pros for working a big established company, I think it really depends on where you're in life and what you want to achieve in life. So if you're looking for safety, stability, you're establishing your family, or starting a career, sometimes a more established place can be a little bit more no-brainer, yeah, to start things off.
But if you have a bit of a risk appetite, and you're at a place in your life where you can take risks, then I think going to start up as early as possible will definitely be my recommendation. Like, I was on a work permit, or, you know, financially I wasn't ready, so I couldn't take the risk that I always wanted to take. I find that people think the grass is always greener. So when I speak to candidates who are working at big companies, they're tired of it, they want to work for a smaller startup. People who work at startups, they're like, I don't want to do this anymore, it's so tough, there's so much ambiguity, let me go to the safety net of a, of a bigger company. So people tend to flip between the two.
And you mentioned on your, on your LinkedIn profile, so you close some mind-bendingly complex deals back when you were sort of on the, on the sales floor, that made you lose sleep at night. Could you share, is there any, me, memorable experience from that time, and how did you manage to kind of overcome that challenge?
Absolutely. I think switching from consulant to sales, my life has been about building territories, figuring out my stakeholders, and very large complex enterprise deals, where you have $5 million deal, you have a short amount of time where you have to manage, like, multiple stakeholders, sometimes up to 20, 30 stakeholders, really, across different functions. I remember myself closing deals with, like, Barclays, McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, or even, like, startups. There's one, very big one now, on a gr, Multiverse, which have now become like a huge unicorn. The complexity comes from having to manage a lot of ambiguity around stakeholders, different information to different people. I think sales is very, it's very scientific, at same time it's very human. Yeah, as sellers, I think what we're trying to do is advise people, project manage things, and then give them a lot of safety.
Yeah, you know, three of the main reasons why deals won't close is winnable deals, so things like, you will lose sight of insights about a deal, like you're left in the dark, so you're trying to create a bit of visibility. So I had that a lot, for example, in my life, which is one of the reasons why I started Flowla. Or, complexity. Unfortunately, you introduce a lot of complexity into the process, you send the wrong information to the wrong people, jump out of nowhere, you know, you haven't multi-threaded in the right way, ET, they don't know what is going on exactly. So, like, last minute, you know, deals falling into cracks, all of those things.
Yeah, been there. And is there any one sort of stand out that sticks in your mind, of like a particularly complex deal? Yeah, absolutely. I think the McKinsey one was definitely, we were trying to, so I used to work in a company called General Assembly, which is like an education technology company, upskilling 300 consultants coming into their workforce around data science, engineering skills, product management, like lots of different trainings that we had to deliver in 20 different geographies.
Wow, mean, it was all about stakeholder management. And I think my champion was very clear on what they want, but together we were a team of people building consensus with almost every function, every person in the business, from partners to it, who we, to convince, last minute, you know, somebody in the SDR team in India comes up and says, you know, like, well, you've done everything, but you haven't done this, etc. So a lot of like anxiety until the last minute, where you get the sign, there, just so, there's just so many things going on, so many that you need to pull.
Great. Yeah, I mean, definitely been there, I can relate to that. And you helped with Witco expand into the UK market, what were the unique challenges you encountered building out a whole new region? Good question. That's part of the reason I was like, okay, I feel like an extension of the foundry, if I'm doing it for somebody else, maybe I can just do it for myself. I think that experience led me to believe that I should be a co-founder.
I think it's a bit like the US of Europe, I always think of the UK, because a lot of markets are very traditional, the ways of working, how people do business, it's very relationship and personal based. Yeah, although the UK, and especially London, it's a very open culture, it's very professional, everything is very scrutinized, you have to follow processes. I think you have to be top of the game all the time, like topnotch, anything that you do, from your business development to how you close a deal, again, like project management, and showing the skills that you're able to deliver something, even at that sales stage, signals the right thing, that your product, or you, will be able to deliver the right product to people.
Which is not necessarily how things work in other countries, like in Germany, I think relationships come into play, although you would think that they're quite structured, and that might building that very long time. But I think the UK is a bit more innovative in many ways, in the ways of doing business and technology, so they're open to trying new things. Continental Europe, so, for example, when we were doing outreach in Spain, we were building the Spanish market, you'd get, you know, reply rates between 5 to 10%. This was just after covid. In the UK, you would, if you're getting 1%, I think that's a big success, today it's even worse. Yeah, gives a sense, tough nut, crack the UK. Absolutely.
Yeah, I often wonder how the UK is perceived by other countries, and people have lots of different opinions on that, but it's hard to tell when you're actually, you're from the UK, and you're, you know, you're working in the UK, I don't think I would be able to tell, like, how others see it, because all my career now is been in the UK, so I'm probably the outsider to them too. Yeah, there's definitely difference in culture. Yeah.
And you speak to revenue leaders every day, what do you think are the sort of top challenges that they're facing in 2023? Some of things might be quite obvious to everyone listening, but I would say three main challenges. One, scrutiny. MH. But budg freezes, people are still, I think, a bit afraid about the future, or at least the predictability is quite low, like what's going to happen. So spending money, I think going into Q4, it's going to be a bit more relaxed. But scrutiny and deal complexity is definitely increasing.
You know, a Gartner study shows that there's about 11 stakeholders in an average deal, at the moment. When the CFO wasn't involved in any deal, now they're suddenly in the picture, or they might pop up, you know, one month down line, when you're just about to close. So everything is a bit more difficult. I think the second one would be competitiveness of the market, like these days it's quite, how should I say, there's an abundance of products and services in every service line, it's hard to differentiate yourself, abely, it's hard to stand out. And when it comes to new business, I think it's quite critical. And I guess, you know, tools like Flowla help you very much with, I, I'm imagining that's part of the reason why you guys are using Flowla, to be able to stand out from the ground.
Absolutely. And the third one, I think, there's a def, definite shift from new business to retention. MH. And upselling. Yeah, because, you know, it cost about 30% less to actually maintain your existing client base, and it's bring onally, there's a lot more investment in that retention, that customer success piece.
And when you say scrutiny, from where, from the buyers, from budget holders? You know, for example, we have a lot of cases where Flowla is really liked a lot by the accounting, ex reps, who see the benefit, which is, they close more deals, they, it helps them with closing large enterprise deals. We have a lot of testimonials where they say, you know, I couldn't close it without you, they get the benefits. But when they go to the budget holders, you have to again show the value, you have to show, is it absolutely a must, or not, even with our product. I see that it has to be a must to have these days, not a nice to have.
Nice, exactly. In a lot of cases where we are already having, like, you know, 10 seeds or 12 seeds clients, they get that it's a necessity, and it's not a NIC, so you have to be a necessity. Yeah, you're constantly having to prove that value all the way through the process. Yeah, for founders kind of inly, your position was maybe a few months ago, or a year ago, looking to move from maybe product Le or founder Le sales, through, so actually building a sales team. Yeah, where do they start, or where did you start?
I think they start with themselves, it's the common story, you have to know how to sell first, your product, because nobody will sell it better than you. But not every founder has a sales background, or even those who have it, may not be able to crack it. I think you start with yourself, first of all, trying to create that first playbook, and as you bring that first sales high, you're iting, there's like three stages to building that sales team.
First, from zero to four, it's all about trying to create the playbook, who's your ICP, what am I, who am I, who do I actually serve, how do I sell this, how do I talk about it, etc. Building social proof, and once you kind of get a sense of that, from zero to four, and trying to create that playbook, it's a lot of inter iteration.
Then from 4 to 10, where I think we start making a lot of sense, and I get that feedback a lot. As a revenue team, you need to start building a bit of a lightweight sales process. Yeah, so it's not on your sales people, where you still, as a leader, you have ears on the ground, so you're trying to figure out, you know, being fed by that information from your people in the front line.
But what about your client success, what about your marketing effort, even like product teams. So it starts becoming a bit of a lightweight sales process, and by that I mean a structure of what is a deal for us, how do we run a deal, at what point who gets involved, from my side, from the client side. And it's really critical that everybody looks at the same source of truth, same picture, as a team.
Yeah, so you're not selling things that you're not supposed. Yeah, everyone has to be aligned on that, everyone has to be aligned. And at third stage, after 10 people, I think it's all about compliance, because it becomes a point of effectiveness, productivity per sales, R. Now we have our playbook, how do I adhere to the playbook, or how much deviation are we able to allow in compliance to the playbook? Yeah, I think that playbook is, it's the all important thing when you're looking to bring on new people, helps with the training, everyone kind of is aligned by this, by this playbook. Which, yeah, it's great.
A lot of your recent posts on LinkedIn that I've been seeing are to do with work life balance. So you do a lot of traveling, but also you've got a business to run, you've got deals to close. What advice do you have for sales leaders or founders, or just anyone really, for struggling, who are struggling to balance everything?
At the stage, I feel like asking the question back at you. But I answer, I'm the, I don't know the answer. One thing that I realized, as everyone else, you have to recognize, it's going to sound so cliche, but you're just human. Like sometimes you feel like you're the founder, you have to do everything, if you don't do this you have 18 months of runway, like you have to run fast. That is not true, I've been there, burn out, it's not sustainable. So now the rhythm I try to get into is, a, make sure that I'm not jeopardizing quality with quantity, even when you talk to people. Like the thing I like most about my job and life in general is, I'm curious about people, get to know them, talk to them, if you're not following up, if you're not showing interest, yeah, what's the point, right? You're lost.
Once you start focusing on quality, you realize the amount of time you need to invest in things can be a bit more limited. You can set limits to yourself about what you can do, or not, you realize that you're not a, you know, super person. The second point, a very practical tip that I try to implement, is now I just say to myself, you don't have to earn the free time, because, in my mind, I think it's the way I've grown up as well. Yeah, I have the free time. One last thing, and then all finish. Yeah, I often hear my partner from the other, go, the room going, like, it's dinner time, it's whatever. Give yourself one or two days a month, even if you're just going to stop, that's called a weekend, you have them every week, by the way, not once a month.
I think that was, yeah, I'm still work in progress, you know. From what I see on LinkedIn, they, this's, this new term, work life fluidity, rather than work life balance. Like some weeks you're going to go hell for leather, you're going, working around the clock, and then the next week you think, okay, I need to regain a bit of that balance, just have a bit more time, you know, those couple of days off, potentially. I like that concept, of we. I think our employees have that, yeah, you think? Yeah. You mentioned that being active on LinkedIn, you talking about connecting with people there, connecting with your prospects, connecting with people in the space, how was social media, personal branding, or just being active on LinkedIn, how is that played a role in your career and your ability to connect with people in the sales community?
To be honest, I don't think of it like a project, or something that I give a lot of thought into, on a day-to-day basis, I read about it. For sure the adventure started with, so I like travel, I have a micro blog on Instagram, so I like sharing, I like, I think I like sharing and I like listening to others. So when I post something, it's about, I'm trying to create some interaction in that, I want to hear you, what you think about it, I want to create a community. I think it's very deeply embedded in the psychology of, like, we are humans, we are connected, you know, we feel better when we're together. I feel like I'm an extrovert, as you can tell, and as an extrovert, I'm the person who go on an Uber ride and start talking, I get energy from that.
So for me, being active on LinkedIn is just the way I be, you know. And I feel like right now, as salespeople, especially those who are trying to be, trying to be active on LinkedIn, is really difficult, because it's very soul draining if you do it for the sake of it. Yeah, but if you realize that you're being paid to build a network, yeah, to speak to people, to advise them, to be their therapist, sometimes be the one on the therapy, I think it becomes a whole different game, it's becomes your life. Yeah, I think the thing is, what I found helpful is, just be authentic, like post things that you actually want to post about, or opinions you want to talk about, or a question you actually genuinely want to know the answer to, from people on LinkedIn. So that's what I found is a good place to start.
Is the Flowla team currently fully remote? Right, you don't have. We're remote now, we do work. Yeah. And you've managed remote teams previously, how do you cultivate that? Obviously every company has to have a culture, from AAR, from remote.
Again, I think the recip is quite simple, to put, their implementation is high. But three things: one, try to hire the right people with the right motivation. Yeah, so for me, a key word, one of our values is ownership. I think, remote work, I hate being told what to do. Yeah, I hate being my mom, manag, that was always how I felt. So I want to bring on people who want to be self determinant, yeah, self motiv, a better way to say it, that they know what the end goal is, and we're all adults, we can manage ourselves. So if you have ownership, I think it becomes easier, it's a sense of ownership, I say, is the cost of flexibility. Yeah, if you own your thing, fine, do whatever you want.
Those rituals, culture, that you mentioned, every two weeks we get together on a Friday, sometimes it's awkward just to talk, try to talk to people on Zoom, so we just play games. Yeah, and it's really fun, everybody brings their own games, I completely recommend this to everybody, like board games, or like online games, these websites where you try to draw things, it's just so much fun, you have a drink, and it's just, nobody's talking about that, yeah, my week was this, that we do that too, but it's just get together, what we seek as indiv, as humans, as psychological proximity, and we try to create that. But there's a limitation to it, physical proximity is needed occasionally, in my opinion.
So every month we'll get together, we'll sit one day in a room, we work like crazy, I say crazy like all day. Yeah, and we do it with fun and enthusiasm, because we haven't seen each other, we all get energy from it. And we do our, you know, quarterly dinners, we do our, we just did our very first retreat, some islands, and we went to some islands in Turkey. Okay, love. Yeah, and it was just the best time, physical, now and again, you need that, but it doesn't have to be, can find space all day over. Yeah.
You're just talking about ownership and having that self motivation, how do you test for that during the interview process, do you have particular questions, or do you just get a sense from what someone's saying? That, for example, you can give people case studies, dayto day, you know, we're all humans, we can miss deadlines, like, how do you manage that situation? It's on you to let me know you're missing a deadline, not me having to discover it, you know, your delivery time, that something is not done. So, situational questions.
Okay, it's good, final sales themed question. What are your, this is quite a difficult question actually, what would you say are your predictions for the future of SaaS sales? That's probably three things I have in mind. G. Over the days of, oh, let's try this new shiny thing, let's spend some money on this, there's a bit of convergence happening in every sales industry, where people would be okay with, like, niche specialized products, now they're looking for something that can do a certain thing very well, but it has to do other things too, they can live with that. So there's that convergence.
What does it mean for sales, is there's going to be a lot more scrutiny, deal average sales cycles will be even more lengthening, which is why I think you need to be able to give the buyers everything that need, they need in their disposition, to be able to make their own decisions. 85% of selling is, this is research, and 85% of selling is happening internally, when you're not in the room.
So as a sales person, you have any control, buy enablement tools like ours will be much more important, because your buyers are looking for autonomy in their decision making, availability of information, and authority, they want to look good when they're doing the internal selling for you. So I think bu enablement is going to be really important. Reducing complexity is going to be important, because 26% of deals fall into corrects because of introduced complexity, go SE people. Yeah, and that happens much more when you have a SaaS product, where you think the product selling is repeatable, versus it's still a human that you're dealing with, so they still, the fear and anxiety, and they're not giving you their time to jump on a call again and again. So what do you do in the absence of that?
You need to be able to do all that acing again. I think, freedom, just like we no longer ask people to take our pictures, people are taking their selfies, I think selling is going to be much more autonomous, yeah, therefore doing that, buyer more autonomy, because at the end of the day, they're going to do what they want to do. There's no point withholding information, because they can go and find out themselves, there's no point in, you know, making it difficult to buy, you have to make it easy for people, comes away from you. Yeah, great advice.
So I have one final question for you, which is not related to sales. I know you're very passionate about traveling, you've done a lot of traveling around the Greek islands, and well, across the Mediterranean, so how many Greek islands can you name? I actually don't know the answer to this, so let's see how many you can name. I could only name six. Oh, wow, okay. So I guess, the main, I'm sure there's small islands. Name, I think you've chosen the specific ones, across the Turkish border, which are called Dodecanese, which are 12 islands. Okay, that's literally the translation.
Yeah, I can name too many, these, like the main ones. Like, yeah, I think the ones that people in the UK really want to travel to, they travel to a lot, are the ionian islands, so things like Corfu, Kula, the ones that I was thinking of. Absolutely. And then Ios, for example, very popular with. Okay. So we've got Corfu, Ios, Corfu, Le K. I think that's, I can go on points. I've been to 45. Yeah, wow, okay, well, then you get, you get bonus points, thank you. Yeah, more than 12, give me the bonus.
Well, that, it's great to have you on, Alper, and sharing your wisdom to our audience. See you again soon. Thank you very much, Alex, you've been a great host. My pleasure.
SaaS Insiders, welcome to this episode of our show. I'm talking to Alper Yurder, a co-founder of Flowla, and we cover a wide range of topics, from building your MVP, finding the right team to be a co-founding team with you, as well as solving the real problem and connecting with the problem to the level so that your investors understand it and they believe you're the best team to execute on this. Check out this short clip from the episode to get a taste of it.
And I think it's also super helpful that when you have a well-rounded founder team, where you have people who are building something from their own pain point, the story that you tell is just a very natural one. So if 10 VCs will refuse you, the 11th one will listen to you, and the 12th one will have a bit of, a, I don't know if it's right to say here, but the video for FOMO. And I think, with everything in the world, unfortunately FOMO really helps. So when you're talking to a few different people at the same time and starting to close around, suddenly people start having a lot more interest in you. We're covering much more in depth on those topics, so I recommend you to listen to the full episode right after this sponsorship segment.
This episode is sponsored by the SaaS Insiders Studio. We help SaaS founders build their minimum viable products, MVPs, launch quickly, find a product market fit, and grow from there. Studio works with non-technical founders that are on the pre-seed or seed stage to help them execute on their product vision. To learn more, go to my LinkedIn profile that you can find in the description to this episode, and shoot me a direct message there. All right, let's jump straight into today's episode.
The SaaS Insiders, I welcome you to this episode of our show. Today I'm joined by Alper Yurder. He's a co-founder of Flowla, and today we're going to be sharing with you his amazing story, how he turned out to be a founder in the first place, and he'll be sharing with you some of his learning experiences working on that, on this SaaS business, fundraising, and all the crazy stories that you have. But that's at Alper, and welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you for that. Thanks for having me.
For those who might not know you yet, if you could give one or two minute introduction on who Alper is, where you're coming from, background, what you're working on right now. Of course, we're up to, born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Move to Europe, then worked in quite a few different environments, a lot of countries: Italy, France, Netherlands, US. Start my career in consulting, being Accenture, and then moved to my first sales job, real quarter carrying revenue role, and from there I assumed a few different revenue leadership roles in different stage companies, from post IPO to Series A, and eventually I ended up becoming a founder.
So I'm happy to tell the story. I enjoy the sun, the sea, the nature most, and I also do blog from the Mediterranean all the time, bits, and it has interesting parallels between being a co-founder and a micro influencer, have to tell. Yeah, that's me. Well, probably coming from Turkey again, used to mountains, to seas, yes, the nature is getting used to that. You're getting pretty interested.
One thing I'm curious is, you're not a technical founder, right? So you come from like the sales background, like the management. It's, you have a really interesting story of how you turned out to be a founder. You mentioned that you were working as an employee, and that was kind of the route you wanted to take. Could you share with us and Cyrus what's the story, and what were, like, the say, their background, thoughts, what made you make that decision to say yes to become a co-founder?
Yeah, it's funny. I've been, I've been quite a risk avert person all my life. I tried to do the best, the right things, and avoid risk unless calculated, all that. So I've been an employee. I was also an immigrant working in foreign countries on a visa, so you need to be really a hard worker, good worker, good employee, promote, etc. You know, provide for family. And that's probably why I kind of shied away from being a founder for a long time. But people who know me, they always say, oh, you always wanted to be one anyway.
During Covid I took a sabbatical because I was a bit fed up with being an employee, and I said I'll take a break. And during that time I decided I'll never be an entrepreneur. I enjoy my salary, I enjoy my safety, I enjoy remote work too much. But then the idea of Flowla started coming up, and my co-founders, I know them for a very long time, friends from uni. The idea is something that was basically solving my own problem, and a lot of stars aligned.
And in my last role, as a, I was a GM for a Series A French startup, basically starting the company in the UK and then pre-launched to the US. So I was kind of the first guy on the ground on many things, building things from scratch. I almost like a founder, instead of doing it for somebody else. I might as well do it for myself. And then, I, in two days, I decided to join as a co-founder.
That's an interesting journey, like in two days. So what was, like, the decision making, like, from I'm never going to be an entrepreneur to let's do it, I'm a co-founder now? Yeah. I think I've been really lucky. I always tell my co-founder, our CEO, if it wasn't for you I would never do it. I think some people, I know, they're entrepreneurs in heart, and I think I might be one. But, as I said, the risk-averse, this was kind of stopping me from being one.
But Flowla is a product that we are building from my own pain points, and selling, like selling is a very complex and difficult job, especially nowadays, everybody knows the pressures. So it's a tool that we started to solve my own problems. So it's something that I believe in, I, I'm invested in. My co-founder team was kind of a no-brainer between us. We're like almost like a dream team, in that we have the skills, sales, technical co-founder, engineer, and then a product guy who has four exits in his belt previous to that.
And just typing, I guess, personally, in my life I was like, okay, if not now, if not with these people, for this product, when else am I ever going to do it? And so far so good. One thing I like is you mentioned you're basically scratching your own itch, meaning solving your own problem. Could you talk a little bit more about Flowla, for those who are just finding out about this product, like, what's a speech, basically, like, what does it solve?
Yeah, of course. The funny thing is, as a founder, you start building a product and it takes its own life, and as your users start using it, they kind of start telling their own story of what your product is. So, you know, you starting from somewhere might not end up being the same thing as what people are using it for. In a nutshell, what Flowla is, I used to be in sales. I used to be the one closing, building teams, seeing everything from the first contact with a client to closing a deal, to onboarding, and then being a leader to make sure that everybody else is doing those things.
So there are a lot of issues and problems and complexities in all that process, but probably the ones that are most important is sales is a very complex process, where you have to engage a lot of stakeholders. You have to keep their attention constantly on your deal. You have to bring new stakeholders to the game. You have to pitch the same thing again and again. I used to close multi-million dollar deals, like 50 stakeholders across the globe, the client doesn't know, they are counterparts in different countries. So you, as a salesperson, are the project manager trying to close a deal.
So it was very difficult, you know, lots of documents, lots of WhatsApp channels, Slack channels. And I said, like, can we just have one single link where all of this happens? Can we have one single place where the buyer and the seller and all their stakeholders can engage and collaborate towards closing a deal? And as a result, we start building Flowla, which helps you grab attention, which helps you shorten the sales cycle, because instead of sending 20 emails, ping-ponging, basically you just have one single link.
And, in one, in a way, our power users are closers or sales reps who define it, like, here, everything is there, you know, go to my Flowla link and just check it out and let's talk there. And that's what it does for people at the moment. One really powerful thing you said is your initial idea of what your product might be might end up being something totally different, because your users will tell you what they really want. Could you elaborate a little bit on that? Because a lot of times founders have the syndrome of, like, this is my baby, this is my vision, like, this is what I want to build. And sometimes that help, that kind of makes them overlook the feedback of their actual ideal customer profile, and as a result is to, like, kind of go in their own direction, like, regarding, disregarding the user feedback. What's your take on it?
Of course. I think that's a great learning experience being a founder. And just for me, switching from sales guy to pro product builder has been about getting feedback. You know, maybe as an employee, or in your life, you don't really love feedback. Everybody says they love it, but everybody hates it, basically. It hurts you. As a product builder, feedback is great, because that helps you get to success as soon as possible. So if you have users who tell you something, you listen to them. And as more and more people tell you the same story, you start listening even more.
