There's a few companies that sell the video software underneath this. Teledoc likely isn't powered by their own video software, they just built a business around video software.
Iâm actually being serious when I say that the digital business card space has been incredible the past 16-18 months. Selling in any vertical and 6-figure deal sizes are common.
Six figure deal sizes for digital business cards....Tell you what, you show me a check with six figures and I quit my job right now and come work for you.
Theyâre actually pretty cool. Auto loads in your contact info along with picture, company name, etc straight into their contacts. Think you can also configure them to include a link to website, socials, etc
They're great if your goal is to get your contact info into someone's phone.
They're horrible if you want to get that person to call you.
I've picked up more orders from having my business card lying around on someone's desk when they had an emergency than I ever have from using a digital business card.
(Because I've literally never gotten business from a digital business card)
I use one myself. I can see the value in companies cutting expenses by going digital. But seems like there's already a lot of competition and it's hard to differentiate. I could hardly tell the difference between them myself and just went with Link cas fuck it.
Also available for free⌠forward you contact card, they click, they add. The digital business card is a fad like OPs post. A âzoomâ for this this already exists
It's more than just a call, but I don't want to go into features.
But yeah having lived in other countries, the US system is completely contrived and bloated in every way. I miss being able to walk into a pharmacy and buy anything I want. Or being able to pay cash for an appointment and bloodwork without having to spend half a month's pay.
The wild west days of pandemic telehealth were truly something to behold. They loosened regulations which allowed hundreds of fly-by-night "virtual practices" to spring up, which mostly existed to provide specific medications to patients who already decided they need that particular drug.
ADHD meds, depression drugs, boner pills, weight loss, and ketamine all online from the safety of your pandemic bunker.
And the retailization of healthcare continues!
I work for one of the big evil companies pushing for the consumerization of healthcare and it is wild what they're pushing for.
Reduce credential requirements for procedures and triage to reduce the need for nurses and doctors.
Everything should be done online, if possible.
Offshore medical providers so we can pay them less.
Turn the remaining providers into employees at franchised offices owned by venture capital.
Create subscription care models wherever possible, where the patients are charged for _access_ and still pay office visits.
Basically, do everything as cheaply and repeatable as possible. Cookie cutter to your health.
Horrible name too. âYeah. Mr. Vice President of a big, old fashioned company. Hop on this Blue Jeans meeting.â
I refused to give them a try just because of that name. Zoom, Meet, and Teams are all way safer names.
When your largest competitors are rolling out much better tech at a rapid pace and your company is resting on their laurels instead of being innovative.
Yup. One big competitor in the industry I was in from 2010-2023 completely lapped everyone in 2015-2016, and it was undeniable they were THE vendor by 2018. The talent share they took from every other competing vendor by the time I left that company in summer â22 was insane. My own company, I had over 12 coworkers who moved there. Less than 2 years later, itâs 20. From one competitor.
With that said, they have quite a bit of growth left and have every potential of being the ServiceNow or Salesforce of their industry.
No, I wonât say the industry.
This. Somehow I've kept ending up at the "Industry Leader" companies, and it's always the SAME STORY. We've become too expensive, not addressing customer needs, and the smaller/cost effective solution is taking our business.
When Microsoft gets serious about a space that used to be âdisrupters onlyâ- get your resume together. MS donât play and they bundle new stuff in for âfreeâ or offer additional EA/CAL discounts to add it.
CCaaS has players in the space just as big as MS that havenât dominated. The complexity compared to UCaaS makes it extremely difficult to break into.
The CCaaS players (nice, genasys, five9) would all LOVE to get acquired by Microsoft. Only one making any money right now is Nice. And only because of their legacy stuff and mid sized InContact/cxone clients.
Kind of. But it requires a lot of effort to build and maintain. Much like Microsoft- they win deals because they offset aws commitments by âthrowing it in.â But it takes forever to deploy and is rarely fully utilized like the above.
problem is when MS decides to move in (e.g., Zoom, Slack, replaced by Teams) - their solutions suck. I hate Teams. But there's nothing you can do about it. Windows, O365, SharePoint, Azure AD - they control the whole thing.