What I'm trying to say is, basically, I started building a product to close complex deals, but as we started building Flowla, a lot of people started using it for outreach, to make a first great impression on the first contact. Others to help push a deal towards the next step. We have client success leaders who use it to make sure that sales people are not selling wrong things, and then promising, you know, wrong things to their clients. So basically, when you build a product, it starts being used in a certain way by a certain group, and then you, as the founder, have to decide where is the quickest route to success, and therefore you start doubling down on it.
Although you let it live in different ways, you double down on something. For us, for example, when we started first fundraising, we were fundraising with Flowla. There are recruitment companies who use it for hiring. It's a bit like Notion, really, like it's a bit like Notion, but much more human. And, you know, you can have many use cases, therefore you let people to have those use cases, but then you, as the founder, decide where to double down, which guides what kind of product, what kind of futures you build further.
And just to make sure I got this correctly, you are fundraising with your company and you're using Flowla for that process, right? Yeah, it's so funny. We started, okay, close complex deals with Flowla, because this helps you visualize the buying process to your buyer and handful them towards closing. And also it gives you a lot of insights about what's happening behind closed doors, like we get actually insights, like who's viewing your content, what are they looking at, are they sharing it with other people. All of that, you know, really dopamine moment for the seller, where they get a notification somebody's checking your content, spending more than two minutes on a case study or something.
But this applies to many different use cases, which, it started taking its own life, as I said. And for example, we closed our round with investors by using Flowla. So we fundraised using Flowla. We have an investor flow, I think, in the right terminology people call it data room, people use it as a data room, because at the end of the day you share your pitch, your team, your different documents, and then potentially investors come in, they look. And it's really cool when you're basically selling your product with your own product, or, you know, fundraising for your product with your own.
I, at some point, with one of our early stage investors, we had 40 people from that company coming in to check a flow, and we were like, okay, these guys are gonna probably put some money into Flowla. Yeah, that's what I love about this. It's like, it's the best, like, demo in the world. You invite them to use Flowla for this deal. It's like they can feel it themselves how easy that makes it. So that's pretty cool.
I assume all the feedback you get from users is, well, helping you come up with the roadmap for future development. But when it comes to the initial built, I know, of the year we talked a little bit about, like, MVP, how your co-founder was building it himself. When it comes to that, to that journey, and when you launched for the first time, get feedback, what do you think are the principles that apply to building an MVP? What do you think are the components to make it successful?
From your non-technical perspective, a lot of times a lot of SaaS and Cyrus are non-technical, and for them sometimes it's hard to talk technical terms, to talk features. So, what, what's your take on, what, how would you approach, like, building an MVP if you were to go back in time? Of course. I think those early days are really valuable, and really a joyful euphoric time, where you're getting a lot of feedback from different people. So you build something, you put it to the world, and you try to get as broad a feedback as possible from people who touch the pain from different angles. You know, when we first started building Flowla, and I was kind of acting like, you know, advisor to Adam and those who were building it at the time, just before I became full time with Flowla, I was kind of approaching from a complex sales point of view.
But I know that they were speaking to a lot of people who have, like, high velocity sales, basically, who do a demo and then in one month they close a deal. My experience was closing a deal in a year if I'm lucky. So getting that kind of broad feedback from different people, I think, is really helpful, because it feeds you with a lot of feedback. And before you decide, okay, this is the majority of feedback, therefore I'm going to double down on that, I would say use that time, because it's the most luxurious time to go out and speak to people without an agenda.
And I would try to, you know, although I'm a consultant, so I like to approach everything with a hypothesis, and that time is the time where you don't need a hypothesis, you can just, you know, collect different hypothesis from people. I don't know if that answers the question, or maybe I lost my train of thought there, but that would be the first very important feedback. Like, use that first time, first few months, maybe six months, whatever, just to collect as broad an area of feedback, talk to as many different people as possible.
So at that time, when we first had an MVP and we were opening it to our first network, I was talking to headhunters, recruiters, others, founders, sales people, anybody who we thought could potentially use this product. From your personal perspective, do you think your MVP, like, how would you describe it? Was it just enough to get launch? Was it like too little, you think? It might have been a bit, a bit more viable, or do you think it was actually like too overworked for the first time? What do you think?
Yeah, it was. I think one of our chances is that we have a really strong founding team and a product owner and the technical co-founder at the same time, who believe in, like, doing things properly, in the right way. I don't think Flowla was ever a clunky tool. The first impression the tool gives, everybody has always been easy breezy. I can't believe, you know, how fast you've kind of built the MVP, etc. I can say these things easily without being humble, because basically those two guys started it and dated it. If it's not my doing, then I can be even more, give more credit, which I will.
And at that stage, I think the MVP was quite easy to understand, and as we started opening up to people around, maybe like March, April, so they saw the benefits. And especially I remember very clearly thinking, you know, working with other SaaS businesses, etc., before, or selling to other sales people, you know, everybody agreed that it was a very easy breezy product, easy to understand, well built, not clunky. So, once you have that kind of simple, not clanky version, go out with that, because I think people feel comfortable giving it a go at that stage.
Do you know how much time it took your co-founders to get the first version out in the water? Oh yeah, of course, from December to, I think, November, December, I had the very first version, and in March we had proper working version. Yeah, but was it like, did it take you long, two weeks to get the first MVP out there, maybe two months? Like, what was the time frame? I think around two months, around two months.
Okay, one interesting topic here I wanted to discuss with you as well, Alper, is fundraising. A lot of times founders, when they launched something, they have to make it simple. They have a few routes, they have, like, bootstrapping, angels, they have venture capital, multiple ways to go, with all of them with different, let's say, benefits, with different challenges. How did you make your decision, well, to go into basically, like, the fundraising route? What do you think was going through your mind, what kind of decision-making process, and do you feel like this was the right decision to make, overall?
Yeah, that's actually a great question, that's a really good question. I think we were lucky to have a network of few close angels and really cool VCs, to which we had access through some network and friends. As you might imagine, this is not the best time to be raising, and it wasn't for us either. You know, from April to June, I think we started having a round of discussions, and especially the type of VCs we were speaking to were kind of a bit like late stagers, etc. But as the world starts going out, I think what is really important is that people start referring you to each other.
And at that stage it becomes a bit more evident that, you know, either this or that will kind of invest in you. And having those angel investors, especially people who have the industry insights, we have a couple of them, who come from, like, we have an angel investor from Salesforce, or, you know, that kind of network is really helpful.
And I think it's also super helpful that when you have a well-rounded founder team, where you have people who are building something from their own pinpoint, the story that you tell is just a very natural one. So if time VCs will refuse you, the 11th one will listen to you, and the 12th one will have a bit of, a, I don't know if it's right to say here, about the Biddle for FOMO. And I think, with everything in the world, unfortunately FOMO really helps. So when you're talking to a few different people at the same time and starting to close around, suddenly people start having a lot more interest in you.
There's a saying that eventually capital, almost like a private club, in a way, like it's super hard to get in, but once you get the first one interested, or just someone who, like, likes you, can refer you, like, suddenly, like, all of those guys are, like, are willing to talk. Yeah, but in that sea of talk, I think you have to be really careful who you want to go with, because I can say, we're super, we have been super selective, but we've been very lucky that our investors are, they have the expertise, they contribute to Flowla's growth in every way they can, with the network, with experts, with connections, with a genuine support, and all of those things.
And, you know, one of our investors even introduces us to some angels or influencers in the, in the business. So when you find the right type of people who know the sectors, and not just throwing some money at you, that's the right partners to work with. I'm curious, when you had to make that initial decision to go for the first fundraising round, was there even an option to go bootstrap? Was they're even, like, an option to consider? And if so, like, what made you go to the, like, VC path basically?
Yeah, I wouldn't maybe speak on behalf of my co-founders, but on my side there wasn't an option to be bootstrapped, for life reasons. We needed investment, and I think having that investment from a financial standpoint was quite constructive. But also we needed investors who would contribute to the, to our growth with their expertise and network as well. So I think in that sense, could we go about strap maybe, do I think that we've done the right thing with VC funding? Yes, and fine.
Also, there's a very important point. I think it is a very right time for products like Flowla. You know, since I started building with Flowla, I'm seeing a competitor popping up almost every month. This is a space which I think, in three, four years, no one will be closing deals via email. Everyone will be using a medium like Flowla. So when we hear competitors popping up, when we hear easy interest in our company, sisters, that's super cool for us, because it's like a market in the making, which I know is a very uncool thing to say, like, you know. But if it is true, it is very true that there's a market in the making.
One thing that you've mentioned is, well, first of all, the public, they say, like, I want to congratulate you on closing the recent round, or for your company. We talked of the air that, you know, we'll be focusing on building the internal team, growing the product. Do you feel like when you get the funding, it's also like a bit more responsibility, for example, compared to bootstrap, because there's this dynamic that you need to go at much faster rate, there's some specific milestones? Yeah, compared to if you go bootstrap, it's like, it's your way. What's your take on this?
That's a great question, I think that's a great question. It's funny, I think some businesses prone to being more lifestyle, and all that. So I think for them to be bootstrap, it makes sense. The way I see our product is, there's no reason why three, four million sales people in the world, in an out outreach tool, shouldn't be using something like Flowla. So for us it's kind of a no-brainer that we should be growing to those levels, we should be reaching a portion of that market. You know, if I thought the product was something that is kind of a niche or limited to a certain market, then of course, why run, why, you know, take your time, have lifestyle business.
I won't lie, it's very demanding to be a founder, right. The last time I was working these hours was when I was first year Bain analyst, you know, being a strategy consultant, doing due diligences, 12-hour days, and all that. And so, if it feels like, you know, after 12 years I'm back to those days. But there is an element of, you need to run, because you're trying to build something that can, you know, become quite big. So you want to be at least one of the top few, if not the top. So you have to run.
What was the other portion of the questions, sorry, I forgot. Well, I think it was, what's your take on this route, the bootstrap versus, like, VC, and basically, like, the dynamics of it? Yeah, so for us, I think running is the right way, but it depends on, you know, your perception of running. But it's also the right way, because, well, for us to be able to kind of achieve certain milestones, to be able to, you know, keep the funding route, it makes a lot of sense to get that external kind of support.
Because we need to invest in the team, we need to bring in the right talent, we need to, because there's a huge market to capture that, you know, as I say, if your market is a global one with huge potential, if this is kind of surfing a wave, a paradigm shift, which I think email is, really, it's being used in the wrong way, it kills deals. So if there's going to be a switch from email to a medium like Flowla, then you better be at the right pace.
One thing you mentioned is, founder is working long hours, of course, trying to teach you more things. But I know it's not only about just hustling, it's also about learning a lot of things at the same time, especially during the first years of being a founder. I'm curious, as you are now in this stage of, you know, accumulating, like a sponge, just getting old information, all the necessary skills, when it comes to those resources where you learn those, do you have any particular books you would like to recommend that impacted you in a great way in the past year? Maybe some inspirational speakers, or any other resources, that you think, like a founder, let's say, if there is, it's their first venture as a sales business, that would create a benefit from.
Yeah, I try to actually focus on my own vertical and read, like, a lot of sales leadership books. But I guess, for, as for everybody, like, Peter Thiel's from Zero to One, it's kind of like a no-brainer, and for me it's a book that I read maybe five, six years ago first, and then I keep referring back to. I do have, I get a lot of inspiration from the people I talk to on a daily basis, to be honest, because my chance is that I am a salesperson building a sales tool for sales people. So it's a very virtual cycle where I'm constantly been talking to industry leaders and network of people, you know, communities that are very specific for our group, and or influencers on LinkedIn who speak about this.
There's, you know, a few names that I can definitely share, but the point that I'm trying to make is, I don't think it is a one-size-fits-all kind of experience. Everybody should kind of, sometimes I really benefit from a podcast which, you know, everyone else listens to, about mental well-being, because it's really important part of being a founder. And sometimes I will listen to something very niche. But I do have, like, I think, from Zero to One is a book that kind of inspired me to be a founder before I decided I want, and then I went back to being one.
Okay, that's a really good suggestion, a lot of, a lot of founders recommend this as well. I know you come from the sales background, so, for example, when it comes to sales, to closing deals, for you it's, you're like a fish in the water with this. If someone who's coming from other background, let's say they're from e-commerce, from real estate, where maybe sales is not their, like, biggest skill, the sharper skill, they haven't invested, like, 10 years into that, do you, do you think there are some particular reads, or maybe other resources you would recommend for people to immerse into the sales?
Yes, I think, definitely there is a few revenue leadership books that I'm reading at the moment. I'm really bad with names, I can come, like, I'm really badly remembering those names. Well, the SaaS Insiders will just put those in the description, the episode, so that we can, we can figure out that I'll produce specific names, so they can pick them up.
One question I always like to ask is, if you were to go back in time, let's say you would go to back, but maybe in May, in the beginning, when the whole journey started, what do you think are the things you would do differently? From your experience right now, what is the sound learning experiences you went through that, ah, I wish I did this a bit, in a bit different way. Are there any, some things you would, you would think you would do differently?
I think it's mostly mindset things. Definitely there must be, there's always room for improvement for your management style, there's always room for improvement for your, how you make best use of your time. I think the one thing that I would tell my earlier self is, don't look for a savior. And this is what my co-founder told me, you know, trying to outsource your problems, especially as a founder who knows your product the best, and you know everything about your product better than anybody else at this stage, don't look so much for an outside savior, look for support and expertise and advice, but know that you are going to be the one solving it for yourself.
For us particularly, you know, for example, marketing or content or social, those are areas where we have some expertise, but not to the level that I know sales, or co-founders, no product, etc. So that's an area, for example, where I feel like I'm, I've learned the most, and I've learned that there is no running away from having to learn those things.
You know, you can't just outsource something and expect somebody to come and make it happen for you. As a founder, you have, you will be involved in everything, but in time hopefully priorities change. So that's one thing. The other thing would be to start looking at things with a different point of view, in that, don't think of things as failures or errors, or try not to be too pessimistic, try to take them as data points, which is something that I learned in the journey. Like, you know, startup journey is very much testing and iterating.
So if you start seeing things as little tests, from which you get data and learn, it's a much healthier way to improve. And this is something that I learned, and I try to tell my team as well, because I think, as human beings in this capitalist society, where success is, sometimes, a true measure of your value, you know, it won't be always successful until you are successful. So don't use them as an opportunity to beat yourself, use them as an opportunity to learn from those little failures, and see them as a test, the sooner you can, the better.
Nice, it doesn't start, I just want to want you to pick this up, because this is, this is, this is pure gold here. One thing, Alper, guitar old, is about taking ownership of the process in the beginning, and basically, like, honing those skills yourself, so not just, opening that, you know, some external guy will take care of your marketing, will take care of your content, right? I think a lot of times we've been taught that we need to learn how to delegate, but I think what people sometimes get wrong is, like, oh, I don't need to learn marketing. Well, how do you know this guy is doing the right thing, then, for your company, right, if you don't know the basics, if you don't know the structure?
So I think it's really important to know all the basics, and then it's fine to outsource, because you know how to prevent those people. Yeah, especially in the economic environment where we are, where, you know, fundraising is really difficult, all VCs are looking for, you know, you, for you to have an MVP and then be profitable at the same time.
And I think, like, burning through cash, or, like, to the moon and rockets, and all that is no longer our reality. We need to be realistic, and make sure that, you know, when you're investing in something, you've cracked it first. You know, when you're bringing your sales team, you know how to sell. When you're bringing in a content person, you know what them, that you want them to, you know, put out there.
Or an engineer, a back-end engineer, for example, before hiring them, you, basically, what your product roadmap for the next four months is, and you're so overwhelmed you just need somebody. So yeah, be a little bit more frugal, be a bit more prudent, and also involved in things that you don't know, because then you crack it yourself and you realize, okay, now I need help and support.
And one more important thing you've mentioned is about taking some, let's say, failures, I wouldn't say failures, it's more like small challenges. When you face them, don't take them as a defeat, take them as a learning experience, right? Absolutely. There's a saying that you cannot lose, as long as you keep going, basically. That it's just a learning experience. You cannot lose, as long as you. Absolutely.
So I think the reason why it's important is because a lot of founders are discouraged, because they don't come with an expectation that is going to be an emotional roller coaster a lot of times. Of course, now that we're speaking from the position where we are, we might say that it's, you know, we're grateful for the journey, it's like, it's really good. But if you go back a little bit, and when you're in this process, it feels like it doesn't feel too good, right? So it's pretty hard to feel that way, to feel the positivity, you know, the gratefulness, when you're in the middle of a fire.
Oh yeah, I mean, I think it is very much the reality, for me, that, you know, every moment is different, it's a roller coaster. And I think it has an effect on your mental well-being. It also depends on your personality, your experience, how you start seeing things, and definitely it's a roller coaster. And yeah, get ready for the ride. Like somebody, a mentor, told me, think, you know, the hardest, and then 10 exits, and it's going to be that hard. And at that point I was like, yeah, you know, I'm doing this thing for somebody else, you know, my job keeps me awake at night, so I might as well stay awake for my own thing, etc.
Yeah, it's definitely harder, because there is no, there's no room to run. Like you have to, at the end, of the solve the problem, you are the one who's going to crack it, and you have to make it. There's no other way. If you were to pick, like, the biggest idea from our talk today, before we'll be wrapping up this, if SaaS Insiders who's listening, they skipped everything and they just took away one big idea, what do you think that idea would be, for our talk today?
Oh wow, that's a very difficult question. I don't want to say just for the sake of saying something. I think, personally, for me, this kind of conversation really makes me feel really good that I took the leap of faith, although it's been really hard for me. That, when the time is right, when you feel that stars are aligned, and you're still worried, just, you know, take it, take the opportunity, grab it, go with it. What's the worst thing that can happen? You know, you're still you.
And if somebody, as risk-avert as I like to call myself, if I can be an entrepreneur and do a pretty good job of it, then I think everybody should give it a go. Like, don't fear, take it, take the opportunity, seize the opportunity. What do you think would be the best way for SaaS Insiders to get in touch with you, in case they want to add value, maybe learn a bit more about Flowla, maybe it's someone from the investor side, or someone else just seeking some guidance or feedback? We'll be putting some links in the description, but I'm just wondering, what's the best way to reach out to you?
Of course, feel free to, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to drop my personal email, etc. And if, and if anybody is looking for, especially, like, sales or go to market advice, the reason I love sales is, I feel like sales is like therapy. It's the opportunity for the one with the problem to speak, and the sales person to listen, and to try and solve it. So I like to call what I do in a discovery, called sales therapy. So I'm always here, I can be your therapist, I can listen to you. So reach out, and hopefully I can be of help.
I appreciate it, appreciate it, making this, making this offer. To wrap up our conversation today, what do you think will be the final thoughts, what will be the note we should, we should finish on? Good question. What do you think should be the note we should finish on? I can do a, do a little shameless plug with Flowla. I think, if, especially we're talking about technical, non-technical founders here, and there must be a distinction, and I think the skill sets are quite different. But being a founder means you have to start learning things that you don't know, that you have to be comfortable with learning other things, that you have to be ready that you will be the owner of your problems and you'll need to solve them yourself, and not look for a rescuer.
I think, like, don't burn money looking for a rest skill, try to be courageous enough to take the first step yourself, try to crack something first yourself, and then, once you have an idea, the gist of what needs to happen, and then spend your money there. And yeah, I've enjoyed this conversation very much, thank you for inviting me. I'll preorder everyone. Alper, thank you for joining our session today. SaaS Insiders, make sure to check out Flowla, make sure to connect with Alper, and we'll see you in the next episode. Foreign.
All right, so we are live. All right, hello everyone. Hello everyone. Hi, we can hear you loud and clear, Vlad. Same here. Cool, good, that's a good start. All right, good morning, afternoon. So let's wait a minute or so before we, before we start. Let's always let announce where, from where they're from. So what places are you joining us from? I'll go first. Oh, by the way, where are you? Where? Oh, London. Okay, good. Kansas City, Kansas City, Mexico City, Florida, love, cool. L from India. Turkey. Florida. Allen from Ukraine. London. Oh wow, let's spill from London today. Yeah, and Tera, Ontario still counts as London. I'm gonna count as a Londoner. Okay, cool, right. All right, so people are still joining us. Let's wait a few minute, a few more seconds, and then we will get started with the, with the presentation itself.
Okay, can, okay, go. Oh, aome. So awesome, let's get started. I will start sharing the screen. So today we have quite interesting topic, in my opinion. I always wanted to talk about this one, and so cool that I had, like, an opportunity to talk with this, with our partners, Flowla. So today we will be talking about, like, buyer engagement, from the first contact to close. So, how to engage your prospect, your customers, your opportunities, on every stage of your B2B sales process. So, as always, my name is Vlad. My name is Vlad. I'm gr person here at Reply with SDR background, super happy to share everything I know about how to engage your prospect during the cold outreach outbound stage of B2B sales process. And Alper, please introduce yourself.
Yeah, I'm just looking at my picture where I'm a little younger. So I'm Alper. I'm a co-founder of Flowla, is a digital sales room, mutual action planc, customer success portal. I'm the CRO. It's my first entrepreneurial experience, and before that I started my career in consulting at Bain and Accenture, where I advised sales teams on their goen market strategies. Then I did all the levels of sales, from being a rep, enterprise deals, to, as the deal sizes shrank from enterprise and my responsibility and the stage of the companies changed, and in the last roles from Series D to A, and now to our, to our company, which is now over two years old, and yeah, that's me.
Cool, so I think we will, we will hear from your cool, firsthand experience. Awesome. So here's what we will cover today. We will go through every step of B2B sales process, and talk about how to, how to cap initial interest during prospecting and outbound stages, like c outreach stages, then best practices for maintaining engagement through discovery, negotiations, then how to like engage prospects, opportunities, and close them. And then we will share maybe a few examples how to leverage Reply and Flowla to streamline this process, and as always we will share the recording, templates, links, slides, so stay with us till the end, and I will share everything as a link, like, closer to the end of the presentation.
So stay tuned. As always, feel free to interrupt us, give, ask your questions in the chat or the Q&A section, and I will from time to time stop the presentation, and we will answer your questions. So that's a process here today, and let's get started.
So, why it matters? So every time when I, when I, when I think about B2B sales process, I always focus on pretty much this fl will, and I think about, like, okay, so there are a bunch of stages, and on every stage of like B2B sales process we can lose prospects' attention, we can lose their interest, we can lose their, I don't know, their engagement, basically. So, and then I think about, okay, so where we lose our prospects, opportunities, con customers, and how I can, like, an SDR or salesperson, gross, like, returns this prospects back to my sales process.
So that's what, that's how I think about this process. And then I think how cold outreach, how, like, sales engagement platform like Reply, can help me returns this, these, again, leads, prospect, opportunities, customers, back to the sales process again. So lots of opinions today, nothing data backed, but just sharing my personal experience.
So, first of all, let's talk about prospecting and outreach stage. Typically, like, cold outre, right? So, starting from building lists, scraping data, verifying data, collecting data, en reach, en reaching data, and so on, and then adding these prospects to my sales engagement platform, sales engagement tool, then reaching out to them, and then booking the very first meeting. So, and then I will share today how I think about this process. But before we start, let me know in the chat, what's your favorite way to engage prospects when you send cold emails? Your strategy, your tactics? I don't know, maybe it's copyrighting, maybe it's personalization, maybe it's relevancy. So let me know, what's your favorite way to engage prospects here, curious to know.
I like that, using ChatGPT. So, S, a problem, personalization, cool, relevancy and value, prospect. Mhm, personalization. Okay, I wonder if people still send Amazon cards. H, okay, yeah, that's a great way to do that, or, like, a bottle of wine or something, right? Like, out of the box, sent, a possible opportunity, being, the known, multimedia content, in bond leads versus outbond leads. Okay, cool, great. So, well, in my opinion, engagement is changing over time, because I remember when I start sending my first C emails back in 2014, and I hadn't been using any called outreach automation tools, and so everything was manual.