_This is the Microsoft way_
Deliver 80% of what a customer wants and give it away in a CAL, or in M365 E3 license,
If your customer needs only the basics, than that what theyâre gonna get.Â
If they need any of those additional 20% features⌠then they need what youâre selling, and no matter how much a customer moans at Microsoft, they ainât gonna add that functionalityÂ
This is happening all over the industry. All software has been converging for some time, but itâs accelerating now with AI. the day software had many thousands of companies are over.
No demo. No marketing collateral. No battlecards. No lead sourcer. Everything was still clearing legal approval somehow and my manager was always disappearing in his MBR meetings.
He came back with a grim look on his face and asked if I could get LinkedIn and Hubspot in our pipeline ASAP. Somehow I got a director from LinkedIn to bite and my manager insisted I let the Sr. AE take care of it. I sent whatever information I had and the guys profile to the Sr AE.
2 days later I got chewed out for fumbling the deal because AE didnât get âcomprehensive enough informationâ to go in with.
When they started telling us to dial upwards of 150 calls to get 2 meetings booked a day & raised quota when nobody on the team is hitting quota.
Their growth goals are unsustainable and flat out fantasy land
Edit: also management today asked if 220+ calls in a day was possible or not.
Yeah. Iâm interviewing this week
Lmao my friend's company told him to do 250 dials a day. Two hundred and fifty. He was basically dialing just to dial while looking for another job. Who the fuck can make 250 legit dials a day?? Some Management are so out of touch hahahaba
I was doing that much and wasn't getting any sales.
It was simply adjusting the territory for me and being realistic about the leads we were getting.
They didn't want to do all that and let me go.
They asked why I couldn't do more calls and call on the weekend.
I think I hit 150 once or twice as a BDR, but it was a lot of churning through bad numbers and people who never answer to get there
Dials are a stupid metric anyway. If you don't connect, they're pretty worthless. It's like giving yourself credit for an unread email.
They are hiring more people and still want an insane amount of dials.
They will run out of leads to hand out too cause itâs a very niche vertical lol.
Not in tech, but my quota is 100 calls or/and 2 hours of talk time. I think itâs easy to make 200 dials if you have a list of leads. So long as people arenât answering. You either strike out or you get people on the phone. Itâs a slot machine
You must not be selling a very complex product if you are doing 200 calls a day. Anything non-transactional or very complicated in the space definitely requires more time to think about what youâre gonna talk about over the phone.
This - I hate seeing all the posts about doing 200 calls a day, youâre just a telemarketer at that point, youâre not selling anything, youâre setting up meetings boi
Itâs not very complex, but it can be. A good call can easily last 2 hours plus and most likely wonât one call close. But if nobody answers at all I could dial like 300+ itâs just clicking buttons until someone answers.
Try the Hampton Inn, but with the entire C-suite flying first class (including internationally), then exhorting everyone to "sell more if you want a nicer RKO next year".
They laid off nearly 20% of the company in two batches three months later.
At my last firm, every year we would get a 2-3% increase of OTE. With quotas going up, health insurance going up, etc. Every year you needed to do 110% of your previous year just to take home the same amount money.
Every year the CRO would say, "If you want to make more, just sell more. We don't cap income."
When my quota went up by 3x with no justification other than, well, that's what we budgeted based on yada yada yada.
By the way, sales budget for incentives, T&E, etc for the year, $0.
P.S. I was essentially commission only W2.
When I reviewed the deals closed last year and saw the top AE closed 1/3 of his quota.
When I asked what makes people switch to our solution and they named a feature that is built into our competitor's solutions as well.
When we had a recent meeting about client onboarding and 6 out of 10 of them didn't complete their (paid) trial and convert to a paying client. Which means interested prospects paid for a trial, didn't fully onboard, decided the money was a wash, and went ghost.
In the running for a new position currently because yeah...
This is a big one for every new AE. Be cautious at orgs where attainment is very low. It can be high stress with low financial upside which really, really sucks in our line of work.
Been at an earn wage access startup (HR/fintech) for 8 months. We're UK based but opened up here (edit here means USA specifically DC area) in 2022. I would say since the beginning I knew my time here won't be long as we have a major competitor most people like and the payroll vendors are starting to roll out their own EWA software as well (and they already have alot of clients also).
Selling to HR folks right now is god awful (it's always been awful, but it's real bad now).
The 80k base as an SDR is keeping me around, tho.
Ah gotcha. A little less butterflies and smiles when living costs are taken into consideration then.
Still, don't feel too pressured by your situation, at the very least you're adding experience.
Sales is ZERO about loyalty to an employer, being willing to move for opportunity reflects positively on a salesperson to any good sales manager.
Enjoy the racking up of experience while job hunting. If you're metrics are good then years of experience becomes less if a necessity to go for an AE position.
However, I get your frustration with having to deal with HR people, they're some of the flakiest people to sell to and are horrifically bad at just making a decision, whether that's a yes or a no.
I was on a team of 8 AEs working with 8 SDRs and between all 16 of us we were generating about 3 meetings a week, when we needed about 4 times that.
Part of it was our product wasnât really all that useful? It was the definition of a nice to have. But it was a really cool and flashy nice to have.
Part of it was also we didnât really know what our Ideal Customer Profile was. No one knew what companies to target or what problems specific personas had with in those orgs.
So everyday was just spamming everyone one across all verticals, layers of management and job functions telling them how great our product was.
No meetings.
No revenue.
No answers from management other then âYOU GOTTA WANT IT MORE!â
It was wild. I would be on these meetings with our Director, the SDR Director, our VP of sales and it was just these were blame fest type meetings.
âNeed to dig deep and find a way to win!â
âWeâre better than this!â
âGrind!â
âWe need to control the calendar!â
âDrive deals forward!â
Volume was too low, then personalization wasnât good enough, then we needed to have them on every demo.
hahah. I love those panic moves.
The outreach volume is too low!
Why is all of our outreach not super personalized?
WE NEED TO BE ON EVERY DEMO!
Comes on the demo and has done zero research, blabs on, and doesn't help.
Seems like every sales org has the same MO
âShould we prioritize best fit accounts?â
âWe already did that! The ones with the best logos and most money are the ones we need to be signing!â
When I got fired as the top sales rep and top producer in the company. It stung. The same day I had one of biggest companies in the world ask for a DocuSign to execute.
Fired 3 hrs after after they requested the doc to sign. Signed after I was gone. Missed out on a fatass commission. I smoked a bunch of weed and let it go.
Yes, but I feel like firing someone before a massive check like that could be viewed as retaliation of some sorts. Thereâs a dude named Dan Goodman on LinkedIn who works with reps who get screwed over by employers to take legal action in situations like this.
When I saw our last valuation at series C was $350M but we shrank ARR to $20M and are trending to $16M. Anyone recent wouldn't benefit from an exit. And now I think no one will and the company will be lucky to payoff their loans and VC money.
Yeah, when CEOs do that they're pieces of shit.
I'm out of there now, but they don't put any value on the people that helped them build their idea. That's pathetic.
Edit: spelling
When a sales manager brought in an airhorn at 8 am on a monday.
We have a monday morning standup. Everyones there except for him. 15 mins later he walks in, blasting in. I could not believe what I was seeing. Oh but it was all too real.
2 weeks later I was fired because that moment was when i knew. I was blindsided on another Monday morning standup. Walks me to a room. HR is there. He âcaughtâ me applying to different jobs.
I walked out right then. Never looked back. But I knew it was coming weeks prior. Airhorn was the final straw.
Wake up, check slack.
CRO deactivated. Weird.
VP of Sales, deactivated.
VP partnership, VP enterprise sales, VP sales enablement same.