So I sent my first email, and then I had to create manual tasks, or use some mail merch software to automate the process with templates. And when I sent, like, f, first or second email followup, prospects were already engaged. So some of them were applying something, like, saying, oh wow, cool, you follow up to me, that's awesome, I have never seen that before, because, you know, you on this, like, but, like, back in 2013, 14, 15, that was like something quite unique in B2B, right, to send followups with automation tools. So it was like interesting to prospects, because you send it like additional followup. Nowadays, sending additional followup sounds like robotic, right? Then we had automation tools, sales engagement tools, then we had, like, personalization, then relevance, then AI personalization, now we have trigger based outreach, a bunch of tools to think about.
Called out how to engage prospects via cold outage, right? So, and then I will show about my nine rules on how I'm trying to send, like, to how to engage cold leads, probably they have never heard about us, they have never tried our software, and so on. So how to, how to, how to, like, make them join a meeting with us. So how to do that. And then I think about the, this process in the, in the following way. So, First of all, know your customers. So why? Well, because if you send, I don't know, even personalized email to wrong prospects, it won't make sense. Why?
Because, for example, if you personalize email, if you spend, I don't know, time personalizing emails to a CTO, probably they will never reply back to you, because it's a wrong persona. I had conversation with the customer a few, like, a few weeks ago, and they, I asked, so what's your ideal customer profile? Well, he said, like, it's actually everyone in B2B space, all industries. And I was like, okay, that's interesting, because the same here at Reply we have, like, bunch of industries, but some of them are more engaged and they have a strong, like, product market feit, and they typically use us. Of course, we have some customers from other industries, but it's super hard to engage them through outbound, right?
So my idea here is to know your customer, be super focused, meaning, like, as an SDR or a salesperson or a team, just spend more time analyzing your customers based on city, country, size, industry, keywords, then group them by mr, and then you will have something like this tree diagram. And then you will see that, for example, here at, majority of our customers are from the us, they are from, like, computer software, information technology, internet marketing space. So I know where I should focus my energy when it comes to cold outrage, because, okay, I can send thousand of cold emails to prospect from, I don't know, design industry or design vertical, but it will be super hard to engage them because it's a little bit different us case. So that's my tip number one.
Tip number two is relevance. What I, this mean, what I've noticed, that lots of, again, lots of experts are talking about personalization, and it's important, but what, as I said before, relevance is way more important than personalization. For example, I can send c emails in campaigns with zero personalization, but I will send them to relevant prospects in a right time. So why? Because data says that approximately 5% of potential buyers in B2B space are actively seeking for solution at a given moment time. So you can reach out to, I don't know, the pe of sales in tax space, but they have no interest in your solution right now, because everything is fine for them, in, for example, in this specific era.
But, so what we need to do here is to figure out how to reach out to the prospects who are actively, like, seeking for solution in your vertical, in your, like, space, in your category. So how did, and so, when it comes to cold out reach, in my opinion, it's all about targeting prospects who, like, actually already in the market. It's the hardest part of that, but we have bunch of tools nowadays, how we can, like, streamline and find those prospects, basically ignoring 95% of all other prospects. So, again, 95% other by potential buyers are still okay, because you can send cold outre and think about it as, like, advertisement and impressions, because you can send your cold emails and they will memorize your brand, your company, and when it's like perfect timing, they will reach out to you on their own.
But, again, c out reach nowadays is all about targeting prospects who are already in the market, and how we can, how we can think about relevance. So, to be relevant, we need to know what prospects, where accounts, are looking for your solution. So, for this case, they, like, figure out, we can rely on triggers or intent or signals, so pretty much the same, right? So nowadays it's quite popular trend to have intent based cold outreach, signal based c out reach, with technographics, job changes, hiring data, like social listening, dark funnel, war interos. So all these techniques could help you focus on relevant intent based call outreach.
And then you can just use this trigger based outreach as a reason forre, and then you can say, hey, I noticed you're hiring 10 SDR, congrats, based on your job title I assume that you're responsible for managing those team, not sure, like, if you're, if you're looking for a new solution, but let's have a check. And then, in that case, you will have, you, I'm like pretty confident, you will have better results than an average called outreach, again, because it's kind of relevant. The same could be used for your LinkedIn outreach, right? So here, for a few examples, how, like, other salespeople and SDRs reach out to me via LinkedIn, saying, hey, recently saw your Zapier integration, or, notice that Reply users Amplitude for user tracking. So it's already kind of trigger, right?
And what's the best part here, that you can, like, multiply those things. For example, meaning, if you know trigger, you can use it as a reason for a trigger. And, again, in my opinion, reason for outreach is one of the most important parts of called emails. So, and you can use this in your emails, for example, hey, I saw, and then specify trigger, and then you can, like, have a chain of thoughts in your called email, and saying, hey, I noticed that you're hiring for SDRs, and it got me thinking, and I realized. So, based on this trigger, so here, few examples we already tried in Reply. For example, that could be department grows.
I noted that company department has significantly grow grown in the last six months, so thought me it might be relevant, like, job changers, hiring intent, reaching out to startups, based on their department size, for example, if they have 10 SDR, or etc. And the same can be used even for inbound leads, for example, re engaging clos lost opportunities, your MQLs, your customers. So always have this reason for outreach. And then, what's the best part, as I said, you can build a chain of sorts for your c dem. So it will, it will look more, like, natural, in my opinion.
So, for example, hey, I noticed that company sales team has grown significantly in the last six months, how are you making sure your forecasting process scales with your team, or how you make, making sure your, like, sales engagement platform, like, has all things you, your team demands, or, for example. So you can always, like, link those things together, and it will be super easier to create those templates. So there is no need to fake your personalization. And, again, number five, super important topic, is copyrighting.
I wanton stop here, we have written really cool guide on how to write unignorable cold emails, and I will share it as a link, because there are so many things there, like, to take into account, so that we, so we had to, like, write this guide on cold emails only. Copyrighting is super important as well. Number six, again, lots of people already mentioned this, personalization. Even if you're relevant, it's still great to have something personalized in your codings. It could be like anything, for example, it could be images, gifs, videos, guides, landing pages, maybe links to your digital, like, sales room, and so on.
So you can use this, like, personalized pieces of content to personalize your emails at scale. For here, a few examples. So, for example, one of our experiments in Reply was to send c emails with personalized images, with their logo, like, prospect's LinkedIn avatar, their company name, and so on, their primary logo color, and it worked quite awesome for us. The same, here's an another example of personalized call email to me a few weeks ago, again, image, and then when I click on the link it's already personalized for me, like, personalized landing page just for me, and it's like works as well.
Number seven, it's datab backed insights, so when it comes to insights, sorry, the engagement, so we can, we can rely on data rather than our god feeling. For example, we can, we can increase our engagement, like, just making some small tws. For example, we can adjust sending windows, we can adjust our subject line lens and it will generate more opens, then we can adjust our cold email lens, we can A/B test things, we can check our apply rates by industry, sequence lens, tone of voice, and there are a bunch of things there. So, like, changing some small things based on data will help you increase engagement, that's for sure.
And strategy number eight, be yourself. When you send c emails, typically they are quite similar, right? So the same strategies, the same tactics, the same framework. So what you can do here, just add to those emails a small piece of yourself, of, right? So, for example, here at Reply we use personalized images. For example, Ilia from gross band, he uses heo instead of generic hi, hello, first name. So, and it makes perfect sense, because that's how you can differentiate yourself in through all these cod emails. And here's another example how our SDRs does that for her c emails, so quite u cool use case, and it helps get way more replies just adding this simple personalized image to her called email followups.
And strategy number eight, it's outbound during test, that's how I call it. So be honest with yourself, after creating your template sequence, read it and ask yourself if you would respond if you received such an email from someone else. And ask yourselves, self, do you like this email template? Do you want to see something similar in your inbox? Would you reply back if you received a similar email in your inbox? And something like that. And if you have two yes or three yes, that's awesome, so probably someone else will reply back to this called email. If you dislike your email, just change it, just try something new.
So, again, it's super hard to implement all those things in together. Sometimes you have to abandon some things, because you have to achieve your qu, you have to get those meetings. Sometimes it's almost impossible to implement all of the, all of these things together. The same with me, I, it's all, again, it's super hard to put everything together. But just implement one by one, add new level of engagement, and I promise your reply rate, your reply rates will start increasing, and you will get more applies, that's how I been doing it myself, like iteration by iteration, and then boom, you have more replies over time.
So that's my strategy, to how to engage whole outbound prospects during my prospecting and c reach stages. So, and again, think about call out reach and engagement, like, an end goal here is to, is to, like, make the prospect say, wow, that's look interesting, let's chat. So that's the end goal here for outbound. And then, based on this statement, you just start thinking, okay, how can I, how can I change my c email sequence to get this feeling from a prospect. That's my framework, basically.
All right, Alper, your turn here. Yeah, I was enjoying listening, now I have to do a bit of talking, apologies in advance if I sound a bit weird because I have a strong sore throat. Everyone, I think that was all great tips. What I'll add on the cold outreach bit is from years of doing Cold outreach, I think these are two learnings that I want to share, and one of them links to what we are doing in our current organization. One, for the cold outreach to be successful, you have to have an objective for the cold outreach, like, what is your objective? Are you, is the sole objective of a cold outreach really to book meetings and demos, or are you using it for different things, like raising awareness, building your brand image, inviting people to your circle?
The thing that really works well for us in terms of lead generation, demand generation, is this integration of inbound and outbound, and what we try to do is to create the content that is relevant to our personal, and then share that in our outreach. So the first message is never, come on, let's book a meeting. If you are, like, a seller of industrial air conditioners for a manufacturing company, then I think it's pretty clear, like, it's a yes or no, do you want to buy our air conditioner or no. But if you're selling something that is a bit new to the market, or if you're trying to educate them, then your job is a bit more difficult. Therefore, cold outreach, there is not necessarily converting to the meeting from first point, but requiring them to your funnels, like nurturing a bit, exactly.
And one thing, the second point that I want to mention, links to that, which is, how do you educate, how do you share a lot of information without being boring, without losing the attention. And that's where, you know, when we start building Flowla, and it's a tool that both customer success and sales teams use, and there's different values for different people, or any other digital sales room will have that. But one of our very early adapters in SDR was using it as, the first email was, I'm going to share something with you, are you open to it? Second email was a beautifully crafted digital sales room with the relevant information, videos, PDFs, a personalized message, and then they would send the link in the second email.
A, not to kill obviously the conversion, and B, to be able to share a lot of information, and see, then to see who is coming to the digital sales room from the sales side, because imagine, when you're doing cold outreach, you're completely in the dark, you send something, you want to get some information on. What Flowla, or other digital sales rooms too, to an extent, do, is to give you a sense of who's joining this room and what are they. We do also enrichment on LinkedIn, how many times do they look, so you get a sense of what is your buyer panel and the real champion, maybe. That, that's my only contribution to the cold outreach bit.
Talking about the closing, obviously engagement starts with bringing people into your funnel, which a lot of sales leaders underestimate, especially these days. I concur with your point, 2013, we, there weren't even tools, like, I remember when I first had my sales job, we were sending merge mails on Word, and that was the tool. And even more stupidly, my very first campaign, I had sent one by one emails to people, there you go, I admit now. Obviously the tools came in, and engagement was great.
I think COVID and post-COVID world we live in, attention spans are very small, and it's really difficult to bring people into the funnel. But you, once you bring them into the funnel, there's things you need to do to make sure that people are engaged, their attention is with you, that they're paying, that they bringing other stakeholders that are important, or you are bringing other stakeholders that are important. So let's talk a little bit about, like, how do you win winnable deals, the opportunities that you brought into your funnel, let's make sure that we're closing them.
So, very briefly, I will ask, and at any point please warn me about our time, Vlad, but I guess the first question is, what is the number one reason that the folks here think is for losing a deal? Interesting to see the result. And for the description of a deal, let's say there is intent, there is, you know, all the stars are aligned, that you have a potential prospect, someone interested. Excuse me, let's see, let's see. And all right, let's see results, can you see it over? Yeah. I, and I think folks can see it too, it's really good. 41%, po, discovery, qualification, don't show them, oh yeah, anyway, now people know. And then there's not enough multithreading, obviously not sharing.
Yeah, it's so funny, like, the reason I love the sales job is, I see it as the job of a seller is really to share the right information in the right time. There's this concept of good enough decision making, right, which is, the job of a seller is to listen to their prospect and understand their pain, bring them a perspective, share a point of view, and then if you're able to close that deal with your product, great, then you close, right? So we help them make good enough decisions, to make good enough decisions. The first point of entry is your discovery, once there's SDR to AE handoff, or the AE, they created their own opportunities.
We do quarterly research on areas that are really interesting and concerning to our audience. One of the very recent ones that we did with our great head of content, she worked on, is around engagement, and the first question we is we asked is, why are you losing winnable deals? And the main reason for that was poor discovery.
We actually, this is a really good research for folks to go to our media hub and read. We both ask this question, to the buyers, like, buyers, how do they feel about the buying process, and sellers, how do they see the selling process. And number one, again, poor discovery. Why? Because you didn't collect the right information, you put something into your pipeline that wasn't an opportunity in the first place, you thought somebody was your champion, and for 5 weeks you told your sales leader that you're going to close a deal, which was never going to close. So we have a lot of great research into how to run a stellar discovery, we'll share the checklist for that as well with the folks here, but that's the one, number one reason.
Number two is around multithreading. As I say, either you as the seller, you need to bring folks to your deal, make sure that in a conversation when you talk to your champion, who else do I have to involve in this deal, if the stars aligned, if the price was great, that, what are the reasons why we couldn't be working together? You know, asking those indirect questions will help them open up and start saying things like, we need to bring the finance person, or the whatever. And the good thing with a digital sales room, of course, again, you send the information, people start coming into your room, and suddenly, you know, we had so many instances where, in our own pipeline, and our customers tell us the same, I thought X was the champion, it appears why was the champion, because they were coming to the digital sales room 100 times afterwards.
And finally, a general, I guess, misstep from sales reps is a lack of information sharing, not enough, a following up. Those are kind of three of them together not being able to do your job properly. Let's say, this part, I'm not going to, not going to boil the ocean, because we already talked about some of the top challenges. But on the right side is what, is what we talk about, from cold outreach. I think intent based outreach has been very popular, and it's becoming, as you say, like, it's a very relevant way for outreach. I think intent based discovery, negotiation, and closing, the whole process is really important nowadays.
And how do you measure intent, how do you, do you get some sort of information, data, about your deal's likelihood to close? For those very crucial insights, you have different tools, and, again, Flowla is no different there, in terms of figuring out your champion, what is the level of intent and interest from your different stakeholders. So we provide things like, how many times they access the digital sales room, how much time they're spending on it, are they inviting new people, are they engaging, are they taking the right actions, etc.
So the gold standard, and I know that every sales leader has a leading and legging indicator, or signal, for deals closing, but engagement and making sure that your deal is top of mind, and somehow keeping the deal live and nurtured, is the most essential thing to make sure that you're closing. And last point here, I know that it's super intuitive that we need to follow up, but that's, again, one of the main reasons why a lot of deals fall into cracks, because we don't follow up in the right way or in the right time, because we have a lot of content. I'm going to skip through the next slides, if any of this is too fast, and if folks want to reach out and ask questions, please feel free.
In terms of the three stages of that end-to-end engagement, from SDR to AE handoff, then throughout the deal progress, and finally the, which is, which is also very critical, sales to customer success, because Flowla, use a lot by customer success professionals. And I, probably, folks here also feel that there's a big convergence between sales and customer success these days, because everyone has access to information. Like, let's say, you, an SDR, you send some initial information to your prospect, and then you hand it off to the AE, so they can start the engagement process. But even before you do that, a lot of the information is already available through websites, internet, G2, whatever, for the buyers, right?
So, therefore, what are, again, those factors that can help us close a winnable deal? The first section, starting with an SDR to AE handoff, and I think throughout the process is making it super easy and frictionless for the buyer, I think that's the key. Like, I, as a buyer, don't want to be chasing the salesperson, I don't want to be chased in the wrong times, I don't want to be asking for information, I don't want lack of transparency. Like, everything has to be smooth, transparent, and available to me.
So, therefore, starting from the SDR's first point of contact with a prospect, sending them a digital sales room, having different stages there. For example, on the screen you have this welcome stage, where you can have a bit of information to share, warm them up, maybe a case study, whatever, but the prospect sees transparently that there's a process we're going to follow, and there's different information which we will share with different people in different stages, giving that sense of timeline also helps with urgency, which we'll come too.
The second stage is obviously how you do your discovery and demo followup. I already mentioned some of the key problems, but one of the reasons why a lot of account execs or sales reps, people in closing positions, really love using, to, like, Flowla. It's probably because one of our very early adapters, she had described Flowla like this to me, very simply, she was Spanish, and she said, when I have a prospect, what I do is this, I take this, and I give it to the prospect, and here is everything that you need. And that's a flow, and the prospects, I think, really appreciate it, because it looks great, it's all organized, what you need to deliver.
I think the whole process is a psychological process, and your buyer or prospect needs to feel safe with you, they need to feel like this person has everything under control, they're sharing the right things with me at the right time, because they're working towards a timeline or project, right? So making them feel comfortable, everything is in one place, again, those are really important things, and what the digital sales room does is helps you, the seller and the prospect, to be guided through that, maybe moving to the next stage.
By the way, I will also add here that, for example, here at Reply, for some time ago, for sd of we were using, like, personalized videos. So when we schedule a meetings, especially outbound one, we were adding, like, personalized v art from an SDR, with these personalized video saying, okay, thanks for schedule meeting, now I'm, like, connecting with our AE, so we will have a chat, like, time, and then what we will be talking about. So if you also can send us some additional answers to our questions, so please do that, so this will help us prepare better for the, for the pres discover col, and was quite successful. Yeah, quite successful experiment for us, I would say.
So, yeah, the same was, that thing there is, people want all the information, but they don't have the time for you, or they don't want to be abiding by your schedule. So they want availability, they want access to all the information, and they want it to be, it to be async. So the beauty of working with something like a DSR is, you can have everything async, like, I can record something, you can record your reply on it, you know, on the next day, and it keeps the whole conversation a thing, I think.
And the last bit about the whole process, as we started talking about multithreading and involving different stakeholders, I already mentioned this, but what, again, it helps with, is, here you see anonymous, but, for example, we can ask people to enter their names, we enrich that through LinkedIn, so you get to see who is joining your digital sales room, what are they interested in, and based on different personas, different needs.
What we're launching actually next week is our autopilot, and the autopilot is basically, like, it's, it, to me, it's a big innovation, in terms of every manual task that needs to happen, all these followups, you can put them on autopilot, and just say, you know, when X person use this stage, then send them a followup email, or open this stage for the other people to see. So those kind of automation, I think, really enables the sales rep to follow a sales process, and enables them to do it with multiple stakeholders.
All right, so maybe quick overview of this slide. Yeah, I, yeah, it's a cool one, how to, how to avoid mistakes, right? Yeah, we, to all this, again, it comes from years of experience and our recent research, but some of the top things that I want to share, and actually, one thing, don't think of the discovery meeting, or the first U meeting, as an opportunity to, you know, future dump, or don't think, don't fall into the trap that your prospect is super interested in everything that you say. Think of it as a conversation. I always like to call the first sales relationship between the buyer and the seller a therapy session. It is where you unearth all the, all the deep problems that your buyer has, even things that they don't think about. So the key here is to ask them questions about what is the real problem, and don't make it feel like inter interrogation.
I know that, you know, a lot of reps will go into a discovery call with 10 questions that they have to ask because their sales leader told them to. You need to make it conversational, like, I'm asking you this question because it's going to help me to deliver better value, you know, I'm asking you your budget because based on that I can provide different packages. So what you need to do is have a very intent based approach, which is, I have your best interest in your, in my mind, when I'm asking you questions. Let me go through the process, we'll make it conversational, it won't be one way, I will be listening to you, I will be asking you questions, but then I'm going to be sharing some benchmark, some innovative idea, right?
So make sure that you are enjoying the discovery call, and you're having fun with it, because you're actually helping the next person solve the problem. I actually love ignoring buying signals. Why do you have that one? Well, because sometimes, well, it's also super hard thing, because what I've noticed, we at Reply have some kind of, like, based on HubSpot automations, we have kind of some slack channels for our AEs. So, for example, when they prospect visit our website, so we send, like, a signal, okay, this open opportunity visited our website, or this discover call opportunity just created a free trial.
So, and then what I've noticed, that sometimes it's quite useful not to ignore those signals, because you can send just, and I've noticed it, with just my personal experience, with HubSpot sales team, so every time when I do, like, a meaningful action on their website, in product, there is always someone from their team, so they actually ma mastered those buying signals. So if you want to, like, just feel how it works, just maybe create a trial with HubSpot and do some stuff on their website, product, and then you will, you will see how their salespeople and account executives rely on these buying signals to, like, reach out to me in a right time.
So it's a, again, I think that's a really cool one, because I guess you're tuned towards outreach a bit more, and therefore, you know, that grabs your attention. For me, the signals, for example, are what's happening inside that first call, or your sales interaction. Like, I also do a bit of advisory work, or, you know, I coach other founders who are not necessarily commercially minded, etc., on their sales process, and often the most cringe and terrible thing that a nonexperienced salesperson will do is go in a call, talk to the, to the prospect, for 10 minutes without a stop, and just not realize that the next person is not getting any of your messages. You know, they have fish eyes, and that is a signal, that is a very bad signal that you're not engaging this person.
Even if your tool is the right thing, you're not going to, you're going to lose them, because you're just talking about yourself, and not their problem. That makes sense, I agree here. All right, and bonus content from Flowla, so wna, yeah, this one, I think we'll be sharing the deck. Therefore, what you can do is, you can basically go to our content hub and download a lot of free material. This is our discovery call templat, basically created, to run a stellar discovery. Yeah, all right.
Now let's talk about the final stage of s, on how to engage your customers, now, guess, almost ready to buy opportunities, on closing and post sales stages. So, B2B sales final. My experience here, and again, just as a growth person, as an SDR person, I'm not a salesperson actually, unfortunately, or maybe not, again. So when it comes to, again, I'm still in our sales process, so what I've noticed here, when it comes to cold out reach, we still can lose our customers and opportunities on different stages of B2B sales process, as I said in the very beginning.
And when it comes to cold reach site, and how we can engage buyers here, so we can actually create bunch of sequences. When it comes to Reply, we, here at Reply, we use Reply not just for outbound, but for our inbound sales process, and our, like, a sales process, like the whole funnel. And for example, when it comes to no shows, so we can lose some no shows every month. So as you can see here, typically we have, like, 50, 100 booked meetings every month, and all these are no shows, that's a huge number.
So, and then I think, okay, how can I, as an SDR person, get them back? So now we have, like, automations here at Reply. When AE creates a note in HubSpot, no show, it triggers an automation, and adds, and adds these prospects, like opportunities, actually, to our sequencing, like, no show sequences for account executives. The same could be for ghosting opportunities, example, if they stuck in discovery stage, or, like, final stages of the pipeline.
And, so, yeah, we have a bunch of those sequences for MQLs and lead in our CRM. So I will share it in our, like, Notion file, we will send after the presentation. But, again, as you can see here, we can re-engage and get back these, like, prospects to our, to our sales process. For example, we can re-engage ghosting opportunities, we can re-engage close lost opportunities based on close lost reason, we can just re-engage demo no shows, we can just reach out to, like, all not closed, like, demo requests in the past six months. So that's a playbook we are currently running, and typically we can, like, generate additional 30, 40 me meetings just for this playbook in a month or so.
Yeah, quite, when you think about B2B sales process and sales engagement, it's an engage on buyers, it's not just about cold out reach, or relying on sales and new, it's also about, like, downloading your c CRM CSV file, again, just clean it, or engage your prospects, engage your leads, opportunities. So, again, that's quite successful tactic and playbook we use here at Reply.
All right, and now let's talk about your sales ccle. Here's poll number two. Let us know, how long is your average sal cycle? Curious to know. c, at Reply, typically, because of our SMB nature, sure, it's like 30 days, like a perfect number, one month. So it's interesting, because we can have different cohort-based experiments every month, if needed, when needed, so it's just interesting.
Okay, let's see, oh, let's, yeah, one to three months, oh, okay, it's an average one, the most frequent one, cool. Okay, 3 to six months, okay. We have some enterprise as yours, I guess, here, on ni call, yeah. Okay, Alper, back to you. That one person who is less than a month, I want to product. Yeah, I think this ties into the, to the latest section, which is around urgency.
Sometimes I think, in all our sales careers, our leaders, managers, etc., told us about urgency, part of your goal is to make sure that the engagement and attention is there, that you're always moving the prospect towards the end of the funnel, and closing, and making sure that you are, you know, bringing it earlier and earlier as much as you can. Again, this is a content from our media hub around, what I wrote was the 10 tactics you can use to create urgency, and it got really good feedback, u, both from, like, experience sales reps, and I think from people who are like early to sales, or founders, or AEs, who are in their very first roles.
These are some of the tactics, again, I'm not going to share all of them on the call here, but I'm just going to talk about the ones that we really like to use sometimes at Flowla, which is actually going to be on the second page. Things like tying to a strategic agenda, talking about the cost of using versus not using, etc. These are all really useful tactics, and I think there isn't like a one siiz fits all kind of approach, depending on your product, your stage, awareness level of your prospect, you can use the different tactics.
But some of those that really work well for us is, for example, what's the consequence of not implementing a solution like Flowla? You are today, you know, on the lucky side, you are, you may be closing deals in less than a month, but I think that was only one person, in general, if you're lucky, in the SMB side, and actually these sales cycles have become much longer due to the difficult economic times that go through.
So if you're using a tool like Flowla, it gives you a lot of opportunity around making sure that your sales playbook is implemented almost to perfection, thanks to autopilot, making sure that you know you are aware of multithreading, and you involve all the champions that you can, and you get information about it real time, so you can pick up the phone and actually advance the conversation. So talk about consequences of not implementing, that is one.
Another one is show and tell, which I think we used a little bit more in the earlier stages, as we were getting to the first, you know, 20, 30 clients or so, which is obviously it's all about safety. You know, sales, I think you have two really strong emotions, and one is fear. So your buyer is fearful, your job is to make sure that they feel safe, and show, and show and tell is a great way, which is, bring a client to the conversation, and show them how that other client is really using you. And I think a paradigm shift, especially if you have a bit of a noble to product.
Like, think about Notion. You know, I resisted Notion as a product in my last three jobs, I didn't use Notion for five years, I hated it, I still listen to people who hated today, I can't live without Notion, but it took me five years, right? So I think sometimes when you think about a new tool, like digital sales room, Flowla, engagement platform, etc., mutual action plan, some people, early adapters, which I'm sometimes not one, are going to adapt so quick. But if you give them the notion that this paradigm shift is happening, it's going to come better soon than late, then I think it sometimes opens up perspective for people. So giving ait thought leadership and vision, I guess.
Yeah, cool, yeah, I love it, because I also read recently, I read, I guess, HubSpot's research as well, and they said that, yet still, like, case studies are one of, like, the most, like, requested things from B2B buyers, like, show me how other similar companies like use your software, that's cool. Okay, so it aligns with prospect's expectation, I guess, with buyer. Absolutely, yeah, cool. All right, let's proceed. Okay, let's, we still have a few minutes here. Yeah, I think this closes the last section, which is, again, when we think about the sales process, we always think about demand generation, then closing. And in my very first job, which was sales job, which was maybe 10 years ago, I'd be like, here, I close, now somebody come and deliver customer success, and obviously I was really grilled for it.
Today it's a bit different, I think, especially with, like, SaaS tools, where the role of the salesperson is in between closing a deal and showing the ropes, including the right people, to actually talk about technology. What becomes really critical is, the salesperson plays the role of the customer success person, because your first call, sometimes discovery call even, is like the first onboarding call, where you might be going into explaining the product in details, right?
Vice versa, I think customer success is now having a much more commercial role in all this, which is, especially when it comes to renewals, retention, a lot of companies are now expecting customer success to sell, to upsell, to renew, which is why this handoff is no longer like a very strict line, but it's a bit more blurry, nevertheless, both internal and external.
Obviously we have some good notes around, you know, take the right details, share them timely, make sure that you're transparent, make sure that you're on boarding right people at the right time. But, again, I think the most important thing is, put everything in one place, and walk them through the stages at the right time, like give the prospect a sense of. One of our advisers said, your prospect doesn't care, outreach, sales, customer success, they just see one company, and they just want their problem to be solved.
So when you use a tool like a digital sales room, everything is in one place, the stages are clear, you can have a Gantt chart, you can have a timeline, you can automate things, like, when we move into a deal negotiation, make sure that the person receives, the customer success person of my client receives, implementation plan. And there you created a smooth process where no step is overlooked, and your buyer is feeling like they're being handheld, and they're in a safe process, again.
Yeah, I think some of these materials, I think we can share, we can share with, oops, just a second, I miss, I want to leave a little bit of time for questions if at all. Yeah, pro here. Oh, that's what we already said. Yeah, it's, I mean, basically all in one place, all the sales stages are open, and now it can become your customer success portal as well.
All right, so, and again, webinar resources, we will, okay, let me share everything right now, actually. Share, just second, share externally, copy link, chat, so you can enjoy it before you jump off the webinar. All right, so we, again, we have all resources in one link here, in Notion link, you can click here, and g resources. Again, at Reply, we celebrating 10 year, 10 years, so it's final week of this celebration, so feel free to grab our discounts.
I guess Flowla will also share some kind of bonus for everyone who still with us. Okay, so, yeah, Alper want to remind folks that next week we're launching our autopilot, which is really groundbreaking, in terms of many digital sales rooms out there. What it is, basically, all the tedious things, all the followups, all the things that need to happen automatically, but you're doing manual as a sales rep, our idea is to make sure that Flowla is doing all of that for you. So my co-founder Adam will be talking about that with some really powerful panelists next week, so we would invite everyone to join as well. Cool, awesome.
All right, so all resources, all links, all useful, all useful materials from our presentation in this one link. Any questions so far, before we, before we wrap up? Our conversation was quite interesting topic, because I'm not a sales expert at all, so quite useful tips when it comes to engaging customers and prospects during the disco stages. Okay, so sounds like no question, as always, let's stay in touch, feel free to connect with me and Alper on LinkedIn, join our multi-channel cold outreach course, and, as always, thank you, and have a wonderful evening, morning, and afternoon.
Wonderful, thank you for hosting, Vlad. And if folks are interested in talking any of these topics, I'd be happy to chat as well, you can reach me on LinkedIn, I do one toone sales coaching, all that stuff. Yeah, always available, thanks. Awesome, all right, take care everyone, bye, byebye.
All right, so welcome to this webinar, hosted by Flowla, at the back of our research that we've done a couple of weeks ago, and we shared, the webinar is called Mind the Gap, bridging u the gap between buyer expectations and what sellers do. I'm joined by three amazing panelists today on this webinar. I'm not seeing my slides yet, so it would be nice to have those, so I don't mess up anybody's titles or the names of their companies. Hopefully, otherwise I'm just going to go freestyle, and they'll feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But Lisa Travnik bas in the US, she is the Chief Growth Officer for Sourcemap. Hannah Ajikawo, if I'm saying, if I'm butching your surname, Hannah, I'm so sorry, it's just how I say. Perfect, great.
Unless you're living under a stone or in a cave, you know Hannah probably, she's one of our LinkedIn top voices that we featured in our almano end of last year. She's a CEO and founder of Revenue Funnel and the top LinkedIn voice. And Christina Brady, amazing, Christina Brady is a c and co-founder, isn't still a new, I would say co-founder like myself, of Luster AI, and she's a great voice, very fun and interesting and smart, that I love to follow on LinkedIn on all things at revenue and leadership. Welcome to the panel, ladies. Thank you, thank you for having us. Thank you so much for having us. This is gonna be a fun convo. Yeah, yes. I agree, I agree. Thank you very much for anyone joining.
I think it's about time we kick off, so first of all I have to mention that this is the first time I'm hosting a webinar at Flowla, so if I make any mistakes, apologies, and feel free to intervene, interrupt, anyone listening to us, please drop your questions on the chat box, all day, every day, engaged. The last time we did this was our co, was my co-founder Adam, and we had great engagement and great conversation going on in the chat box. So we'll make sure to spare five or 10 minutes at the end for questions, maybe. If we can move to the next slide, so this conversation will be guided by our research, which we've done recently with 200 top executives who are in buying positions.
We try to understand if buyers are happy with the way they're being sold, and if there's something that needs to change. And today, with my wonderful panelists, we'll be discussing maybe some horror stories that they know from their lives, the highs and lows, and how to improve things, right. This is the brief agenda of today. I'm gna start with our section, which is going to be understanding the frustration of the buyers that we've listened to. So if we can skip to the next slide, Ellen, and I promise I'll shut up. Did we lose them? I think, no, the internet's made Alper shut up. Guided by five questions, the first, very first question that we ask people, is the very first question we asked our buyers, is have you had a negative buying experience in the last three months?
And as you can see on the left, the number 65% of people who responded were like, yes, I had a really terrible experience in the last three months. That's quite a striking number. I'm going to let everyone read some of the quotes for a second, and actually I'm going to ask people to share some of their horror stories of being sold to in the last whatever, and with that in mind, maybe I'm gonna yield the floor to the ladies. And let's start, let's start with Hannah, like all day, every day, you're listening to buyers, you're talking to sellers, do these resonate?
Yeah, it's very accurate, and it's so interesting, sometimes people think they see a relatively, you know, a relatively small sample, and you're like, oh, maybe it's representative. This is very representative of what I here, when you, when I'm listening to calls and reviewing them, but also as a buyer myself, right, I've spent quite a lot of money as a small business owner in the last year, and just really trying to improve my own business and optimize it. And I've experienced where I've explicitly stated that there's some limitations in what I can do based on the solution that was in offer, and they were like, no problem, like, this is, we can accommodate that and we can do all these things. And I thought, you know what, that it feels genuine, and then you get to it, it's like, oh hey, you know that one thing that I said was critical, and it's like, oh yeah, no, we can't do that.
And I think that it just leaves such a bad taste in your mouth as a buyer, particularly when we're, it's different, like for me, I'm like, I report to myself, but can you imagine that I delegated that responsibility to someone, and then I stepped in as the user or the person being impacted, and I'd be going straight to that buyer, like, what did you do, how could you buy this, how could you spend that money knowing that we're not going to get these things? So I feel like, in our, you know, as sales people, we really have to be conscious of some of the expectations we, we're setting, specifically when people are saying stuff and we're just not listening. It's just so important, particularly today.
One thing I really, I really find really fascinating is, as sellers, we only get to buying positions so late in our careers that we don't get to chance the chance to develop that empathy, right, like being in the buyer shoes and having some of those terrible experiences where you're like, please stop selling me in this way. Like, do you have some of those moments, Christina, and obviously, as you, because of your product and what you're doing, you're trying to improve on all those fronts, like, what would you add to that?
I would say that sellers are accidentally right now coming across as selfish, right, they're approaching every conversation with what they need to get out of that, right, and it's led by trying to make sure that everyone in your organization is following your sales process and your sales methodology, and knowing, I'm going into this call and I have to get these boxes checked. And so in order for me to get my boxes checked, I'm leading the conversation and making the buyer give me what I need to go into my CRM and make sure that I can advance this to the next stage, right. So it's very, and I say accidentally, because I don't think that this is how salese and companies are meaning to come across, but it is so self-serving.
And instead of doing a lot of listening to what buyers want and need and how they want to buy, the process is so driven by the company, and then it's relying on things like rapport building that are actually just small talk wearing a bad disguise. And so we're missing the mark in so many different ways, and of course buyers are having a bad experience, because it's uncomfortable, it's awkward, they're not getting what they need, and so they sit back and they disengage, and they're going to start engaging with salespeople or companies that don't do that.
And I actually think that's why we saw such increase in like plg type of motions, is simply because customers wanted to go and buy the way that they wanted to buy, and unfortunately they started to think the way to do that is to not include a salesperson, whereas if you see a salesperson on their game with a buyer centric mentality, they're almost unstoppable. And so why we're not paying more attention to that, versus celebrating the idea of this self-serving sales process, to me that's where the problem really lies. I love all of that. Yeah, and I have so much to say, but Lisa, would you like to contribute with maybe some of the horror stories that you hear, or you try to improve on?
Yeah, so from a career standpoint, you know, my experience actually started as a buyer in marketing, and then product marketing, and then RevOps, and then I came to more of the growth and sales position. And so I think that did benefit me in a lot of ways, as it, when it comes to empathy, right, especially when you think, I think RevOps products are the toughest here, but it's a, there's so many marketing tools, there's so much overlap. I think Hannah's point around, you know, what's really important to me and the right fit for me, like the opacity of that is just, I saw it so many times, and I was the burned buyer or user a number of times, so I absolutely appreciate that.
And it, and one of the just to add on to what Christina said too, I think another way that this manifests is, so I've joined a lot of privately backed organizations kind of at a growth stage, and so you inherit a lot of different layers, the Playbook, right, the privately backed company Playbook, and kind of having that either push on you, or needing to kind of play that game with the board. And then you have a team of folks who are really good at the Playbook, perhaps a bunch of sellers that are great at the Playbook, and then you have the sellers who really want to get in there and build like a user and buyer centric Playbook specifically for your organization.
And so all that to say, yes, I've seen it, it can be really hard from a leadership standpoint to, I don't want to say bridge the gap, plug the title here, but to really evolve an organization and sort of understand where you need to replace people or replace culture. But in any case, yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. I've never, I can say I've never felt like I've won in my role, in a, you know, a year or two down the line in a growth position, continuing to drum beat a Playbook only and not really turning things around somehow, right, turning that camera around. So yeah, i' I've never seen the results out of that candidly, and think there may have been a time and place when that worked. I just haven't seen it in my career.
Yeah, the Playbook is all good, especially for scaling, but what people want from you is a human interaction, which actually brings me to the next stage. By the way, before I move to the next slide and the next question, I'm going to say the thing I hate most as a buyer is when being followed up and chased in the wrong times, and then when I'm chasing people to get some answers I'm not getting them. And the second one is an FBI investigation, like MEDDPICC discovery, that is, that is the, that is the worst thing, like I'm sitting through a call where, you know, I've have to answer 10 questions and it's not going anywhere.
If we go to the next slide, we're going to talk about this a little bit more, which is about how the buyers actually see the role of the seller. Like, the sell's role is to help the buyer to make a good enough decision, and I'm just going to share some of our findings from this before I start the conversation on this. But when ask the question, how do you see the main job of a seller, a lot of people will say it's sharing information, it's helping me to understand, it's handholding me if I'm the champion, helping me to build a case, right. And I think that's a lot of what our users of a digital sales room are selling, and why they're using us as well.
But contrary to that, face the situation, which is where you're the seller, your role is being the helper, but only at the terms that you're buyers are allowing you to help them, which is when asked the question, how do you want to receive the information, a lot of people will say, I want to do my own research, I want it to be acing, I don't want to be in meetings, I don't want to be in calls.
Hence this gap, like, okay, you as the buyer want all the information, I me to help, but you don't have any time for me, you don't allow me to help you. So do you face this dilemma in your day today, like, maybe starting with any of you who wants to go first, and let's dive into this a little.
There's so much to unpack here, right, and even if you think over the last, what has it been, about five years, that Gartner has been putting out research around sense making. And where, like, that one of the challenges is it's just the sense of having so much information that you're like, h, okay. And the reps that come in to differentiate are the ones who can just help you make sense of it and cut through the noise.
But in order for you to do that, I need to trust, you know, Christina the salesperson, to come to me and be like, I'm just going to listen to Christina, she's built enough trust with me that I'm going to listen to what she says. If she says don't read that report, I'm just not going to read it, I'm going to. And it's very hard to establish that, because we don't get trained or enabl to do that. And I completely, even again, I believe this is true, right. So it's like, as a, as a sales, you know, they're thinking a sales person been to share, you know, help me understand my problem.
And it's, and it's like, yeah, but I don't actually want to talk to you, because my belief is that I would love you to help me, but firstly I don't know when I need help, because I need to figure some stuff out on my own. And also, when I finally interact of you, you're really annoying, actually, you're not helping me, you're adding more confusion, so now I've got more stuff, I'm like, I'm back at stage one. And to and to make it worse, you labeled our call a discovery call, and buyers don't do discovery calls.
So I, that's like my pet peeve, when I see, like, you're holding yourself there, I hate seeing meetings in rep's calendars that says discovery call, I'm like, what is that? Yeah, definitely a better name, maybe drop in the ch, what should be a better way to call those. Christina, don't hold yourself anymore, please, share with us. I'm ju, I'm just celebrating everything that she's saying, because the other thing to keep in mind is that at this point in time, salespeople probably occupy less than 10% of the total buying process.
And that is for every solution that they are shopping for to solve that problem. So you have this tiny fraction of time and thus influence over the buying process, because now buyers are looking at anywhere from 9 to 15 resources to determine if they want to buy your product, and your voice is a small piece of that. The other thing is that we've trained buyers out of trusting the resources that we send, because the resources, again, that we send are so self-serving.
I believe that you are going to send me every amazing case study of every great job that you've ever done. I don't think, as a salesperson, you're gna send me an example of a time you absolutely drop the ball, right. If you are a brain surgeon that has killed 90% of your patients, I don't think when you're advertising you're going to tell me all the people whose brain you bought, you're going to tell me the 10% that are still walking around in functional. And so buyers don't trust the information that you are sending them.
And so it doesn't mean don't send information, don't send case studies, but understand they're not going to take what you send at face value, they are going to do their own research. And if you are not understanding the story that exists about you and your organization outside of your sphere of influence, you're going to lose every time. And that could be what is on the web, what is on LinkedIn, what is on Glassdoor, what is on G2, what do your customers or previous prospects say about you.
So the research that they're doing to prove if that case study is a one-off, if it's a standard deviation or the norm, is going to happen. So as much as you're controlling what you're sending to them, you also need to control the overall narrative, and make sure you're doing your part in conjunction with the rest of your goto market team, to make sure that you're being talked about properly when you're not in the room, because it's going to happen. Lisa, how do you control that, being talked about, and how do you control the information sharing, like at Sourcemap, you sometimes have to explain yourself, educate the clients, share a lot of, like, I guess all of this would resonate with you.
Yeah, absolutely, so without getting two in the weed, Sourcemap is, it's not, it's a bit of a category creator, right, we're a supply chain software organization, it's regulatory software, and we're helping comply with laws that in a lot of cases aren't completed yet, aren't written yet, they're coming into enforcement in 2025, 2026. And so there is a bit of education, actually a burden of education in some cases, and so we do a lot of educating in our sales process.
What we try to do is, to Christina's point, not shove case studies, not shove kind of promotional materials, we have a set of materials, and of course we use Flowla for this primarily, that tries to be quite factual and kind of just outline the offering, and what would be important, just a something that can be accessible pretty quickly as soon as we do kind of a quick introduction with someone, a case for a discovery call. I think, in some cases, Hannah, because we do have clients coming in just saying, can you explain a little bit more, and then we give them educational material.
And then from there, we actually do very few case studies, we just find, we actually promote and sort of pull up pertinent areas where we are being discussed on the web, kind of good or bad. We show up in annual reports of some of our clients, for instance, so if it's a vertical of that client, we'll just say, hey, we're not going to really, we're not going to add more kind of case studies that are branded to your queue here, but let me just plug something that a client published outside, you know, that you could Google yourself, right.
And so try to do kind of a healthy mix of that, we let people do that async, we let them converse with us, ask questions, and then from there we have kind of curated content that would explain the nuance of whatever they're asking based on their persona and whatnot, and kind of their particular needs, because again we don't find that that's super successful. We can, no one engages with that, that's not groundbreaking, that's not surprising, so candidly, we just don't, we just don't really bother, and we just really, we just try to build kind of pieces of contact that can be digested for FAQs.
So, and just in terms of some maybe practical tips for our audience, like this third point about helping build consensus internally, like empowering the champion to do the selling for you, etc, like, do you have any tips, any, you know, practical things that maybe, like, out of ordinary things that you do, like, any of you want to maybe share, like, this is something that you should do to empower your champion, that is really impactful, if anyone would like to contribute to that?
Yeah, it's interesting that people don't see a seller's job as helping them to build consensus internally, because it's, it varies, right. So I always say there's two, there's two different sides of where people are when it comes to making buying decisions, it's really early on where they don't have a consensus, which it's late, and that's where most of our energy goes. Everyone I speak to, the sales training clients I have, they're like, I know, we're not too bad at the opportunities where people are looking for stuff, it's the people that aren't, and it's really hard to get that kind of education, that consensus.
And I'm like, I know, but it's because we gear our entire business towards only working with, only optimizing our systems, our processes, our methodologies, to people that are in market, when we should be looking at people who are experiencing latent issues, right. So the thing is, to really, and this is where we have to, from a kind of practical perspective, is we need to be doing the old school kind of, like, let me look at my territory, let me look at our sweet spot, and getting in really early.
Because what you want to do is, you want to shape and say, hey, Christina, I know that, you know, things that you may not recognize are actually creeping up that's coming over the horizon. So something that Lisa's company has a kind of like a unfair advantage of, because they're like, you may not know but 2026 you kind of have to talk to us, right. But you w to almost position yourself in as that expert, to say, I just want to help educate you on something that's coming in 2026 that you may not have thought about.
Because as you do that, you start to put something on the agenda that they didn't even used to, they may not have been thinking about. So, like, try to get items on the agenda that are going to be necessary for you selfishly, but of course they going to impact positively the buyer at a later stage, because if you wait until they are at that stage where they're in market, the five vendors are in.
The five decision makers are in the other, like the 10% bracket. You want to make that 90%, you want to take up 90% of that buying exp, then you're the trusted advisor, then you're the trusted, the advisor who's sharing the information that's not available to them. I love that. Maybe Christina, very quick contribution to that, and then I'll move on to the next slide.
I support all of that, and the thing that I'll say here too is, this pie chart is very interesting to me, because they sort of all lead to one, right, like these should not be viewed as three separate things that sellers are doing. Like, your job as a seller is to share the right and relevant information that pertains to the problem and the value of how you solve that problem, which is going to lead to a fundamental understanding of the problem the organization has. And by giving them a combination of those two things, they can build consensus internally, because they now have a story to sell that they can tell without you in the room.
So if you're thinking of your job is being segmented, like, do I share info, or do I help them build consensus, like, you share info that helps them understand the problem so they can build an internal consensus, right, like, it all leads into one. Yeah, absolutely, and actually this next section starts talking about that a little bit in detail. If we can move to the next slide, Ellen, let's talk about that overall journey where you're sharing the information and giving what we call the buyer experience.
And as you've all mentioned, like, people have a lot of tools, information, they do their own research, they do, and they go and compare, but when it comes to the relationship between the seller and the buyer, and what our top priorities for a buyer to buy, to choose a vendor or a seller, obvious obiously, product futures come first, in our research around 59% say, I look at the product futures, obviously no surprise there. But what's really interesting is that they site buyer experience as the second most important criteria, that relationship, that handholding, that walking together, being in the same journey, it's even more than the cost.