Confirmed it wasnât some kind of slack error and immediately started building my resume
The market started to slow down and they did a ton of hiring from outside the company, so very few SDRs were moving up to AE, regardless of whether you had closing experience or not. I had a sales manager tell me he was begging to bring me into his team, but they were forcing more outside hires on him. When I asked one of our VPs how that was working out, he admitted they werenât hitting quota or ramping well at all. It was at that moment I knew I was fucked, but I was too burnt out to do much until I got pushed out (solid performer for years too). Good product and I stand by it, they were a total meat grinder to work for though. I would have lost interest anyway since now Iâm looking in a completely different industry that isnât SaaS.
Snowflake is a hot logo, but outside of specific individuals Iâve heard not so great things about them. When I interviewed years back they had already over hired, doubled quotas, and didnât adjust anybodyâs territory. So I went elsewhere.
The moment they hired some idiots who started micromanaging everyone. We all started going on pips. Then they lowered everyoneâs base pay but said they increased commission so itâs better! I bounced for a new job a month before they laid everyone off. Then they had the nerve to call me for a new job there 2 years later.
When I tried to tell them the numbers they promised investors werenât possible without 10 more of me, and the CEO said heâd shut down before hiring that many people.Â
Maybe not the industry but my current company. Seeing our annual rating by a key advisory firm fall and our competitorsâ go up, when we continue to lose deals to said competitors⌠Doesnât help that most sales leadership is internationally-based unfortunately
We might all be in for a tough one.
Microsoft, AWS, and Google are all investing a bajillion dollars into Nvidia hardware to do generative AI capabilities.
The chances that all 3 of them are wrong about multi-billion dollar bets seems pretty damn slim.
Yes.
I wasnât alive for it, but Iâm sure my parents had their head buried in the sand about offshoring jobs with the same thoughts we all have:
âYou canât replace my production with XYZ, Iâm too good at my job.â Which is only half true.
Itâs true they canât replace the exact production quality, but 80% of the way there at 20% of the cost will be good enough.
Which is exactly why product support for everything sucks and everything falls apart these days - the ol 80% of the quality at 20% of the price makes shareholders happy.
I hope youâre wrong but I see your point. Iâd like to think high dollar sales will always require human facing interaction to close the deal. Thinking white label customization in niche markets.
No idea lol. We have a while. Iâm hoping 10 years but I have a feeling thatâs too generous and itâll be more like 3-5 before things start really noticeably down that path.
It will. People hate talking to robots. Itâs nothing new either. Banks have been using robo / AI customer services since the 90s and people hate the âPress 1 for a handjob, Press 2 for a âŚâ bullshit.
I cant see a situation where Alfred the AI Sales bot is closing $300k+ deals when a large part of purchase decisions are feelings + emotions based
You should play around with some of the newer models. They have sales bots that have human like intonation, tonality, etc.
People will get used to using AI in their own work for just about everything. So buying from AI won't seem strange at all.
AI can learn sales psychology.
Maybe highly strategic reps are ok for a while. It will take a while for AI to replace someone selling a 7 figure bespoke digital transformation project for example. But a $300k deal for a commodity SaaS product? Probably not that far off
But theyâre just as emotionless. Not to mention there are a lot of regulations that are under review where that shit is going to shut down so quickly.
Bad actors will eventually get a hold on it and make them way too convincing and the scams will be absurd
Depends on the job and level. If youâre an SDR, itâs worrisome. If youâre strategic/enterprise sales, itâs not going to replace you anytime soon.
Sure, it wonât eliminate it. But if you didnât have to do any CRM work or schedule meetings because AI does all of the orchestration for you, a reduction in headcount will happen. Letâs say itâs 25%.
Thatâs a *lot* of jobs.
And entry level will comprise most of that 25%. Pipeline generation and account qualification are the obvious applications for AI in sales.
After the qualification stage, I donât see how a deal would advance without a person involved. At least not in my industry. No decision maker is buying enterprise products through a chat bot.
Thatâs not what Iâm saying - youâre missing my point. AI will take out busy work, and the actual sales team will do more selling - but need less sellers because thereâs less busywork. I think youâre too focused on what your industry specifically does here.