So I guess this means, when people are presented the right kind of product with the right experience, they're happy to pay for it, or maybe I'm wrong, what do you think? I mean, I can say that recently I was in a sales process for, I would argue, a commodity tool, data for BDRs, for lead gen, right, there's a number of products out there and it's constantly evolving. I knew what I wanted, I wanted to check a couple feature boxes, I was ready to buy, and I was inches away from walking away because the buying experience was so poor.
And I ended up actually knowing someone there, and reaching out, and just saying, hey, like, do you want to save this, or should I move on. And they were kind of able to bring it around, but I couldn't agree with this more, because it's a proxy to me to what experience I'm going to have with the product later on. I assume it's a reflection of the culture, I don't think sales and CX will be completely different. So absolutely, to me it's a huge warning sign.
Love that, thanks for, thanks for sharing that. And I think, in our research, if anybody is interested, there are so many of those situations where we heard codes saying, like, you know, it was the right product, etc, but the whole process was so annoying that I dropped and I went for somebody else. Hannah, Christina, anything you want to share on that, on that part?
Yeah, I mean, it's, it gets really bad with a buo experience. I mean, and I think what saddens me is often times it's because of the way we have enabled reps to act in certain ways, so like gatekeeping information, and, oh, you can't do this unless you've hit these, like, you know, BDR. You get someone like Lisa that's like, hey, I've used this product three times, previous roles, I really want to buy it, just want to check these two pieces. And the BDR is like, I can't give you cost, it's like, I know, just, I just need to know what it, and it's like, I can't give you c, I can't, you need to meet the AE. It's like, that's fine, send me to the AE.
Yeah, but I need to get, I actually, it got so bad with a prospect that the prospect knew me, and they knew that I was working to do some, like, go to market work with this client, and they just said, who, Hannah, like, what is going on, I can't get past the BDR team. I was like, what? So they actually called my CEO to say, can you just get
Me, like in, I went above, like the whole team, to the leader, and was like, you're not, your team are not letting this prospect through, and they know the solution. And it's because they're like, they, they're not freed to do anything, it's just like I have to follow this process. And it's actually quite scary, but that experience is the whole reason why it becomes so important, exactly what Lisa said, like it sets the expectations of what, what's to come.
But it's also, I always say, like, remember, a whole deal and bu experiences about drisking a sale. And if you are going through a process where it's just friction, difficult, it's not clear, the communication's off, you're like, I just feel like there's so much risk here, there's so much unknowns, even though I'm against the deadline when I need to get this in place. So that's why it becomes, you know, over and above the experience. I do the same thing with restaurants, I walk into a restaurant, and if I'm waiting five minutes for someone to say, can you have a table, I'm out, I'll just go somewhere that charges more, where I know that they're not going to ever let someone walk out if they're going to get like a $100, $200 from me. So that's what I do, the same thing.
I love that point so much. The thing that I will add is, if you have a cruddy buyer experience, or you have reps that understand how to properly build rapport and value sell, then the only thing that companies are going to shop you against is your price. Like, you suddenly make your price the number one factor, in lie of proper features, communication, experience, acumen, and good oldfashioned customer service, right. So at the end of the day, like that example of the restaurant, of walking in, like, nobody's greeting me, if come over and they try to sell me a $25 burger, I'm going to say go kick rocks, right, whereas if I go into a restaurant they're like, yeah, the service is kind of cruddy, but the burgers are just a dollar, you're like, okay, right. So it's like it suddenly becomes about, now the price matters, because everything else doesn't.
So if you want your customers to be shopping you based on price, go ahead and offer them a credit experience, and I hope you're the cheapest, because that's the only way that you might win a couple of them. So true, anything you want to add to that? I really love the point that you raised the hand, I don't think we have it on the slide here, but friction, it's a word we love at Flowla, because everything that we do as a digital sales room, the point is to create like an end to end experience, from the first contact to on boarding, because the buyer doesn't care about your, you know, now you're gonna talk to the BDR, now you're gonna talk to the AE, if they could they would talk to nobody, but then at least one person, right. But every friction that you're introducing to your process is actually hindering the chances of closing that deal.
So I'm wondering, like, Lisa, in your day-to-day, like, how do you remove those frictions, or do you, do you feel like they exist no matter what? Well, I can't say that I've built the formula for never having friction for anyone ever, in my, in my fuddle, I mean, I'm not here to say that, but I will say that I, you know, one kind of key thing in the Playbook, if you will, again, is a touch point doesn't have to be a call, right. I think there's just, like, this, you have to get in front of them, you have to get them on the phone, I just don't think that's true.
I mean, it used to be that it seemed unprofessional to text a prospect. I think some prospects, if they're your champion, they'd love a quick text to check in, how'd the call go, you know, how' the internal call goal. I talk a lot to my reps about customer enablement, right, so it's about giving them what they need to feel good about the decision they're making, and to feel, to feel good enough about that to go out on a limb for you in their own organization. And so for every client that's a little bit different, but I don't hold my reps accountable to calls necessarily.
It's important to build a rapport, there's a little bit of qualification, right, you want to make sure, before you give a prospect something, that they have some base level understanding, especially if you are in a category creation. But then beyond that, especially if they're, if they're educated, they've known you for a while, you know, kind of understanding that, give them what they need and let them come back. I mean, be there, be available, but I just, I don't believe in this, let's book another hour to get pricing, let's book another hour. I mean, you want to be able to get in front of them enough.
And then, and then it rip, and it can, it can e and flow, I just think that it's, if you make it too hard, yeah, people will just fade off, especially, you know, if they're senior buyers. So we have different kind of paths depending on where they are. Yeah, and I think, like, again, the job of the seller is to help the buyer to make that good enough decision, which is, you don't have to share everything, like 100%, it's kind of an 8020, you have to make sense of the data that you have and help them in the best way.
And a lot of times it's not about sharing what is already out there, but you mentioned this point about, like, the regulation that's upcoming, maybe the mismatch is in what you know as the buyer, sorry, as the seller, and you have a competitive advantage over that, and you're sharing that in advance and anticipating. So I'm just curious, in this regard, like, how do you train a rep to give a stellar buyer experience, like, Christina, I don't know, is that kind of your bread and butter?
Or, yeah, one of the reasons that buyer experience fails is that most of the time, when we are learning how to be masters of our craft, the number one place that we are practicing our talk tracks and our value selling is on live fire calls with customers. So rarely, especially if your company is changing a lot, or rolling out new products, or hiring new people, your customers are not getting a stellar experience, because we're using them as guinea pigs to improve our craft. And then, by the time you nail it, things change again, and everybody goes back into that learning curve.
And so, like, yes, my company is utilizing AI, generative AI, to be able to practice those conversations in a real scenario without the buyer. What I would say is, there's a lot of tools and ways to do that, the element here is, practice your conversations before you have them, practice going into a conversation with an end in mind, practice the flow of your conversation, get used to getting caught off track, because you are going to go into a conversation and your buyer is going to throw you off.
And if you don't follow them, while at the same time guiding them where you have to go, like, you're going to take a deviation, and if you're following a script or a checkbox and you're not comfortable in ambiguity, then you're not practiced enough. Every master of their craft of anything achieves mastery and maintains it, because you can't out practice them. And by the time they're performing on a sales call, they're comfortable, they know what to do, they can pivot, they can bend, they can flex, they know what to anticipate.
And they can listen to the communication style of the person that they are talking to and amend that, they can mirror them, they can become a valuable person, because they know enough about their craft that they can put that down and simply listen and be present in the conversation. And so often we don't do that, buyer experiences are bad because people are inherently uncomfortable talking to their prospects, they're terrified, and I get it, I've been there.
Yeah, I see it, and this, firstly, clients don't like me, because I always make them do things that they don't want to do, right, that's the first, I put it out there. But specifically around this kind of rep enablement stuff, so I just, I just break all the rules. So I just, I'm not sure if people are familiar with HubSpot, what HubSpot were doing, like, 10, 15 years ago, but when you started as a rep, one of the first things they did is they made you, because we're selling to marketers, right, they made you, like, build a website, set up an online business, all those things.
And I do the same thing with clients, right, outside of the first week of, like, onboarding and an assessment, being around just making sure you can wing together the value proposition. The first assessment is always going to be around you pitching our company as an internal buyer inside that organization, right. So I'm not selling, I'm not going to say, oh, I'm going to do my value proposition and present, this is what Flowla does. It's more like, oh, Lisa is a buyer, how would Lisa talk about Flowla to her internal teams if she had to pitch us, how would she position the needs of that company, how would she position the issues, how would she position the competitors that she looked at, and then why she would say Flowla is the best solution, because that's really hard to do.
And if you can do that really quickly inside a month, then when you get on the phone of a prospect you can be like, you'll never guess what, actually, I actually had to pretend to be you through the first month of my thing. And I know it's really hard, it's actually really hard to see the difference between some of these solutions. So let me just, like, point to something that's really specific that you may have overlooked, because that's what they want to focus on, that you know, two slides before, what's the one thing I don't know, like the thing that is in between the bits that are not very clear.
Because otherwise it's like, okay, so you've just regurgitated your website, and also the slide deck that you sent me, and now I spent an hour with you, and now you're telling me I've got to do that again with your AE, who is going to do the same thing, because they don't trust the SDR's discovery, or intern, like, it's just, come on, man. So I always say, like, when it comes to rep neoran go buy a centric, it's not easy, but when it's done, it makes a massive difference to how they have those conversations, it makes it fun and human for the seller as well.
I think that's why we're all in this game for the human interaction. I mean, I love that chat, maybe I'm going to move on to the next section a little bit, just because of the time. If we can talk about, we're now talking about the human element, and how that human interaction actually fosters the buying. And I think one thing that is now being talked a lot and lot about is, how do you measure buyer engagement, to gauge interest and intent of the buyer, right, and unfortunately we can't always be on a call with people, because they don't want to be on a call with us all the time, at least until we build that trust.
So I'm just curious, like, in your own ways throughout the sales process, what are some of the ways that you track buyer engagement, how do you define, maybe let's start with, how do you define engagement, is it qualitative, quantitative, is it an a call, is it by looking at some tool, and how do you make sure that engagement happens throughout the process? Maybe let's start with you, Lisa.
Yeah, so I think something that Christina said in the last question a number of times is conversation, she said conversation, didn't say presentation, she didn't say slide deck, right. So to me, the sign of overall engagement is, can I see signs of a conversation that doesn't need to be in a call. Of course, with Gong, you know, we use Gong and Flowla, where I am, so you can see is it a conversation or was it a speech, you know, and you can see that through email, through texting, right, so that, that's one thing, right.
Another thing that we do, and again, I'm talking about kind of a regulatory Enterprise sale, but we have things that I call customer considerations, and we actually show these to clients pretty early in the process, or through the process, pieces of it, to sort of say, here's something you should think about. And it would be, they'd have to think about this to know that we're the right choice, they'd have to think about this to compare us to competitors, and we sort of tease out questions to those answers throughout the process.
If they're not able to answer that question, they either haven't talked to their internal stakeholders, or they're really not there yet, and that's okay, that can be true. But to me, that, along with kind of course pace velocity engagements, all of that, how many stakeholders you have, what their title is, yes, those are, those are inputs. But to me, it's the quality of what we're talking about, are we getting into what you're going to integrate with, are we getting into specifically what you're trying to solve for, and I'm not talking, you know, just bant type of qualification, right, but really specific to our tool in our industry.
So to me, it's a demonstration of a conversation that can take a lot of forms, and then the depth of that, and have they really, have they really picked up the thread, gone back to the, you know, to their own notes, and then come back to us with something. That's what's important to me in the process. Yeah, I agree, I would also add, do you have places where your customers can collaborate with you? To your point, don't include being on the phone, like, even I, when I'm working with a customer, or when I'm working with a potential vendor, and I really want to buy the solution, when the only option that I have to interact with you is give, giv, you my time on the phone, sitting there, dedic, becomes pain, it's hard, right.
And it's like, so it go, how do your buyers want to buy? So do you have a tool like a Flowla, do you have a tool like a room where we can collaborate, do you have a way where you can actually measure engagement, right, like, if it's not measured, it's not happening. And revisit what those measurements of engagement look like, can you look at interaction in documents, can you look at reply times on emails, can you look at the number of people that you are multi-threaded to within that organization, and do they have the same materials that everybody else has.
How soon are people responding to you, are they accepting your invitations for the meetings that you do actually have, are they showing up, are they engaged, are they asking questions, like, is, what does their body language look like. There's so many quantitative and qualitative ways to do it, but high level, if you don't have a place or a way for you with that customer to engage in a comfortable setting that does not only include calendar time, then I would go so far as to say you actually can't measure buyer engagement, and if you can't measure it, it's not happening.
No, totally fair, I guess, I assume everyone's a Flowla user, so I apologize. Yeah, I mean, we do the kind of the customer considerations as kind of a work sheet, right, and so if there's chatter, if they're, if they're coming back to us with points, if they're clarifying points, right, you have to see that. And if not, yeah, I just assume they're not using it, if no one's logged in, then, yeah, they're curious, they want some information, we've got to be there, but I'm not, I'm not going to assume that they're hyper engaged.
And sometimes those signals come before even, like, you know, you're in the deal process, I guess, like, first you have your signals to qualify if the prospect is going to be going into your funnel, and then after that you will have maybe like indicators that you're checking, but maybe a little bit too late in the process. I don't know if that ever happens to you, this leading versus lagging indicators things, is that, is that ever a part of your reality where you're trying to improve things, Christina?
Oh, man, so often we don't realize something is wrong until that deal keeps not coming back, or it gets pushed back, and then we go back and we're like, what did we do. It's like the number of post-mortems, as a sales person and sales leader that I've been in, after a quarter where we've absolutely bombed, and then gone back and been like, oh my gosh, most of the time we're making a misstep at the very beginning of a sales process. And that is a snowball at the top of a mountain that is pending an avalanche.
And every mistake that you make, you're pushing what starts as a tiny little snowball down the hill, and it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it wallops you at the very end when the deal doesn't come back. And then you have to go back and try to subjectively piece meal together where mistakes were made, because you didn't have the factors in place to measure it.
And unfortunately, because companies are often moving so quickly, even when we uncover issues, the process to solve them and close them is so difficult, because of all of the different stakeholders that you have to pull in, is it a tool, is it a person, is it a budget, who's in charge, who's leading this. Meanwhile, we're continuing to sell and send these snow falls down a hill, and so it doesn't get prioritized, because at the end of the day we throw our hands up and say, let's just focus on revenue, let's focus on loow hanging fruits, and let's make decisions to get that done, and we don't stop and sharpen the saw.
So many sales teams are running a marathon with a pebble in their shoe, because they're like, well, I can keep moving, even if my foot's bleeding. Stopping, taking off my shoe, dumping the pebble out, and then putting my shoe back on, feels somehow more painful than running the entire race with a rock in it. And so there's a paradigm shift there that has to happen.
I find it so funny, like, I think there's just the buying, the way people buy, and all these things have just changed so much, right, we know that over the last decade or so. But it's so funny, even just doing a training session recently, and regarding this question, it was like, let's do a deal diagnosis, and do all of that stuff. And it was like, you know, I just want, you know, I said, what's your, you know, goal for the sessions, I just want to really find out where's the weaknesses in it, still, is it going to close, and all these things.
And I was just like, okay, so first question, has the buyer said that they're going to buy something? I don't, I don't know, actually, I don't like the fundamentals of, hey, really, the first call, when we go through this research, when you're talking to me, if you're talking to other vendors, I don't know that yet, is this going to end in you changing something, are you actually gna buy something, or you just figuring out
A business case. If you're just doing a business case, I'm happy to help that, or you can decide, as a business, we have too much loow hanging fruit in our funnel, where we can just get more b of the fun opportunities, we don't need to spend time educating people, we're like, that's maybe for next year, let's just go after the market that's ripe. But if you are, like, we're trying to expand, then, yeah, you got to start doing those business case meetings.
But the most fundamental thing of, like, are you actually trying to buy something, or you trying to learn, and it's like, we actually just want to learn, oh, damn, I need to take out my pipeline, I didn't realize that. So it's just, sometimes, yes, all of the tools that we have, and I love the fact that we can, we can track engagement, because back in the day I was, had just to keep calling, just check it in, I was, I was saying that, don't say it now, but 15 years ago it worked, right, so it's just like, just checking in, how's it going, how's the kids, are you gonna buy, are you gonna buy.
Right, but now it's like we can track that, so that overall engagement, two-way interactions, you know, everything that the team was saying, multi threading, how many people are involved in it, has there been explicit statement of change, is there explicit consensus that's being shared, do we have all those key, like, deal qualification stuff, because there's a lot that goes into it. But it's nice that we can digitally see it, as, like, a leader, you can look down and be like, you know, for my magic room I can see that there's some good, you know, good opportunities in the pipeline.
Yeah, we're that we're building, and getting constant feedback on what, in what else needs to go into a dashboard of FL analytics, and like how many people are in, what are they engaging with. And so many times we hear, yeah, I thought this person was the champion, but the other person was actually, out of nowhere, they were looking at it 25 times. So I reckon that, you know, it's something for multi-threading, but rather than promoting Flowla, something that is really interesting for me that you said is asking that first question.
It takes, like, are you gonna actually buy something or not, that takes a lot of courage, that takes a lot of confidence, and sometimes it comes with experience, which means a lot of lost opportunity. So how can you maybe bring it forward, that ability to ask that question earlier on in the conversations, how do you train yourself on that?
I say, River, it does come with experience, right, but now, from a place of experience, particular us on the panel, you just reverse it, you basically just get them, you put it on yourself, like, I do not want to get excited here. I, when I see your business, and I see that you're going through this, and you see that you're going through that, and I'm, you came, it, it's really easy to assume that you are ready to get something and make change.
But I want to, you know, work to your timelines or your expectations, where are you at, like, are you trying to get some research, more than happy to provide resources for you, or do you really need to understand who's going to be the most credible partner to take you on this change journey. And they will be happy to be like, you know, when people respond and they say, I'm not your hot prospect, and it's like, h, go away, but you want them to know that I don't, I can consider you a hot prospect based on your profile, but I don't want to get it wrong.
And if I, if it is the case where you're really early on, let me meet you where you're at, and I don't have to set up all the fireworks in the business. And I think they will appreciate, you know, with a little giggle, thank you so much, because I don't want that pressure, and I'm not ready to buy it. But so we just have to reverse it, to pull it on them, like, I can make an assumption here, because when I see that, you know, you've hired 100 reps, for us, that's like ring the bell, but be ready there, right, and it's okay for them to.
And what you learn from that is, oh, feeding it back up the chain to the business, you know, what I've spoken to 10 companies that have had lots of hiring and they're not really ready to buy, can we start developing resources for education. So we want to feed that back up the chain, but, yeah, rever, reverse engineer that conversation, and I've never had a time when someone's like, I don't want to tell you that, they're like, thank you.
Yeah, if you ask the right way, Christina. Yeah, I agree, at the end of the day it comes down to the psychology of how human beings make decisions, and it's okay to lean into that. Every human being makes decisions based on the same four psychological ideas, and it's whether you're deciding what you want to eat for lunch, or what tools you want to buy, or what car you want to buy. It's, do I have a problem, do I want to solve it, do I want to solve it now, and only then, do I want to solve it with you. And with so many sales people, do is, someone says, I have a problem, and they go, you have a problem, do I have a solution for you, right, but there's a lot of problems that we have in life where we don't necessarily want to solve them right now.
Case in point, I've had a faucet in my master bathroom leaking for six years, yes, it's a problem, but I have bigger problems, right. Dentists are familiar with this, right, it's like, I got a little bit of a toothache, Tylenol exists, I'm going to power through until my face explodes, right. So it comes down to, if you are selling into surface level pain, and someone simply identifying that they have a problem, do the proper discovery and conversation of, great, you've got a problem, talk to me about your priority in solving that problem, and what else is interfering with your ability to do that.
And is that something that is mission critical, is it important and urgent right now, is it important and not urgent, is it urgent and not important, right, like, you can use that matrix as well. But asking those questions, and when, only when, you have a customer or potential customer that acknowledges with you, I have a problem that I need to solve and I intend to, right now you've now earned the right to pitch your product. Oh, great, I understand the problem that you want to solve, right now we could probably help you with that, do you want to see if you can solve that problem right now with us.
But we skip those two middle pieces, because we get too excited that someone's like, I have a problem, you have a problem, become a superhero, and it's obnoxious. I love all that. So then deal velocity, actually it has two words in it, deal and velocity, before you look at velocity, look if you have a deal or not, right. So have a deal, that's right, like window shopping is a thing, it's like a psychological thing, where sometimes shopping for something is fun, and you might just be getting an idea of, like, oh, this is a cool new tool, I just want to check it out.
And if someone's like, so, when can we go ahead and bring in your leadership and get this thing signed, you're like, you're a lunatic, right. So it's like, you got to come down to asking those right questions about deal velocity, anybody want to comment on that? Which is, it's a funny thing, it's, I've never worked in an organization where they nailed deal velocity, it's, there's always room for improvement, like, one of these things, as I say, like, deal and velocity, is it actually a deal, why did we put these things into our pipeline if they weren't a deal.
So what are your best practices, what are your ways to have really effective deal velocity tracking? Yeah, I mean, I can jump in here, I think, again, I, the one size fits all approach, first of all, just doesn't work, right, and Hannah, you know, to Hannah's point, around, like, just ask them the question. I, when I window shopping, and I walk into a shop, and they greet me, can I help you, I'll just say, I'm looking for something, I want your help, I'm just window shopping, and I wouldn't have a problem saying that in a software sale either, or any sort of sale.
So I just assume humans who want to get on the phone with me, or my reps, are going to not have a problem with that either. I'm not solving for maybe the 1% of people who may get weird with that question, like, that just doesn't make sense to me. So then deal velocity is really dependent on what kind of conversation in our pipeline, we do have space for sort of a longer term, 6, 9, 12 month education timeline, we're okay with that because the nature of what we're doing.
And so I look for a different velocity pattern, a different engagement pattern, I serve up different content, you know, different opportunities for engagement with experts in the field, you, nothing really about the product yet, that's just a different velocity, versus someone who comes in and exactly says, I have a problem, I'm building an RFP, I've got budget and I need to be compant with xw by X date, like, that velocity just looks a lot different.
And then again, you know, it's everything we've already talked about, so to me, the, what folks get wrong is, there's like one velocity formula in their pipeline, they try to make every deal look the same, and then you blended it all together, and it's wrong for every deal, because you built like an average of things. So to me, that's really the secret sauce, again, it's not like I've solved every problem, but I don't
Look at everything the same, because not every buyer is the same, and not every process is going to look the same, try to build a couple of patterns, one, two, three, that's where I always start when I join an organization. All right, we already started talking a lot about, like, some of the common mistakes, like how to do things, how to improve things, and you mentioned, like, multi-threading, and like sharing the information at the right time, qualif, qualifying the pipeline at the right time.
So this last section is really about some of the things that are in our control, like things that are not in our control, we can't. Yeah, okay, fine, but at the same time, at flow we call this like winnable deals, and the role of a digital sales room we see is helping you to win more winnable deals. What is a winnable deal? It is, there is need, there's urgency, there's all those stars aligned, so let's help you, the rep, to do your job in the best way, so you're not doing missteps, and you're closing a winnable deal.
And when asked the question, like, what are some of the common missteps you see in your sales process, both from the buyer and the seller side, by the way, there were a lot of people answering about poor discovery, obviously, terrible discovery, poor discovery leads to no results, poor onboarding leads to churn, we know that. But what I want to focus on is a lot more about what happens after discovery throughout the sales process, what can be improved, and things like no multi-threading, lack of guidance, not proper following up.
I mean, things like, follow up at the wrong time, you chase the seller to get the information, they are a ghost, and then they will come, as Hannah was saying, like, pick up the phone and ask how your family is doing, at the very wrong times, or not sharing enough information, like those things came up as the biggest answers. So first of all, does that resonate with you guys, and which ones do we want to go with first, like, should we maybe pick one and talk about some best practices, like, how can you do multi-threading better, is there a way to do it, maybe starting with Hannah?
Yeah, I think the one of the things I think people get wrong, so no multif threading, correct, a lot of people don't do that, but then I think when they do multi threading, they often do it wrong. So there, there's this assumption that you need to just get lots of touch point in an account, and I'm like, that, if you think about the actual literal meaning of multi threading, it's something that comes together, so you can't just be like, I'm going to speak to 10 people, it's like, okay, like, it needs to, it needs to compound.
So you have to think about it being like, I'm going to speak to this person who I'm assuming is a user, I'm going to leverage that information and get to the leader, and say, I spoke to this person, just confirming this to be true, no expectations from you right now. And then you bounced that up, and you speak to the CEO, say, really, you know, at the moment just doing some research to see if it makes sense for us to connect as a as a group, just want to make you aware of this conversation, has it come to your Verizon, just yes or no, don't need anything for it has to integrate.
And I think what we do is, it's just like, even people that are doing like exec level outbound, where, you know, you kind of use the exec's name and get them to CEOs, is still like, hey, dude, want to be on the golf course, and it's just like, okay, and then like, how is that tying to the 15 conversations on the ground, and also he doesn't like golf, it's just like there's all these weird things happening. So I say, no multi threading, yes, but then a lot of companies that are doing it or encouraging it and not doing it in the right way, and it's very disconnected.
Because what you want is, that if you have like the a kind of pod system, where you've got a junior rep integrating with like a senior rep, and maybe marketing's, you know, on top of that supporting, then you want it to be like, hey, I know that, you know, I know Mary reached out to you, like, I asked her, like, it can be, it's okay, like, I don't know why we hide it, like, oh, let me just pretend that no one reached out, like, tell them that we are being extremely intentional about engaging with you because of x, y, and zed.
I used to do multi threading and say, I used to call it a project, I'd find something relevant, and I'd say, trying to get to a round table together to discuss this thing that I know is relevant, because I've checked all the job descriptions in their, in their live jobs, I've checked people signed on and what they were trying to do, so I'm like, I get it, it's real, and then I just keep talking to people around it, and you get like 15 conversations going, and it's like, wow, how did I do this. But you just created something, and then they're like, actually, Hannah, it may not be relevant right now, and that's okay.
At the same time, it's really difficult, when, you know, there's people, especially with remote work, in their own silos, they speak to somebody, like there were codes in our research saying, like, you know, I was trying to talk to the sales rep, they were ignoring me, and then someone else was coming from somewhere and, like, asking me the same questions from this same organization. So I guess looking at a single source of truth, single, you know, like, let's see the deal in one single place, is quite important. To, I don't know, how do you, like, do, how do you overcome those obstacles, maybe Lisa?
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, assuming we're talking about a winnable deal, and all the ingredients you just mentioned, I mean, the way I try to pivot the thought process of my reps is to say, our job is to help the customer feel like they finally did it, like they had a goal and they are achieving it with us. And so it's a, it's listening, like, you're starting the customer, the customer service process really early, and to me, if I need everything in one place, I want to be it to be in a place that's readable, that's exactly what I want, you know, it's curated.
It's not the, you know, case studies that Christina was talking about, the 10% of people still alive, right. And so, again, we use, we do use Flowla, we use that as a way to have a conversation. And then, if we're doing that, if we've made the direct person we're talking to excited and confident, they'll naturally bring someone into that deal room, especially if it's easy to use, that multi-threading will start to happen organically.
And we may never meet that person, but we can see them looking at things, we can see what's important to them, and then we can enable our champion again to have more of that if that's what they need. So, yeah, it's centralization, and then it's just like a customer, it's a customer service mindset to us, you know, you use the same tool, the on board, right, you can use FL on board. We just keep it as like one ongoing conversation that starts as soon as that we qualify that customer and say, hey, you want this, do you want this deal room, great, and we start to build it.
So that's how we think about it, and then the followup and guidance all kind of falls into play. And Christina, before I get your perspective, I, I've done a terrible job with the time, and we only have three minutes, and we have so many questions, of course, that's the usual, but you can address, we'll collect all questions and answer you. But one of them is really interesting, that comes from our LinkedIn live, and it's about, like, engagement at the prospect level, like, sorry, at the prospect level, at an Enterprise account, because there's a difference between SMB and Enterprise, or is there really.
Like, can I ask you, like, can I put you on the spot and ask you, because you have so much experience, like, is there a difference between engaging a prospect at a startup versus an Enterprise, and people are asking, like, at an entr, what can I do, how can I grab their attention, keep it engaged, is that to me, who is that to? Yes, it was to you, okay, I put you.
Yeah, there is a huge difference in terms of how you outreach in multi-thread when it is a startup versus a mid-market versus an Enterprise, and usually it comes down with specialization and focus and prioritization, and then lastly coming with cost, money, budgeting, and operational excellence. When you are working a much larger true enter prise deal, you are looking at an average of 12 to 18 month sales cycles, because of a procurement, security, and legal process, you are looking at 10 plus stakeholders that need to either be involved in the no, or let's make it 50, Christina, right, like it's, there are more people, which means it takes longer.
And so, when we talk about this concept of velocity, everyone thinks when you say, like, talk to me about deal velocity, what they mean is go faster, pushing more speed. Isn't necessarily the right thing, when you are working an Enterprise deal, you have to get really comfortable slowing down, focus, and getting prescriptive, and following their process. When it's a midmarket deal, what you're going to run into a lot is random people that they didn't realize needed to be involved in this deal, they get looped in.
So you're asking a mid-market organization, talk to me about your buying process, and the people have to get involved, and what does procurement look like, and guess what, they don't know, because they're in hyperscale, hyper growth mode, and things are changing every single day. So you have to be patient, and sometimes them a little bit and how they should buy. And when it is a small startup, you're dealing with somebody like me, where I'm like squirrel, and I'm focusing on 80 different things, and yes, I want the thing that you have, but also I realize that you and I spoke for an hour yesterday, and today I don't remember what we talked about, I don't remember what your product does, I don't remember how much it costs. And if I don't have an email from you reminding me, then you have to start cold with me all over again.
Oh, and by the way, halfway through our time today I'm going to get pulled into a fire, and I'm going to have to leave. And so the way that you are interacting with people has to, has to edit, and has to change, otherwise you have no common denominator, and then you have no guiding light for how you're selling to these organizations. So differentiating is key.
I think that was an amazing answer to get started, and with that we come to the top of the hour, anything anybody wants to add. And I'm so sorry for doing such a terrible job with the time, we will get back to the questions, we'll share the recording of the, but this has been an amazing conversation. So I'm thanking my panelists, and I'm getting their final words, if you don't mind. Oh, do you wanna, yeah, f final words.
So we've spoken a lot about biocentric, as you can imagine, creating more flexibility, so that your, the buy, you can meet buyers where they are, that we can also provide them with multiple ways for them to interact based on whereever their heads at, right. And also, to Christina's point, just making sure you edit the way in which you're engaging with them based on the different sal, or different sales engagement that you're working on. So buy a first, always, and you'll probably win more often than not.
Love that, thank you, Lisa. Christina, any final words? I would just say, in their own ways, Christina and Hannah have both talked about putting yourself in the buyer shoes, whoever that buyer is, and I just think that's incredibly important. And in every way, how you engage with them, how you communicate with them, how they want to consume information, if you just keep coming back to that constantly, a lot of what we talked about will come naturally.
Absolutely, I will end it by saying, no practice equals no progress, and remember, when you are training your people, most human beings don't do what's taught, they do what's caught. So if you're not leading by example, and measuring and inspecting what needs to be done, you can guarantee your people aren't following your process.
Oh my God, preach. Thank you, Christina, this was a fantastic conversation, thank you for joining me at my very first webinar at Flowla, I hope everybody enjoyed. I'm, there has been some technical mishaps as well where we couldn't, you know, open the studio to Studio to everybody, which is why we're going to be sharing the recording right after, so you'll be receiving the email hopefully within the next hour or sometime, but otherwise feel free to reach out.
Please follow my panelists, I hope they enjoyed this and they come back, because I love talking to them, and I've been so privileged to be an all female panel in my very first webinar, this was amazing. Thank you, thank you so much, it was a pleasure. Wonderful, have a great day, everyone. Bye. E for
All right, so while everybody is tuning in, I will just slowly start with the intro of today's audio event, and for those for whom this is the very first audio event, welcome, I hope you will enjoy this. So yes, for today we'll have a yet again Link at this audio event. This is the first one we having this year. Last year we had quite a few and it was a success, so I'm excited to continue doing these events. I hope you're doing well and I hope you're ready to learn more about LinkedIn sales. So during this event we will have a panel of sales experts whom you can already see here in the host positions, and today's discussion is, as I mentioned, aimed at startups and other emerging companies.
It can also be, not necessarily tips for only startups, I think, like a lot of the tips that you will hear today, you will be able to apply also for your organization. So stick around, and again, it doesn't matter where you're starting, if it's just the beginning of your sales journey on LinkedIn or if you're already seeking to have like better results, everyone will find quite some useful information.
So great to see that we already have more than 60 people, hello everybody. Yeah, so from my side, I would like to let you know that if you're listening, always react with some emojis if you're agreeing with what the presenters are saying. Sorry if you're not, there's no emoji for that, but hopefully in the future we'll have some of those as well. For those who are joining again for the first time, we will shortly start our discussion, and if you have a question you can raise your hand before the end of the session. Of this audio event we will actually have from 10 to 15 minutes for the Q&A, so if you have a question raise your hand and then we'll bring you on the stage and just have your question prepared, no pitching whatsoever, sorry, unless you do a really great pitch and we can all evaluate it.
But yeah, without further ado, I feel like most of the people have joined already. Without further ado, let me introduce myself. So my name is Kotryna and I'm the founder and CEO of Linkedist, the company that helps people and brands grow with the power of LinkedIn, and today with me in this audio event I have a few people. So first of all, we have Dom ores, the co-founder and CEO of Growth Deck. Hi Dom. Hi Kotryna, happy to be here. Good to see you here, or good to hear you here, right, we don't see each other. Okay, we have Edwiin Vilos, founder and COO of Hemes. Hello. Hi Kotryna and everyone, thank you for having me. Good to have you, and of course we have Alper Yurder, co-founder and CRO of Flowla. Hello, thanks for having me Kotryna, and hi folks, good to have you.
So maybe each of you could just briefly tell us, and I know, you know, we're all salespeople here, so just in a few sentences, of what your company does, and maybe if it's related with sales or selling you can expand a little bit on that as well. So Don, maybe we can start with you. Sure, absolutely, happy to tell a bit more about us. So in the simple words, we either execute goto market strategy or we craft one. How we do it, we use outbound B2B leag generation to do that. We're working in this field more than seven years with top startups in Europe. You know, we have more than 40 people all across the world, more than 70 clients, starting from preed startups all the way to really establish unicorns, and yeah, so I'm very excited to share my experience here, because you know LinkedIn is a is amazing tool for us, we're using it daily for our clients and for ourselves, so I'm very looking forward to great discussion.
Oh sorry, I think I was muted. Thanks Dom, now we could move to Edvin. Edvin, maybe you could share a little bit about Hems. Yeah, for sure, so basically what Hems does, that we a service provider, and we focus on sales positions, and we do sales head hunting and recruitment for startups or SMBs or innovative companies, and how we ended up with such an interesting idea, right, you know, but basically I was head of sales for the last eight years and I worked in sales for the last 16 years and was selling software products, doing international sales, and use LinkedIn a lot, and just identified this opportunity that every great startup needs an amazing salese, and what can be, you know, better than just, you know, sales people finding sales people. So this is what we're trying to achieve with the Hamus, and I see some of my ex colleagues from previous startups, so hi guys, who knows me, great, good to have you, and thank you so much for sharing this.
Now Alper, the M goes to you, of course. I'm, first of all, I'm very disappointed about the fact that there is no disappointment emoji, as you mentioned Kotryna, there should definitely be one, let LinkedIn hear our voice. So I'm Alper, I'm the co-founder of Flowla, which is a digital sales room. If you're thinking that being a seller and closing a deal is difficult, than being the shoes of the buyer, I'm sure many of you are, and buying a product is not easy job. So basically we try to improve the buyer experience and make sure that all of that seller and buyer relationship works in one single link, and that's basically what the digital sales reme, mutual action plan execution is, and I'm very happy to be here because I use LinkedIn on a day-to-day basis, that's one of our main growth engines, and prior to being a very new founder at the age of 38, which is an interesting experience, I've been in sales for over a decade, and an ex consultant.
All right, thank you so much for sharing, and I think that those who are interested in hearing more about the companies that we just heard about, definitely go ahead, follow, check their LinkedIn pages and see what they're doing there. Okay, so thank you so much for sharing.
And again, today I just want to have a really nice discussion. We can, of course, I have some questions prepared, but we can always, you know, have some additional questions, let's see how the discussion conversation goes. And I would like to start actually with putting ourselves into the shoes of a very early stage startup, or it could be even a startup that has been on the market for at least one or two years, still struggling with clients, still struggling with, you know, finding them, or most importantly reaching them, right, even if you find them, you don't, you don't necessarily can reach them.
So if you were in their shoes and you would have LinkedIn as one of the places where you, you're trying to reach your target audience, what would you personally start with, you know, you go on LinkedIn, what's next, do you identify some tools, some additional tools first, do you try to write them, what are your messages, just, you know, from the batch, a few ideas where you would start, because I can see a lot of people that are listening already, they are from startups, and I think they always have this question. So anyone would like to start, don't mind going first on this one.
Yeah, go ahead, which means I don't have to go first on the other one. So I think the biggest struggle for me, and I, and I hear this in my community a lot, is clarity. You know, LinkedIn is an amazing tool, it's great, it's supposedly free, by the way it's not, because your attention is the currency, and attention of the followers and people who listen to you is the currency, and sometimes we're spending it, you know, not in the most economical way. Anyway, I would say trying to create clarity as soon as possible, who's your audience, who are you talking to, who are you writing to, who are you trying to reach out to, what do they care about, I think that's probably the biggest struggle, and try to narrow it down as much as possible, I would say, and that's been my one year of journey, like, who's my audience, who cares, what should I be talking about, etc. So clarity is, would be a big gift once we find it, I think.
And just to piggy back on that, like how, what are the ways you could try to find the clarity, would you create content and then see who engages, would you send some AB testing, some messages, and see which one works better, like how would you get that clarity? Yeah, I think the very simple answer is, first you need to cast a wide net, so you see who catches, and then as you get signals, you try to double down and you try to measure the impact. So if you're posting for a month consistently, you know, different post types, different topics, see what gets the engagement, what actually works, and therefore double down on that. And a tool that I started, for example, personally, at first when I decided, okay, LinkedIn is going to be a big growth channel for us, about a year and a half ago, I started following a lot of people, like, you know, salespeople, customer success, revenue leaders, ET, maybe a thousand people, and in that process I used Waalaxy, which is like a good prospecting tool for LinkedIn, and that helped me to follow people on mass.
Yeah, okay, thank you so much, and those who are listening, definitely take a notebook or open your not, notes app on your phones, because there will be some tools names today that I think will be helpful for everybody. So what about you Dom, what would you add here if you would start out from the scratch? Yeah, so I guess from the practical standpoint, I think the biggest problem is consistency, so you need to be consistent on LinkedIn, that's the number one rule to be successful, because I heard many different stories when, you know, startups complaining, you know, LinkedIn doesn't work for me, blah, in my, in some particular cases it might be the problem that your, you know, audience or your vertical just are not on LinkedIn, for example real estate, or more like a old school industries.
But for other folks, I would say the consistent consistency is the number one thing that you need to nail down, start simple, free posts per week from your personal profile and from the company profile. Then second thing that you can do is to clean your feed, follow or all competitors that you have, you're going to see what is happen happening in the industry, what kind of stuff they are doing, and you can get an inspiration from them as well.
And what kind of tool to use is, I think, you know, you can brainstorm perfectly with the Google Bard, on even ChatGPT, for some kind of ideas. If you want to even streamline even more the process, you can use Taplio.com for generating the content or getting ideas as well, and they really encourage start ups to not solely rely on text content, but to really start mixing up a visual content, including VI videos, pictures, something like that, you know, because research shows that visual content yields about 20% more engagements and impressions.
All right, that makes a lot of sense, and so you touched mostly upon the content creation side, would there be something you would do in regards to like the outreach side, sales side? Yeah, actually, to Alper point, you know, you can invite bunch of people to your connections, right, and after they accept it, you can, you know, just start the conversations, right, and especially with your potential clients or your peers in the same industry, you're not going to necessarily, you know, sell instantly, right, but at least they will know who you are, they will, they saw your brand, you know, you will be visible, I think. So I, you know, that kind of thing is more like a long-term projection, so do not expect the instant cell, do not try to pitch slap, as I see a lot of on LinkedIn nowadays, but instead, you know, try to be long-term relationships, try to be visible, and I think, you know, in long term we're going to win.
All right, makes sense, and thank you so much for sharing these advice. Edvin, do you have something to add?
Yeah, I think I will try to combine Don and Alper suggestions, because if we talk about very early stage startups, I would say that you definitely need to move your focus from how I can sell to how I can connect first, right. You know, and I usually tend to compare LinkedIn connection as a real life connections, with the people, then you approach someone at the conference, you usually say hi, you try to introduce each other a little bit, but you never pitch, right.
So exactly the same on LinkedIn, that you first should list at least, I don't know, 50 to 100 people that might be your potential customers, try to connect with them, and then you can, of course, experiment on the message what you send, but basically your idea should be to really get to know each other. And you can even do it that simple way, that say, that, hi, you know, Kotryna, I'm just launching my new business, I see that you are from the industry, and I would really appreciate your feedback because I'm trying, you know, this and this hypothesis, what do you think about that. And that really hooks people, because you ask for advice, and it really kind of shows that you care about them, at least how much, like, you know, at least you not trying to pitch slap, as Dom said, that's an amazing expression.
And after that, you know, a week or month or so, you can try, you know, to come back to that conversation, and at the beginning I don't even suggest using tools for you, so you can experiment and feel it, the vibe of a LinkedIn, and on top, after you did the first impressions and first connections, then you can start thinking, all right, should I post anything, should I be consistent, or it's enough for me at that stage, and I can, you know, go back and go back to, you know, my project and try to implement the suggestions, and so on, so that probably would be my advice for super early stage startups.
Okay, so like testing and trial, and then later on just bringing all the big guns and all the tools into your. Exactly, because a lot of startups they immediately kind of like automate everything, then send thousands of messages, get either blocked, you know, best case that someone just blocks you as a person, but either you are risking to be blocked by LinkedIn itself, right, and then you do not have a second interation to automate what really works. So yeah, okay, thank you so much.
Actually, you mentioned a few great things, and one of them was your example, you know, with a conference. Maybe all of you, and this is a question to all of you, have some other real life examples, some specific examples where you did something, then connected it with LinkedIn, and then maybe had a call, and some kind of a sequence of events that worked, or work still this day for you, when it comes to selling. So maybe Alper or Dom, if you have something to share here besides conferences and events.
Yeah, I don't mind sharing. I think a big part of closing a deal, or selling, or whatever you want to call it, convincing and influencing people, is having a system in place that always helps. So when I say clarity, it's all about trying to figure out what that system is for you. But then there are general rules of thum that you can leverage, and I think that's based in human psychology. So as a seller, your job is to be genuinely interested in somebody else's problem, is to be genuinely curious about that, genuinely curious about how others are fixing that problem, which means, you know, what is content, at the end of the content is ideas, best practices, things that work for others, and in this day and age where our attention spans are as small as seconds on an interaction, what you need to do is bring it very fast.
So my, so for example, I just started a podcast, and at the end of the day, into my podcast I'm inviting, you know, CEOs and etc influential people who don't have time for me, so I'm trying to sell my podcast to them at the moment. So what I do is, I follow them for two three weeks, I warm them up, I engage with their content, I don't just say hi, interesting, great, blah, but I'm actually investing in what they're doing and provide some good conversations, and always get replied, turn it into some really meaningful engagement, and after I do that, if I feel the time is right, then I pitch slap, because at the end of the day it always feels like a slap, I think, it's the force, is it a gentle slap or is it a big slab.
So after that, I go with a little message, and my message, I think, it's always again consistent, which is a little stat, something that can create a bit of credibility and formal around, you know, why you should join this or why you should buy my product, this could be a common problem that people face, and a very simple on line explanation of how you're solving that problem, in my case, you know, for the podcast for example, like one line of, how XYZ many people see it, and therefore it will be good for you, and a simple call to action, I think simple call to action is magic.
As a seller, what you want to get is not always yeses, but you want to get a response, and to get a response you need to reduce the cognitive load on the person, which means you shouldn't burden them with too much unnecessary information, just say, let's chat, let's talk, interested, can I share this, that, and it's not always, you know, book a meeting or whatever, in my case, are you interested in my podcast, you know, and they can say yes or no or not the right time.
These are some really good notes, and I hope some good advice, and I hope that people are taking notes of this, and again, this is an incredible excellent way to grab somebody's attention, when you're inviting them, first of all, to be on your podcast, and you're kind of giving them value as well, because you're exposing their brand and their company to a broader audience. So I do know that somebody else today in this call is also doing a podcast, so Dom, the stage is yours.
Thank you. Yeah, to Alper point, yeah, definitely, don't ask for time when you have your CTA, don't ask for 15 minutes or 20 minutes, it's like asking people for money, right, it doesn't work. So instead, what we like to call it, not call to action, but call to conversation, right, so that you are asking for just to have a conversation, and that's enough, right, so.
And jumping a bit to the tactical things, right, so we are all about legion, so there's a free steps that you can do actually to get quite quick traction. So first of all, we can engage with your, with the people who are engaging with your competitors's content, right, so these are lwh hanging low hanging fruits, right, and you can get them quite easily. Second is engage with people who are engaging with your content, right, so after a month, you said you did like, I don't know, like 10, 15 posts, right, after a month you'll do an analysis, right, so these are the people that I'm not connected with, seems like an ICP, right, so it's a, it's a great opportunity for you to connect with them, to ask some kind of relevant questions, what they think about the particular piece of content, and you can get the conversations pretty quickly.
Third one is, and often overlooked one, is to comment, to comment on other people content, or to reply even to some, cont, to some comments as well, write, and in comments you can get some magic. You know, it's, I saw many cases when, after really good comment, folks, you know, receive dozens of invitations, right, some kind of visibility, so, you know, it's, it probably more makes sense to do that on more like a popular, let's say, influencers, right, that like, that have like really wide audience, and you can get visible in that, in that way as well.
All right, go ahead, go ahead. I wanted to add on Dom's idea to comment and other influencers post, my record was 20 likes just for one com, comment, and the one of quite big influencers on LinkedIn, so just by simple that I kind of increased my reach and I generated few followers. But continuing on, for example, topic, and for example, we used one very interesting tactics at Fabro, because we, our CEO had a podcast as well, and we were operating in a games industry, and just imagine we were working with such a companies like EA Sports, right, you know, with Unity, with Amazon games, Netflix games, so basically AAA studios that, like, you know, amazing B budgets, like 20,000 employees and so on, and we managed to book a calls with C level executives.