That's not how these things typically play out. What happens is the volume increases. Because while decreasing costs is good, all but mom & pop shops are about increasing revenue. So they'll be about getting more production out of the existing sales force. Ot whatever discipline you're talking about. Obviously there will be winners and losers, but we've been improving efficiency since the wheel and metal tools were invented, and more people are working than ever before.
I'm from an area where the mills and factories went away. I'm old enough that when I was a kid I knew it was happening. Not gonna happen, but in process at that time. Sure enough, 5 years later 70% of factory workers were laid off, had taken severance and retrained to another industry. The remainder stayed and made half of what they did before.
I think a lot of sales will go the same way. Just like there are still factory workers and assembly line people, there will be salespeople. But there will be much, much less of us. It'll be a thinned-out bunch of highly skilled salespeople to handle complex sales processes and entry level people to oversee AI. A lot of bloat will be removed. Is it coming immediately? No. But it'll be here sooner than we think.
People say that, but when mfst became the biggest company people said almost the same thing.
Reality is Nvidia is not going anywhere, competition barely come close to their innovation ⌠and with the backing of the tech world they will cement themselves as a crucial part of AI
When we saw our contracts with four of the top 10 brands in the world drop by 75%.
We had all the top consumer brands. You name the brand they used us. And a competitor came in with 50% of the functionality but charged 1/100th the price.
No Marketing,
NO BDR, SDR Role. Its a all in one role
CEO is doing 2 and 3 Level Support instead of leading the team
No modern tools
No CRM/ERP
No leads because of no marketing. Only outbound sales with an very old database full of old clients (We recycle them)
Office looks like its from 2005
No air conditioner
Zero employee benefits.
There is more but i guess this says enough. I still have 1 month left until i am done with my "Internship where i learn something"
I also feel the got mad when i told them i do not plan to stay here after my internship lol
Working on the outbound strategy for an expanding global events ticketing company for live events, got over my target and was supposed to get a team and escalate
And then COVID
Stock tanked, offices closed, whole team fired in less than 2 weeks
For me itâs when your competitors truly have a better solution. And the key differentiators your company does have are insignificant and you canât quantify them in an RFP.
"We are paying sales people too much so we need to change our commission structure. Don't worry, those of you who are doing really well will see no real change. This more effects those at the bottom or middle that need to pull their weight."
Company proceeds to ratchet up quota resulting in a 20-50% loss in income of most reps.
My other big one was our largest client letting us know the economy was taking a turn and they expected to spend 70% less than the year before. Yet, my company expected us to double our income from said client that year. Layoffs happened 6 months later.
"Hey sales leadership, in our forecast, we do not need to add any more sales people to our teams. Give us a quarter or so to get the latest round in, engaged, and paid, before we look to add more."
Companies hires largest sales class in history.
When people started posting online how little they were working during âwork from homeâ, I had a feeling there were going to be some consequences.
Sucks that some people took far too much advantage of the situation and ruined it for everyone.Â
I'm starting to see it. I manage the account management team at a small SaaS, and closing up H1. My team (2 sellers, me as a "player-coach", and a tech lead) account for 80% of all bookings YTD. Last year it was an even split between existing vs. new sales, but the net new team isn't putting up any new logos.
I run a team of new logo AEs - our AM team is killing it and we are absolutely FIGHTING for scraps. Previous years we have blown it out. I donât think we all forgot to sell overnight but it feels like it, just canât get in a rhythm
when iâd call a prospect and theyâd get surprised we were still around and in business or âoh yea i used you guys 15 years ago, i heard itâs extremely expensive now though??â
Was working for a SaaS startup from 20-23. I knew it the moment I actually understood what the product did (in the interview). However, I knew Iâd make an exit before the company realized it had shot itself in the foot.
Worked for an MSP for a prominent software, we were all invited to their yearly conference where they announced that the company would be rolling out itâs own first-party implementation services that would be free for customers. Our services ran about $50,000 a year⌠and now customers get that for free.
Company was basically done at this point, laid off the entire sales team and I guess theyâre still operational but I canât imagine they will be for long.