And how we did it, we basically connected with them, and we just sent, for example, hey Steve, you know, we have a podcast related to game industry, we talk about that challenges, and since you are executive at, for example, Amazon games, what kind of challenges do you face in this position. And you would be surprised how many of executives replied to us, and they said, oh, I actually have that challenge, and this is like how we started to talk to them. And of course, you know, we were always shaping that, like, you know, turning that challenges into the solution that we sell, and it was very selfish, but it really engaged the conversation, and we never kind of send directly, you know, our pitch, but we asked them, you know, to start talking about these challenges. So I hope it will helps as well.
Yes, thank you so much, all of these advice are useful, and I still see 100 people listening in, so I hope you are getting your questions ready as well, because in around 20 minutes we'll do the Q&A session too.
But just to add to the tactics, and some things that you can do, so of course from my side I would say one of the things that are not as widely used, or sometimes people forget about, is, of course, mutual connections. In my case, a lot of the times I would go to LinkedIn, I would find like a person that I want to reach out to, or let's say they could be a potential prospect, and what we could do is we would then see who are the people connected to that person, and I, if I would see some people that I have a Clos relationship with, or, you know, that I could ask for an intro, I would definitely do it, and once in a while, like this would really work wonders and would be an amazingly warm intro. So mutual connections, I feel like it's often overlooked, but it can really help you, just to be like, hey, I see, you know, that person, could you do an intro, because I could help them with this and that, right, so this is one thing.
And then another thing for lead genen, when you don't have a big budget, is, if you, like Dom said, if you are consistent with your content and you are starting to have like a follower base, people who are following you, an audience, a community, once in a while, not always, because people will definitely sense it, once in a while you can do LinkedIn polls, and when you're doing a poll, try to, you know, ask about whether people have these or these challenges, or if this is something that people are expecting within the next year, and try to think of questions that would help you identify your leads.
And often times when we do these kind of polls, then I could see, for example, if I'm asking what are still the biggest challenges when it comes to your organization's LinkedIn's presence, and people vote like, you know, creating the content itself, then I can definitely write them privately, and here I have a list of people who voted who are potential clients of mine, right. So there are these few things that you can use and definitely gain traction, and since we've mentioned content, I would like to, that definitely we are sharing good tips on LinkedIn every week, and then we recently launched an AI powered marketing ebook, so my colleague Amis will leave the link in the chat of this event, so feel free to grab it, because it's all about visuals and content creation.
All right, so now I would like to move into another topic, which I think is like a big one for a lot of people listening, and that is tools. Are of course a big part of any, you know, practice, even if especially when we're doing a mul channel approach, you know, or when we're just working with LinkedIn, still there are lots of tools, and maybe each of you could share just briefly some of your experiences with some tools, whether that's for prospecting, for data collection, for sending LinkedIn invites, or whatever really worked, and you could also maybe share what did not work for you, because I feel like there's so many things to choose from that sometimes people get overwhelmed and don't even know which tool to go with. So maybe you have tried quite a few, and I already see Dom is unmuted, so go ahead.
Yeah, I have prepared a list of tools, so let's go. Tapo is good for content, good to brainstorm ideas, to see what other people are doing, right, and to kind of optimize your content, and they even give, giving you some analytics to see, so it's overall it's a good tool. Then another one is for automation, right, so in my career I used free tools Expandi, Waalaxy and Dripify. Now with automation tools you need to be careful how you use them, because I got suspended actually multiple times, and when you got suspended for free days is quite painful for you, right, if you have ongoing conversations, maybe some contract negotiations, and can you imagine you're completely disappear for three days, right, you, it will cost a lot actually, so do not over push your limits, start small, 10, 15 up to 20 messages per day, and you should be fine.
Third is, and is tool for analytics, Shield is really good one, and for streamlining your legion, especially, it's really good tool for SDRs, it's called Surfe.com, so basically this is like a plugin, right, that you install to your browser, and they have an interface on the top of LinkedIn, and you can push directly from your, from LinkedIn leads to CRM system, you can leave notes, you can add them to the sequences, is really good, I'm currently using it, so these probably will be, would be my go-to.
What about if we are talking about automatic connection invites, I know you mentioned you were suspended a few times, was it because of those, was it because of something else? It was actually quite weird situation, because I had a tool, I had a plugin, right, but none of the sequence has been active, right, I turned off and turned off them, and I still got suspended, right, so that was the case for other times, yeah, it was for a reason, probably, know, I sent too much messages, but what my actually partner is doing, he's using Phantom Buster for automating connection requests, so he does like 10 per day, and he's fine, so maybe that's something to consider as well.
Okay, Shield is definitely a great recommendation, and if you want to track your analytics, that's a go-to tool. Now Edvin, what are your recommendations when it comes to tools?
I have to admit that I already use some of the recommendations by Dom, right, know, and I'm not, I was never heavy on automation tools, especially for LinkedIn, Lemlist was number one choice, and I'm not sure why but, you know, it probably just stuck with me, and in, we never then big automating LinkedIn, we kind of like did in waves, so basically connect with people, then try to nurture them, and then to do a second wave, so I was only once warned by LinkedIn that your activity looked suspicious, and that's it, I was never block. So yeah, Lemlist is number one choice for me, but I would consider it as a baby tool in automation world.
All right, Alper, what are some of your recommendations? Probably I'll have two, one is something that, are, so we just published an sales almanac for 2023 where we featured 100 top revenue voices, and rather than just saying, oh, this person's great, go follow, what we did is we went through all their posts, all their content, we spend a month trying to create some, you know, latest and the greatest best tips and practical strategies and templates, etc, from all those influencers, and we used Kleo to do that, actually our head of content used that one, so I think that one is a good one.
And the other one I would say is my personal experience of LinkedIn basic, when I was, you know, before starting to build Flowla, the one thing that you hate as a seller is, you are just relentlessly sending what you think is very relevant and interesting information, you're sending a PDF, and then you're sending a video, and then you learn to ask people before you send something, and you do that, but, you know, you're left in the dark, there's no, it's just crickets, you're not getting any information back, and part of that reason is you're bombarding people with a lot of content that they're not interested, but you have no idea of knowing it.
So here I'm going to pitch my own tool, which is Flowla, you just put everything in one flow, you send it, you see exactly what people are interested in, if they're watching your demo for one minute, that is your ICP, that is your person you should keep chasing, not the other people, if somebody's looking at your YouTube video for 30 seconds, that is the person to chase. So I think that information is gold, it helps us a lot in our own goto market motion too.
Thank you Alper, and the first one that you mention, where can we find it, which one, sorry, you mentioned in the beginning. C, maybe our head of content who's listening can come out of mute and answer you better, but I think it's Kleo is the name of the tool, and it just shows the top post for each creator, so you know, you know what, to what's the real good content that you should be looking for in that creator.
Okay, I got it. Actually, when you were mentioning the tools and sharing, I also get to think of another question around the same topic, and that is, you know, this week we actually, Dom and I, we had a podcast episode on his podcast, and it's coming, I think this week, but we also talked a little bit about sales and AI, of course, what's happening, and a couple of times I mentioned during the last few months that, you know, we're not really sure how the future looks like, and maybe in the future two bots are going to sell to each other, and then only when the time comes for, you know, the need of closer interaction, then people can talk, so all the negotiations, all the other interactions will be done automatically. What do you see or predict, maybe, when it comes to the usage of artificial intelligence and the sales process, any predictions, any anything that you already see in the market that's happening?
Yeah, I'm happy to take this one, actually, I would really love, from the 100 people listening, U, what would their reaction be. I just had KL puer on the pod, and we were talking about this, and the moment he mentioned AI, it was just such a cring, cringey moment, and I asked this question to everybody.
I think there's two things, one, so far there's no tool that does what the salesperson does, which is to build that empathy, trust, relationship building, which is at the core of selling, and it's really hard to do, I think. What I hear from a lot of people that I learned from is, they're using AI to make things more efficient and effective, like, you know, instead of spending 20 minutes to write something, yes, you can use ChatGPT to write generative AI, whatever, but at the end of the day the experience needs to come from you, the genuinity, the authenticity, it has to come from you, so I don't think that's being replaced. Where AI is a bit more effective, I feel like, is, you know, things like optimizing, saving time, you know, instead of creating an image over, you know, five hours on Canva, you have now AI tools which can create that for you by learning it.
So at the core of it, the sales job, I think, is very human, it's so human, that I'm very interested to see how it can be automated, but what we need is, I think, tools to help people to get better at their job, so best practice, you know, if you do X you will be able to close a deal faster, if you insert a specific content your prospect will be more willing to engage with you, that kind of best practices, maybe learning from a large set of data, so a tool that can give you the best practice.
And that's kind of what we're trying to build at Flowla, something like a sales companion, I would love, I would love had love to have a sales companion, other than a manager to whom I only have, you know, once a week access to, give me the best practice, but if you have a tool that is using AI to give you ideas about how to do your job better, giving you constantly best practice from others, etc, that's super powerful, and that's what we're trying to build with Ri, so an AI assistant to help you do your job better.
Okay, any other opinions, Dom, Edvin? I can join, and I notice that, you know, we can, we can automate a lot of manual work based on LS's, or like lead research specialist job description, so basically identifying ICPs, identifying decision makers, identifying emails or contacts, and then leaving to SDRs to outbound, and that could be as well automated. But I would say that it could be replaced, right, with AE, with first steps, because as soon as someone would reply to you properly, that I am interested if that and that, or if I'm not interested, that, then it's very difficult to automate, that reply you need to really interact from the human perspective.
Yeah, so yeah, so I would say that the first layer of the sales, LRS, bit of SDRs, yes, you know, we should automate, and let people do, like, you know, sales, proper sales, to each other, yeah, bit to build up. I see quite few directions, everyone who managed a sales team, especially SDRs, they know how painful and how time consuming is to coach them and to listen all cult calls that they made, and this area is getting disrupted, I think, big time, because you have tools like Gong, you have tools like, I forget, I forgot, Clari, yeah, that's the one, Clari, and the analyze sales calls, and you know they just tell you know where, what sales, what sales guide did you know correctly, what they did wrong, there's even some kind of AI assistant that tells you where to shift the shift the conversation, it's really in depth, and I think, yeah, it's going to be even more prominent in the next few years.
Another one is actually programmatic sequencing is the thing right now, and there's a quite a few solutions who can provide you that, so instead of writing the whole sequence by yourself, basically I does everything for you, the quality is actually 50/50, it's not something that we use, but I think few years and, yeah, I think you're going to have the whole sequence personalized, crispy, you know, in few minutes, I think it's going to happen.
Another one that actually blew my mind a bit is AI called calling, right, it's not there yet, but go to air.com and listen to the demo, right, it will surprise you how good it is, and I think, again, few years and going, we're going to have it. And the personalization, right, U, I think that, you know, that can B basically analyze a bunch of profiles, get the information from the website, and, yeah, you can have quite good personalization, and for that you can check it, check out clay.com, actually, for that it's like waterfall enrichment, bet you can use that for personalization. And for air.com, is it spelled like the actual air, or, yeah, the air that you breathe, exactly, yeah.
Okay, this is really interesting, because I've also heard some demo or seen some demos, and I heard some calls where it was not really a human speaking but an AI model with a human's voice, and, yeah, it's interesting to see where things are getting. Even for the sales promotional campaign, I've tried a tool called the HeyGen, and basically I just filmed myself from a few different angles, and what it does, you upload your videos, and then it, basically, whatever text you write, it kind of shows that you're saying that text, not all videos came out smooth, smoothly, but there were a few that looked like it was definitely me saying those words, and, yeah, it's interesting where, think, things are going, because especially for promotional campaigns, for sales promotional campaigns, these things will be useful.
So yeah, let's see what the future holds. Thanks to everybody who shared their opinions on this, on the trends, and on the topic of AI, I know, as Aler mentioned, you know, it's a topic that everyone is covering these days, but hey, we can't ignore it either.
I think now, for those who are listening, it's a great time to start raising your hands, don't be shy, and just ask your question, and we'll bring you on the stage. So if you have some questions, you can raise your hand and I'll be able to see you before bringing you on the stage for the Q&A part. But until then, if I don't see any raise hands at the moment, I want to talk about one final thing before we wrap it up, and that will be definitely just trying to think of challenges.
So I know today we talked about LinkedIn tools, we talked about LinkedIn strategies, and this whole audio event is meant for, you know, sharing what works, which I think we did, at least a little bit, of what works for us. And for every salesperson who is starting out, or who's already in their sales journey, it's a lot about resilience, right, and it's a lot about overcoming those challenges, and I feel like within every single campaign that you do, whether that's called calling, called outreach, any other campaign, there's of course a lot of rejection. So just for the final bit, which I would love to be a little bit more motivational for the listeners, maybe you could each share, you know, it could be also a memorable rejection that you had, which turned into a lesson, or, you know, how you actually overcome them, and how you motivate yourself on continuing with your sales activities.
Again, I don't mind going first on here with rejection, I mean it's part of the job, it's all day, every day. First of all, before, if we're wrapping up before we come to the end of it, there's like a, I was checking out the names of the participants, and it's like such a wide range of people from different locations, I would love to hear from everybody's, you know, best practice, etc, because, you know, you never give without getting, so if anybody's has some good tips for us to get, please feel free to get in touch, like our post and share your tips.
Mine, rejection is part of it, it's everyday, but again, I was talking to somebody and who told me, after a while I was crying, and I understood that I cannot cry anymore, so it's a bit like that for me, the sales game, rejection game, you know, you have bad days, for two three days you have, you can have them, but then you figure out a new solution.
For me, actually, it's not from the world of LinkedIn, but probably one of my worst career nightmares was when I pushed a client for a huge deal to the brink of, you know, I chased them so hard, so bad, that I brought them to the brink of telling, complaining about me to my manager. That was probably the first year of my very hard sales IC journey, and I learned a huge lesson, that, you know, yes, you want to close something and you have a code and you want to get your commission, but you're dealing with humans, so either you enjoy the pace of people and how they respond to you, or you find another job. So I would recommend the same, we are dealing with people, let's remember that.
Great advice, great advice, what about the others?
Yeah, I think I can jump in, and, yeah, actually the tool of call calling a is not air, combat a, so just a small adjustment from my side. And, yeah, I have one really good story that teached me, taught me a lot actually.
I think, so few years ago, we received our project, it was really early for the company, every dollar matter, and received a project from Tel Aviv, right, from one of the, one of the potential customers, and they said, let, okay, let's work for month on this particular event, great, we started to work. After month they say, you know, we're not satisfied, we are choosing another vendor, right, but it's still like few weeks left to finish the project, so that was a quite hard slap for us. And, but we still, you know, kept our professionalism, kept pushing, at the end of the day we delivered quite good results, and after couple of days they came back, the client came back to me and said, you know, the other vendor is just so bad, now we understand how good you are, and we want to keep working with you, right, we see your attitude, we see your energy, your determination.
And fast forward few years, you know, we have many clients in Tel Aviv, that client became the partner of ours, we have a great relationship, I met many times face to face in their office, you know, we just share our experiences, and that's a really good lesson for us, that doesn't matter what is the reaction from the customer, but keep your determination in check and professionalism in check, right, and you can get awarded actually quite significantly because, you know, people all always will remember that.
What a beautiful story, and people are people at the end of the day, right, and you never know how it will turn around, or how it can turn around. Absolutely, Edvin, for the final thoughts we have you.
Yeah, final thoughts, I want to share one saying from my ex colleague, and he is actually here, Gint Shenas, so basically he always said that there is no better feeling than talking with the potential customer. So always remember that if you receive the rejection, or a lot of rejections, H, you can have a remedy to talk with the future customer, right, and it will generate the potential business for you, and you would feel great, and so on.
So, but another thing, that just remember that if they said no today, maybe it was not because of your bad pitch or anything, maybe they were not even read your message and they said no. So come back next time, come back with another approach, and be resistant, we work in sales, and we try, our job is, you know, to be resistant and to hear no every day, and especially then we work in a service business, and Kotryna and Dom can itely agree that, you know, selling service, services, you have to be at the right time and right moment, and, you know, you have to hear a lot of no, and then maybe the same customer who said 10 times no would call you back and say, Edvin, now I need your services, it's good that you never were rude with me, and you were never angry that I rejected you so many times. So keep that in mind.
Really great advice as well, the, so, thank you so much everybody for sharing. I think, from my side, and somebody also mentioned this today, it would be just getting an answer, right, like, that's what matters, and then from a no you can still have some negotiations, you can still talk with somebody, but, you know, keeping your hopes high is okay, but it's more important to actually keep your activity numbers high, and make sure that you send a lot of emails, send a lot of messages, talk with a lot of people, meet a lot of people, and I always say, like, the bigger the number, the bigger the possibility and opportunity that someone will convert and become your client, and maybe your biggest fan or partner.
All right, so I see we have one question from the audience, so I'll go ahead and unmute Olga, and others who are listening, make sure to also, if you have some questions, go ahead and raise your hand and we'll bring you on the stage. So Olga, the stage is yours, we're listening to your question, you also need to unmute yourself, if you, if everything is okay and you can hear us.
Oh yeah, thank you for reminder, and thank you so much for the conversation, especially the practical side of it. The question is, when you were on an early stage of your startup, if you have experience reaching out to potential investors, during your seting round, investment via LinkedIn, those highlevel prospects from top world capital vent Ventures that receive hundreds of emails and messages of on LinkedIn, what would, what tips would you give to such startups?
All right, any takers? Happy to take this one, is somebody who raised over 1.3 million in the middle of the sugar storm that was last year, and I think what you need to understand all go about raising, or maybe you already know, but at least my learning is this, it's a bit like selling, so formal is a big part of it. Once you're going into the fundraising journey, I think you want to, what you want to do is create momentum, you know, when you reach out to 5, 10, 20, 30 people, the next VC that you speak to, the outcome should be, wow, okay, these people are raising and they're going to raise without us if we don't jump in. So, you know, play the game that they're playing with you, because if it goes into the game of, oh yeah, okay, this is a great pitch, let's talk in three months, that's not going to be great for your race.
So I'm coming from the result back, to what you should do in terms of outreach. With the outreach, I think it's a bit similar to sales, I would just start with your close network, people that you feel like are going to invest in you, I don't think you need to go after the, you know, the impossibles, the ones who you already know may not be giving you money because you don't have any connections, any referrals, they're maybe too high up, etc, the world is, you know, there's plenty of fish in the sea. So I would say, again, like, try to know your ICP, who fits to you culturally as a VC, who is investing into the space, how many of them there are, okay, there are 30 of them, this is my sequence, I'm going to reach out to five this week, I'm going to make sure that I speak to one with that momentum, then I'm going to reach out to another two next week. I think that's a smarter way to do fundraising than just say, okay, these are the 40 wonderful shiny names, and I want their money, if that makes sense.
Yes, thank you so much, I can share and advice, as I raised three rounds, the biggest is, was 5 million, and I'm part of venture capital fund as well, 30 million. So basically you have to be direct, BBCS, you have to be really directed and on point, like, we are building chatbot, we have that traction, we have so many users, we have some that type, that revenue, and so on and so on, you know, don't be so fluffy and nice about your dream startup and so on, because, you know, everyone is building next unicorn, but especially at the early stage you need to talk about traction, and once they see your traction, then you can, you know, be bit broader on your big idea and so on, but that's my advice, you know, thank you.
And if you have the potential lead and they don't respond via email, are you hunting them via emails, or you just stick to one channel? Usually, def, you have to use all possible channels, you know, don't stick to anything, be creative, if the door doesn't open a window, send pictures, text, voice messages, emails, ma, whatever, ask for intros, you know, you are chasing for someone money, right, you know, so you need to be really creative, if you cannot land attention of VC, how you will land your customers. Thank you.
All right, so Alga, I think we've hopefully answered your question, or the amazing panelist did, and I think there was a lot of great advice. I don't see any other hand raised, I think people are maybe a little bit shy, but hey, you shouldn't be, we're all sales people here, so come on the stage if you, if you have something you wanted to ask, or maybe add, as Alper said, you know, if you would like to share something from your sales experience, we still have a couple of minutes.
But yeah, first of all, thank you so much everybody for joining, and for panelists, especially for coming here and sharing your knowledge, and again, if you want to learn more about sales, we also at Linkedist have a LinkedIn sales course, so if you want to check it out, go to the events description, there is a secret code for you. Otherwise, I think we touched upon a lot of great topics, we'll be, of course, sharing the recording, so if you would want to share this recording with your colleagues, in a bit, in a few days or next week we'll have it on YouTube, so make sure to check it there as well.
But again, thank you so much everybody for joining, thank you Dom, Edvin, Alper, for taking the time to join me today, I'm sure you might see some new connection requests on your LinkedIn after this event, so be prepared. And I hope that everybody understood a little bit more about LinkedIn, about how you can sell via LinkedIn, I think we could talk about this for hours, right, that like each of the simple single topics that I mentioned has like a lot of in within that topic itself, so I think maybe we'll do at some point followup event.
Thank you once again for joining, we look forward to having you in other upcoming audio events, and of course follow the speakers here today, follow their company, see what they're up to, and thank you, until next time then. I say thank you guys, take care, thank you, great s, thanks Kotryna and thanks to the listeners, bye-bye, thank you, bye-bye.
If you're losing deals at the trial / POC stage, this one's for you. Ever had buyers asking for 1 to 3mon long POC's? What about buyers ghosting you the moment you activate their trial, then asking for an extension as soon as their time is up? Or, my personal favorite, they're asking for un reasonably high discounts, or just telling you weeks after the POC that they won with the competition. Time to say goodbye to all of these.
Hi, I'm Viktor, a full cycle account executive turn sales manager with over 10 years of B2B sales experience, and on this Channel I cover topics from prospecting to closing and everything in between. On today's episode I'm joined by Alper Yurder, co-founder and CRO at Flowla, and we're going to talk about POC's, specifically what a difference a digital sales room can make, so you stay in control during the evaluation stage and win more deals in less time. This is a video I wish someone showed me 5 years ago, and I hope you'll love it. Let's do this.
Hey Alper, good to have you today. Good to be speaking, Viktor. For the folks, I mean a lot of people already know you who are in the LinkedIn community, especially around buyer enablement, but for the folks who don't, who are tuning in for the first time right now, can you introduce yourself and what you do? Of course. I guess I'm an EXC consultant turned ex sales person turned co-founder of Flowla. We've been building the product for about a year, from our own paino.
I used to be in complex Enterprise sales, and I know all the Pains of trying to bring the deal to the end, and at the last minute it falls because of things that go wrong, so we're trying to make sure that doesn't happen to others, so we're building Flowla for that. Otherwise I like travel, I, I'm a micro blogger on Instagram, if anybody needs tips from Greece, Spain and Italy I have an Instagram account, we can put in the YouTube description. So that's me. Fine, work hard play hard.
Well, again, appreciate you being here. For the audience today, we're on today's session, we're going to talk about POC's. So, where we are at the deal, the sales cyle ccle is, we've got interest, we've done an amazing Discovery, both business and Technical, and now we are gearing up to run a POC. But what are the challenges that we face in these cases?
Buyers are telling us, hey, we two, we POC isn't enough, we need a one or thre month POC, or when you, when the POC starts, you agree to a start date, you see that the users aren't engaging with the platform, now they're ghosting you, and when you're following up, in like, we were supposed to start now, and you have absolutely no visibility in who is engaging with your platform and when, or have they completely deprioritized the project, you're stuck and you don't know if you're just wasting time on this project and you should be building pipeline elsewhere. So this is what we are going to solve by using buyer enablement.
And, Alper, so I was wondering, a part from these symptoms that I've been facing that I called out, like, I know these pains all too well, did I miss anything apart from these three points that I called out? I guess probably your spot on. I mean, these are all pains that we've faced. Like, the reality of it is, what people listening to us, trying to, you know, meet their Kota, close more deals faster, what, what's going to happen with these POC's is, Unfortunately, they haven't included all the right stakeholders, and they will Discover at some point that is the case, because some gdpr person out of Poland pops out of nowhere and, at the last minute, asks you to, you know, comply with C certain things. So, I guess a lack of multifunding is a very common thing.
The other thing that happens a lot is, what is an Enterprise deal, or a complex deal, or running a POC, at the end of the day, is it's a pilot to make sure that your buyers feel safe, that they are walking on a journey together with you. They're going to buy your product and they won't look stupid with their stakeholders. They're going to buy you a product, and it will s something, they're going to buy you a product, you're going to be there to support them. So I think the emotion of it is a lot of fear, anxiety and worry from the buyer side. So your job, throughout that pilot, and actually throughout customer experience, is to make sure that you are there to support them.
So give them a clear timeline, make sure that you record everything, because if things get, don't get recorded, they will get confused, or at worst, maybe a little bit manipulated. I'm sure it's happened to you before, like, he said she said, there would be a loot of that, you know, oh, we said, you know, we can start in a month, why. So make sure that it's recorded.
Or, you know, you, your buyer might end up saying, well, you told, you C, your colleague quoted me 20 pounds, versus the product is 20,000 pounds. So make sure that everything is recorded. That would be a second thing. And the third thing, especially if you take over an account, right, rep leaves, you take over, hey, a person exell me, I can get it for 50% off, like, where, then you're like scouring through past emails in Salesforce or HubSpot, right? Absolutely, yeah, I think those sort of things.
Yeah, no, love these. I, AB, I'm absolutely with you there, but, so what's on top of my mind is, can buyer enablement help even experience sales reps, or is it more for just Juniors and meteors? Let me give you some context on why I asked. In my previous role I had en roles, I had a pretty sweet process for running POC's. I got agreement up front on what we're going to do, like, especially like what you said, document everything, what is the price that we agreed to, you need to do that before the call, so that they don't start asking like huge discounts at the very end.
So I had a setup, I enabled the buyers during the session, and we did a recap session after we ran the POC's, and what I'm, and it worked for me. I mean, yes, there were challenges, and I'll give you some idea of how I did this, but I'll be interested in your thoughts after I do this quick rundown on how can buyer enablement help solve the challenges that I faced, or it's not really for experienced sales reps because they should just continue doing what they're doing.
I mean, of course my answer would be yes, because I felt the paino as an experienced sales person. Yeah, I can't wait to hear you, what you say. Yeah, in the one year of building Flowla, I've been talking to maybe a thousand people, sellers, buyers, maybe more than that, and we've been doing some research and getting some interesting insights. I think buyers are more ready for this than you salespeople.
Like, as a salesperson, you think your process is complex and difficult, and you're trying to, like, that Greek, in Greek mythology, there's this guy, I forgot his name, he's carrying the stone over a mountain, over a hill, and justce is doing it, rolls over. But the buyer is feeling the same, like, whenever I'm trying to buy something, I don't get the right information in the right time, I'm being chased in the wrong time, Etc. So if you think from their side, there's a lot of complexity that they need to manage as a buyer.
So, of course, you know, they need more flexibility, they need more autonomy, they need more availability of information. So before you think about yourself as a salesperson, I think about your buyers, what a terrible, confusing, complex process they're going through to be able to buy from you, in their mind, versus how much better of a customer experience you can give, because there's a Gartner study that says, like, 77% of buyers think their last purchase was quite complex. So if you think in that context, there's definitely value for the buyer. And if you have the buyer in your mind, whether you're Junior, mid, senior, whatever, doesn't mean anything, first of all it provides value, which is why people come to us and say, like, I close to an Enterprise deal with you, because people love the experience.
It puts you in a certain different place if you're looking to stand out from the crowd, in the way that you give Superior Service, that you show that you know your sugar. I think a buy enablement tool can do all of that for you. And then, even more no-brainer answer is, selling complex products or managing Enterprise deals is project management on steroids, and in the absence of a tool like this you will create your own Excel, you will have your Slack channels, you will have this, that, no, everything is in one place, it's already created for you. And, on the plus side, you will not be ghosted, because you can actually see how people interact with your product, what kind of content they're looking at, you can engage with them directly. So there's tons of benefits for everyone.
Okay, I'm interested, because, so, you already called me out on a couple of things that I've been doing, but let me, let me walk you through how my process looked, my process looked, and then see how buy, dedicated buer enablement tool, buer enablement is a process, it's a, it's a thing that we do, but do we actually need a buyer enablement tool, or can we just stick to our guns? And, for me, that was, of course, I had a slide deck where everything was, and we used it for setting up the POC. It had all my Discovery notes in there, that was relevant to the buyer, basically what was a proposal that I created upfront before a POC. So if the client doesn't have a budget within that range that I proposed, it's not even worth, you know, wasting my time on POC. And it was a huge help, helped disqualify a lot of people.
Then, when we got into the POC, we had a separate Excel sheet, where, or a Google sheet, where we were tracking, okay, what are all the things that the must haves and the nice saavs that the customer wants to, or buyer wants to validate before they can say Shut Up And Take My Money, that's always where I wanted to end POC's.
So what are the things that we have to do, what's the progress check, that, and when we're communicating, yeah, we want to avoid back and forth emails, because people just, you know, end up asking the same thing over and over again. Bring everyone together, but we use slack for that, like, why not just set up a slack connect Channel with your buyer organization? They can invite new people in there, everyone sees who's working on what, it's a quick way to interact. And I mean it worked, like, it was, it definitely increased buyer satisfaction, I can tell you that.
But what I was facing when, you know, preparing for that recap, preparing for looping in the rest of the buyer committee at, when we're presenting our results, is, okay, like, where did I communicate this to the client, was it over slack, was it over email, was it in the G sheet? I was looking for information all over the place, and didn't, wasn't certain in myself, like, hey, have we discussed a, ABC, and the other thing. When, of course, POC's didn't start because it still can happen, when you have a dedicated star date, that engagement just drops and you don't know why. So I was, I was using LinkedIn smart links to see if they are checking some of the content there, of course I have some insights if they're checking.
What I loved is, I only gave access to people, access to people in for the proposal that I created for my buyers, I only gave access to the people I was involved in. So if a new person needed access, they need to request access, and then I could map out the account, and all of this is huge in Enterprise sales, where you just don't know all the people who are involved. But, of course, like, you already feel my pain, I'm using like five, seven different tools to manage that single account. Will the experience be the same with a buyer enablement tool, or is the whole Pro, or does the whole process get simpler?
You can still use all those five tools, what we do is we bring all of them in one single link, we bring everything in one place. If you have your Excel sheet on which an it has to give a check, they can do it on the flow. With a flow, or what a bi, what a bu enablement tool is really, I think the more common industry term, it used to be digital sales room. It's almost like being in the same room with the person when you're not, because 85% of sales happens internally.
You have your Discovery call, you leave the discovery call thinking, okay, I'm going to send you this, that, thinking everything is clear with your Champion or whoever you're talking to. First of all, things won't be clear, they won't remember, they don't have the time to go back to your Excel sheet, they don't have the time to search for your emails, even if you sent the same thing 10 times in the best format, they will still be like, it's easier, they'll be like, hey Viktor, can you just send me this? How much easier it is then to go back into your inbox and check for things.
So, because, like, as humans we're looking for the easiest, least painful way, and this is why I really love and believe in the future of our tool. It's the buyers just love having access to one single place with all that information. Imagine a CFO, 30 minutes down the line, you're convincing everybody, you're sending a lot of information, 50 email threads, on slack you talked to your Champion, you created another private slack because you don't want the private conversation between the champion and you to be seen by the people you're trying to influence at their side, right, because you're now in team a versus the internal, are Team B.
So all of that happening in a million different places, and now CFO pops out of nowhere, okay, so let's jump on a f minute call, she comes in and she's like, okay fine, but like, I need this information, that, and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna share that with you, I shared it with your colleague on an email, this, that, that's just complexity, like all of that. Imagine is in one place, looks decent, a clear timeline of all the steps you need to go through, those stages that you mentioned.
For example, if you don't want it to see what Finance is doing, or vice versa, you can keep those conversations private, everyone is in an apartment, there are separate rooms, you have the right conversations with them in the rooms, if you want to show or share your conversation with others, you can. And I think, even the best thing is, we're talking about the external stakeholders, but we're not talking about internal. So, you know, in the absence of a tool like this, how does your client success team know exactly what conversation you had?
You need to use also other tools, yeah, you need. How does your, like, we used to use something called Jira, which I really liked back in the day, but it was internal, like a good, you know, internal tool, to say Finance, it's now back to you, it now it's to you, legal, now legal, and then you would go on Slack again because nobody's responding to you on Jira, so You' be like, hey Finance, I put this. So all of this terrible process is in one link, and I, I'm looking forward to showing you in a minute.
I can't wait to hear, but I just want, in case the audience didn't pick up, you touched on a really important point there, which is collaboration. It's not, a POC isn't just about, you know, giving the enablement to the buyer, so that you get to the technical, when they, you reduce their time to Value, to as much as possible. It's not, yes, that is a goal, but how you do that is through collaboration with the external buying committee and the internal buy.
So the buyer committee at your customer side, and the sales team, the customer team within your side, and that is usually like even three different departments, you have sales, you have marketing, you have customer success, four product. So how do you keep these people in the loop, because a mistake that will happen, unless you have strong collaboration culture internally, is you do the POC, customer success is never involved, they, the onboarding fails, and even if you sell the product, the onboarding fails, and then they churn, you're unable to upsell, and you just missed out on a huge opportunity, especially if you're in a land on expense.
I don't know how many times I've been drilled, or you sell the wrong product, or you sell it in the wrong way, thato. Yeah, how many times client success have grilled me, saying, like, why didn't you involve us from the get-go, why didn't you let us know, and I'm thinking, well, because I'm trying to sell, and what I sell you will deliver, you know. That's before I was managing client success teams, so building that empathy, like, as a salesperson your drive is to sell, and you'll sometimes cut corners, but then it will hunt you back and you won't have a very long lived career, like that, pissing off your colleagues, right?
So if you create visibility and transparency about a deal with all your stakeholders, when client success team asks you, have you shared this or that document, yes, it's there, it's on that flow, it's on that flow, everything is in one place, can you please check, they don't need to go back to slack and look for the conversation, they don't need to go back to your Google Sheets, it's all in there, love it.
Okay, so you have me convinced, it's now, it's time to put your money where your mouth is, can you show us how this entire POC process of prepping for a POC, in all the engagement, and managing all the engagement during the POCs, and then doing the POC recap, how does a buyer enablement to like Flowla help us do that in practice? Okay, so this is the Moment of Truth. Before I do that, one thing I'll say, I think to manage a successful POC, as I said, just a very simple recap, is to manage everybody's priorities, anxieties, fears, emotions.
So what you need is to do that in the most time effective way. So you're Sal cycle is longer, you make sure that you record everything is in one single place, it's easy to use, so new stakeholders pop out of nowhere, a, you get insights, you see who is coming, what are they checking, and B, you're able to intervene, c, sorry, third point, if you're discussing your it specifications or your Finance thing, you're having the conversation right under that document, so it's happening all in one place. And the fourth point is, you create a timeline and hold every body to account, and the product helps you to do that.
What I mean, you assign deadlines, you assign due dates, you assign owners to certain actions, by next week you're going to check the trial account, you're going to set up your account. But if you don't hold people to account for it, if you don't send them reminders, as a salesperson you'll be doing the endless chasing and following up, you'll be in trouble. So the tool does that for you too.
Okay, setting up an action plan, but setting up an action plan but also making a mutual, like having, getting Buy in from the customer side as well, then it becomes a mutual action plan, that it's not you who's following up, like, hey, have you had time to check this and this, or try out this and this feature, no, it's like, hey, if you want to get this impact, you have to do this. And if I'm correct, you've already done it, but I don't know if you have, like, can you confirm that we're on track, like, that's the kind of accountability followup that you're doing, and not just, you know, hurting cats, that's, I think, is a huge difference.
I love that you called that out. Yeah, cool. I'm sure it does a million other things, but people have to just go in and play it with themselves, and it's also work in progress, right, we're still building it further. So let's see if I can do this on this recording tool. I'm going to share my screen in a second, and I'm going to show you my screen, I won't be seeing you, I think, Viktor, so everything there. Yeah, I can see it perfectly clear.
Okay, so this is basically the view that your buyer will see, this is your deal room, this is the private space between the buyer and the seller. This link will have your branded name, so for you this will be revenu ramp. Flowla.com, or even not, if you want to, you know, customize it. This link is a link that you can either make private or share as you like, you can send it in an email, you can send a QR code, I'm saying these because I get asked these questions all day every day.
On the left side is basically how you want to run your stages, or how you want to run the show, right? So, for example, you will always have a summary, a recap of all your documentation, different sections, for example, if you want to make it available for people to be able to book a follow-up call with you, there will be their calendar.
If you want to share some Discovery meeting results, and you know that this will be shared with the CFO, you can even annotate with a little video, such as this one, etc. So this is me in the midnight with my eyes. If you want to have your recordings, your passcodes, your due dates, EXC, everything is here. And the idea is, to once you share this, for example, let's say you share a certain document, like, here's the purpose of this POC, here is the buying committee, the selling committee, your, it's super easy for your buyers to engage with you.
Once they receive this link, they can give it a like, they can start a conversation with you, they basically have all the panel of different stakeholders who are involved in this deal, their contacts, Etc, because this then, behind the scenes, helps us show you the insights, who's checking your flow, what documents are they looking at, new people coming in, how much time they're spending, etc. Final thing before I take a pause, if you want to start a conversation, like, I think you're already invited to this, Viktor, so you will receive this immediately, hey Viktor, can you add pricing doc please, and you can do it here.
Okay, so if I really wanted to, I could replace slack, or for the purpose of collaborating, or just partially? Yeah, I think it's a farfetch. Now, keep your slack, we also use slack, I don't want to go as far as just yet saying, like, we replace slack, but I think the way I see people interacting with it is, when there's a certain document, like, POC results, conversation about that POC result happening here, so there's a documentation of some facts, but, of course, you're not having your behindth scenes chat yet on a flow, okay, you know, which you can have on a slack still.
Oh, yeah. No, I was just thinking, okay, like, so it's more an augmentation of the, to be honest, the, for me, I hate creating multiple slack channels for people. Can I have a place where I have the document, and we have that conversation pertaining to that document, so that I don't have to refer it, refer to it, you know? I realize I did it the opposite way. Let, if you don't mind, let me give you another minute of presentation about the mutual action plan. Yeah, excellent.
So once you send your document, sorry, your link, in this flow, what you will have is your steps about the POC implemen ation, so this very simple one, yours might be more complex, but my suggestion is keep it as simple as possible, because if you have 10 stages, 20 documents in each, nobody cares, like, you, you're basically, you know, in the priority least, you will be one of the things they want to do on the weekend, because they need to give you time. So I would say keep it simple, a few steps, these steps are very realistic, you generally set up a trial account for the buyers, so there you go.
Once you take some action on this, for example, maybe you can go to the flow and start interacting on it with me, I mean, we never thought of doing it this way. I don't know if you have the link with you. Can, don't have it right now, but we can, we can go through it. I'm going to just say something like, okay, this stage is taken care of, okay, I'll send that message there, and this action will automatically be done.
So all these notifications will go immediately to your stakeholders, if you want them to see an action has been done, if you don't, they won't, and you can switch between to do, in progress, done, cancelled, in all of these. And again, you can, oh, that's sweet, you can record a video and deliver this message automatically, right? So I no longer have to follow up with my buyers on hey, like, where is this coming, or how is this coming along, I can see that. Okay, that task is in real time.
Yeah, and they get a notification, but if you see that something is not happening, by the way, you will notice that once I have taken that step, the Mutual action plan, which was four steps, is now a little bit changed, because we told the product to modify it once a certain step is taken. Maybe you have new steps that come into play, like it, chicken number two, there's always an overview of what needs to be done, at a single, at an ice, without having to look for the next step. In the sections, exactly, and if this deadline, for example, is not being met, your stakeholders will get a notification again from Flowla, you won't do it, Flowla will do it for you, like, you were supposed to take this action, can you please do it? Maybe not, let's not boil the ocean. I mean, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
But yeah, so I love how, in the overview of our Solutions section, you basically had, okay, why are still talking, and what is the thing that we'll want to validate, and then we go into the actual back and forth enablement part, I think that's pretty much spot on. Maybe one thing, so I called out the specific use case of account mapping, and I only used to give access to, let's say, the presentation, to people who I've already been in touch with, and this way, if they share internally, I don't know if they're sharing internally, right, until they click the link and request access. So is that also something that Flowla notifies me of, that hey, there's a new stakeholder coming on board, you're probably better off getting on a call with them and do additional Discovery to make sure that this project stays on contract, is that something that the helps with?
I love how you set me up, so I can show off a bit more, thank you so much, Viktor, this wasn't planned but I like it. So I'm going to show you two things, one, the inside section, where you can do exactly this, because 26% of winnable Deals, they don't close, due to three main reasons based on our research.
One is, you're left in the dark, you're being ghosted, so there is a bit of problem of visibility, both for you as the seller, again, but for the buyer too, because always remember, you might be thinking, oh, now the ball is in their Court, they are not thinking that, they don't know, they don't care, they have a million other things to do. The second point is sales rep missteps, so things like not following up enough, not multi threading, not knowing which stakeholders to involve from the get-go, a myriad of things. And the third point is reducing complexity to the process, you're thinking by adding more steps, more stages, you're creating visibility, it's the opposite.
The only way to make sure that you handle the first bit, which is being in the dark, is you need some tool to give you a bit of insights about your deal, and Flowla does that, let me very quickly show that to you too. There we go, so this deal, the flow that I showed you is what your buyer sees, they will only see what you want them to see, right?
So this is what's happening behind the scenes, so this is the sellers view of how to create, how to add new stages, add new action points, etc, and the real Beauty, the Vow point for everybody is the insights that we provide. So once you come into the deal, what you will see is a dashboard of how your flow is generating some Buzz with other stakeholders, so you will see your engagement score, how much of the flow is completed, how many views it has had, reactions, so on and so forth, you will see exactly which stakeholders joined it, you will see how your content is being engaged with, like which steps.
So, for example, when I send a, we don't use Flowla just for like managing the deal, but actually, from the get-go, we send it as a follow-up flow, which is how the Rel relationship starts, and almost exclusively people look at your pricing, your demo. If you have 10 stakeholders looking at your demo for over a minute, that means there's Buzz there, you need to close that deal as a good salesperson. And finally, you will see session by session how they're interacting with it, so for example, you joined on October 23rd, you spend a minute and 38 seconds, this is good, this guy might be interested in my tool, because he went all the way down, etc, that way, this is, this is sweet.
Because the thing that we're missing, I think most, in sales, is how do I reach out to the right people at the right time, and this does it. Without, like, especially in Europe, we have gdpr, you can't track, there's a limited thing what personal information that you can track, and here you're saying gdpr comp, but you're also getting the insights that you wouldn't have otherwise on who's engaging, when they're engaging, what they're engaging with, and it lets you ask targeted question, questions specific to the pains or interest area that they have, so you become a steward, a helper, supporter of this buyer, instead of a money hungry salesperson who's just following up and trying to make a quick. How that helps.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I got you that, even when you follow up you follow up in a meaningful way. And the funny thing is, once an SDR, from one of our early users, started using it, and he was like, have you ever used it before cold calling, and I was like, no, of course not, and he told me, well, now, before I cold call somebody, I send a flow, I know what they're looking at, and I have a bit of an information, rather than being completely in the dark, although it wasn't the main use case, that's how he was using it. So I think visibility throughout that sales process, not being in the dark, is something we help with.
Love it. I think, just to stay on track, we've already been talking for 30 minutes, but I already see how using a dedicated tool for this can be a GameChanger, so me, as a seller, I'm able to do my job better, close more deals with confidence. But we have been talking about a lot of things, so if you had to call out, like, top three, five things that our audience should take away from this session, what would you say those should be? Yeah, I think for me, selling is advising, Consulting, and running a POC is the very first, it's not the very first, but it's a very intense moment in time where you show that you are not just an hungry salesperson, as in your words, but you're an advisor.
I call it a bit like a therapist, you're the therapist trying to figure out the problem, and if you can solve it, you'll solve it together, now you're a team, it's private, it's between you, they feel safe. So I would say, if you want to be a good salesperson, you need to master Consulting skills, advisory skills, and a tool like Flowla, or a buy enablement tool, either e shows you the best practice, or if you know the best practice, it enables you to do that, right.
And the second point I would say is, you're thinking that selling is terrible, you're losing sleep over it, buying is also very fear inducing, because when your buyer is making a buying decision, they either look good with their colleagues or not, their problem is either solved or not, they either have a new problem because you're not a great salesperson that they need to constantly seek help from you, or not.
So your job is to give your buyer an amazing experience, because they seek for it. There is studies that show that bu enablement will be growing by probably double in size in the next two years, because people are looking for flexibility, autonomy, so if you give everything to them in one place, in all transparency, you're doing a great service to them, so your buyers are looking for this kind of experience whether you think or not.
And probably a third point I would say is, a bit in connection to this, change is very difficult, so maybe changing the way you used to manage Google Sheets, Slack channels, etc, and moving to something like a deal room, is going to be hard for you, it's going to get easier because all your early adapters will be using it, so at some point you will have fomo. But if you want to stay ahead of the game, you can get started with a template, you can get started with, you know, just from an HubSpot integration.
All you have to know is that your buyers, when you send them something in one place, Flowla, or any of our competitors, or a deal room like ours, that will place you in a better place as a buyer in their ey, you will be the person who knows what they're talking about, they will feel comfortable that you're project managing it so well.
In the words of our buyers, Flowla helps me stand out, Flowla helps me sell better, Flowla helps me close this deal, because all the mistakes that you do inevitably, we help you overcome them, and we help you give a better buying experience, and in an environment where there's probably 10 other products which can do the same thing, as you need to stand out in some way, so why not in the way you sell, that's facts. So by the end, you are showing your buyer that they're better off with you than without you, so even though buyers prefer a seller free experience, maybe with your, in your case, they'll make an exception because they see the value that you bring to the table.
Thank you, said it much better than I could ever. Thanks, no, but you said it in more detail. Now we're complimenting each other back and forth, but Alper, thanks for being here today, for sales reps and sales Engineers who are eager to give Flowla a try or want to get in touch with you, where can they do that? Absolutely, well, I'm on LinkedIn all day every day, aren't we all, so that's very simple, Flowla.com is the place to start, you can just start with a simple sign in.
If people are interested in this template, let's just share it, in, you know, the way you want to share, and people can just take it and make it theirs, just like a notion template basically, and, but I, yeah, I'll include a link to it in the description below, so everyone has access, because I'm sure a lot of people will be already using a notion or sending a page, it's just athetic page that nobody interacts with and people don't look at it.
Like, let me tell you this, so, yeah, give a better tool of go, let's say. And is this just a show and tell template, or is this something that people who are interested can duplicate for themselves? Absolutely, they duplicate it, actually, when they go into the product we have an inspiration Hub, where they will have access to all the templates, all the different, like, people use it for outreach, closing complex deal, followups, fundraising, they will have access to other people's flows that they create for themselves, and they can just steal them, obviously, that, like, that's because Community.
Yeah, no, that's amazing, that you don't have to start from scratch, Alper, lovely having you today, thank you, keep in touch, and talk to you soon. See you around, thank you, this was great. If you enjoyed this video and our hungry for more, you'll love this next one right here, don't forget to like And subscribe, first, and then see you there.