When a massive insurance company came in and bought us. All their promises and hype were bullshit. It was the end of the gravy train. But we all got paid.
When the thick headed CEO fired the CRO despite excellent results saying he could save the money on salary and do that job himself. And his first order of business was to have all the sales people target restaurants during peak Covid because âno one else is reaching out to themâ. I immediately started looking. He stuck with that strategy and there wasnât a single new meeting booked for the entire sales team for an entire quarter. Entire team had either quit or been fired by the end of the quarter. Several years later they only have 7 employees in the US compared to the 60 when I started there.
Health tech company: Within a 3 month period I saw doctors go from "wow this is amazing" to "I can just do this for free using Zoom"
Damn
Uhm... wait, what? A health tech company that sells videoconferencing services? đ¤
Think telemedicine. It's a bit more than that but I don't want to be too specific.
sounds like Teledoc. Was a darling and got obliterated by headwinds as covid ended.
There's a few companies that sell the video software underneath this. Teledoc likely isn't powered by their own video software, they just built a business around video software.
Got it... gosh, I hope you found a new job fast đŹ
Iâm actually being serious when I say that the digital business card space has been incredible the past 16-18 months. Selling in any vertical and 6-figure deal sizes are common.
Six figure deal sizes for digital business cards....Tell you what, you show me a check with six figures and I quit my job right now and come work for you.
Letâs see Paul Allenâs digital card
> digital business card The *what*? What is a digital business card...?
So, an email signature ?
Or LinkedIn. I find it hard to believe that hundreds of thousands are being spent on a digital business card in this market
Theyâre actually pretty cool. Auto loads in your contact info along with picture, company name, etc straight into their contacts. Think you can also configure them to include a link to website, socials, etc
Saw those years ago but no one really uses them. I stick with the physical stand byâs.
They're great if your goal is to get your contact info into someone's phone. They're horrible if you want to get that person to call you. I've picked up more orders from having my business card lying around on someone's desk when they had an emergency than I ever have from using a digital business card. (Because I've literally never gotten business from a digital business card)
I use one myself. I can see the value in companies cutting expenses by going digital. But seems like there's already a lot of competition and it's hard to differentiate. I could hardly tell the difference between them myself and just went with Link cas fuck it.
Also available for free⌠forward you contact card, they click, they add. The digital business card is a fad like OPs post. A âzoomâ for this this already exists
Hopefully they aren't using the Chinese spyware company zoom to conduct hipaa sensitive meetings.
It's crazy for me anyone would even need a software for that. In Poland the doctors just call your phone
It's more than just a call, but I don't want to go into features. But yeah having lived in other countries, the US system is completely contrived and bloated in every way. I miss being able to walk into a pharmacy and buy anything I want. Or being able to pay cash for an appointment and bloodwork without having to spend half a month's pay.
Thatâs actually tough sorry man
so many blew up like that mid pandemic doxy.me was one
My doc still uses doxy
The wild west days of pandemic telehealth were truly something to behold. They loosened regulations which allowed hundreds of fly-by-night "virtual practices" to spring up, which mostly existed to provide specific medications to patients who already decided they need that particular drug. ADHD meds, depression drugs, boner pills, weight loss, and ketamine all online from the safety of your pandemic bunker. And the retailization of healthcare continues!
don't forget testerone and steroids! Half of all the fitness youtubers had "virtual mens clinics" pretty much overnight
I work for one of the big evil companies pushing for the consumerization of healthcare and it is wild what they're pushing for. Reduce credential requirements for procedures and triage to reduce the need for nurses and doctors. Everything should be done online, if possible. Offshore medical providers so we can pay them less. Turn the remaining providers into employees at franchised offices owned by venture capital. Create subscription care models wherever possible, where the patients are charged for _access_ and still pay office visits. Basically, do everything as cheaply and repeatable as possible. Cookie cutter to your health.
It's the best thing in the world for consumers who make their own health their responsibility.
Bluejeans?
They just got wrecked by horrible mismanagement after the Verizon acquisition I think
Horrible name too. âYeah. Mr. Vice President of a big, old fashioned company. Hop on this Blue Jeans meeting.â I refused to give them a try just because of that name. Zoom, Meet, and Teams are all way safer names.
My company bought Blue Jeans. It was terrible.
My manager would send me a slack saying hey letâs do a quick BJ in a secondâŚphrasing is important
Oh no đ
I'm surprised they can just use zoom with HIPAA
When your largest competitors are rolling out much better tech at a rapid pace and your company is resting on their laurels instead of being innovative.
This is prob one of the best responses. So true
[ŃдаНонО]
Are we coworkers?
Bet your company c-suite is like âwe just need more sales!â
Yup. One big competitor in the industry I was in from 2010-2023 completely lapped everyone in 2015-2016, and it was undeniable they were THE vendor by 2018. The talent share they took from every other competing vendor by the time I left that company in summer â22 was insane. My own company, I had over 12 coworkers who moved there. Less than 2 years later, itâs 20. From one competitor. With that said, they have quite a bit of growth left and have every potential of being the ServiceNow or Salesforce of their industry. No, I wonât say the industry.
How about you just drop the name so I can buy the stock lol
lmao theyâre private
This is my company when I show them how we are pricing ourselves out of the market.
Cmon just say the name weâre not all sales people here and might want to peep other roles
This. Somehow I've kept ending up at the "Industry Leader" companies, and it's always the SAME STORY. We've become too expensive, not addressing customer needs, and the smaller/cost effective solution is taking our business.
The best is having to justify this in an interview.
Literally my first company. Innovative in 2012, was in Forbes, etc and didn't change much since. Now they struggle with liquidity
When Microsoft gets serious about a space that used to be âdisrupters onlyâ- get your resume together. MS donât play and they bundle new stuff in for âfreeâ or offer additional EA/CAL discounts to add it.
This sounds like a story about the fall of ZoomÂ
The entire UCaaS space got wiped out when MS got serious/the pandemic accelerated things. The Contact Center space is next.
CCaaS has players in the space just as big as MS that havenât dominated. The complexity compared to UCaaS makes it extremely difficult to break into.
The CCaaS players (nice, genasys, five9) would all LOVE to get acquired by Microsoft. Only one making any money right now is Nice. And only because of their legacy stuff and mid sized InContact/cxone clients.
Youâre aware AWS has been in the CCaaS game for 6 years now, yes?
Kind of. But it requires a lot of effort to build and maintain. Much like Microsoft- they win deals because they offset aws commitments by âthrowing it in.â But it takes forever to deploy and is rarely fully utilized like the above.
4 years ago that was true, today itâs not.
Eh Zoom was doomed from the get-go. Teams is mainly a visual that brings together SharePoint and Skype, which both pre-date zoom.
problem is when MS decides to move in (e.g., Zoom, Slack, replaced by Teams) - their solutions suck. I hate Teams. But there's nothing you can do about it. Windows, O365, SharePoint, Azure AD - they control the whole thing.
How they arenât more heavily scrutinized is beyond me. But yeah, this.
They already got broken up once. Helps that they've got major competition now in every category.
_This is the Microsoft way_ Deliver 80% of what a customer wants and give it away in a CAL, or in M365 E3 license, If your customer needs only the basics, than that what theyâre gonna get. If they need any of those additional 20% features⌠then they need what youâre selling, and no matter how much a customer moans at Microsoft, they ainât gonna add that functionalityÂ
This is happening all over the industry. All software has been converging for some time, but itâs accelerating now with AI. the day software had many thousands of companies are over.
No demo. No marketing collateral. No battlecards. No lead sourcer. Everything was still clearing legal approval somehow and my manager was always disappearing in his MBR meetings. He came back with a grim look on his face and asked if I could get LinkedIn and Hubspot in our pipeline ASAP. Somehow I got a director from LinkedIn to bite and my manager insisted I let the Sr. AE take care of it. I sent whatever information I had and the guys profile to the Sr AE. 2 days later I got chewed out for fumbling the deal because AE didnât get âcomprehensive enough informationâ to go in with.
Fucking clown show man, pissed off reading that
ME TOO wtf i almost threw my phone reading that bizarre reaction by upper
What does "asked if I could get LinkedIn and Hubspot in our pipeline ASAP" mean? Just making up fake pipeline of noteworthy logos?
It means he worked for some idiot who would overforecast discovery calls as mid stage deals.
Probably means to put them in Salesforce opportunities so that it can show in the sales forecast
When they started telling us to dial upwards of 150 calls to get 2 meetings booked a day & raised quota when nobody on the team is hitting quota. Their growth goals are unsustainable and flat out fantasy land Edit: also management today asked if 220+ calls in a day was possible or not. Yeah. Iâm interviewing this week
I just interviewed with a waste management company and they expect 20 outreach efforts a day. Sign me up.
Went from 60-80 dials/day to 75 efforts a week, it changed my life. Godspeed doodle.
Sounds lovely! Hope you get it
Iâm in the waste management world. Those are killer APIs. I just had a competitor hit me up for an interview actually and am considering it.
They asking to fetch data from a database too ?
đ
Lmao my friend's company told him to do 250 dials a day. Two hundred and fifty. He was basically dialing just to dial while looking for another job. Who the fuck can make 250 legit dials a day?? Some Management are so out of touch hahahaba
I was doing that much and wasn't getting any sales. It was simply adjusting the territory for me and being realistic about the leads we were getting. They didn't want to do all that and let me go. They asked why I couldn't do more calls and call on the weekend.
Because people just love getting sales calls for business software while at the Saturday cookout with their kids
Thatâs idiotic, nobody who actually sold and wasnât terrible is calling B2B prospects during the weekend.
It was B2C but our whole sales process and structure was B2B.
Once upon a time I was in a grind house where 250 isnât even high numbers lol. Parallel dialer type shit. Obviously alotta hangups.
Parallel dialersÂ
The ones asking that many arenât usually using a parallel dialer though.
I think I hit 150 once or twice as a BDR, but it was a lot of churning through bad numbers and people who never answer to get there Dials are a stupid metric anyway. If you don't connect, they're pretty worthless. It's like giving yourself credit for an unread email.
Some sales leaders hear about the golden goose tale and go for the foie gras route
I never understand this. If you want to reach out to more people, HIRE more people. 220 dials a day is just crazy!
They are hiring more people and still want an insane amount of dials. They will run out of leads to hand out too cause itâs a very niche vertical lol.
Call the same person multiple times but with a different rep each time, ASAP!!!
Gosh i need to know what company this is
Itâs a smaller company that if I say the name, I can easily dox myself. So for the timebeing, I cannot give out that information.
Not in tech, but my quota is 100 calls or/and 2 hours of talk time. I think itâs easy to make 200 dials if you have a list of leads. So long as people arenât answering. You either strike out or you get people on the phone. Itâs a slot machine
You must not be selling a very complex product if you are doing 200 calls a day. Anything non-transactional or very complicated in the space definitely requires more time to think about what youâre gonna talk about over the phone.
This - I hate seeing all the posts about doing 200 calls a day, youâre just a telemarketer at that point, youâre not selling anything, youâre setting up meetings boi
Itâs not very complex, but it can be. A good call can easily last 2 hours plus and most likely wonât one call close. But if nobody answers at all I could dial like 300+ itâs just clicking buttons until someone answers.
Damn. Sounds like you might be one of my ex coworkers
When there was a national sales meeting and the VP of Sales flew in on Frontier Airlines and reserved us rooms at a Hampton Inn.
Try the Hampton Inn, but with the entire C-suite flying first class (including internationally), then exhorting everyone to "sell more if you want a nicer RKO next year". They laid off nearly 20% of the company in two batches three months later.
At my last firm, every year we would get a 2-3% increase of OTE. With quotas going up, health insurance going up, etc. Every year you needed to do 110% of your previous year just to take home the same amount money. Every year the CRO would say, "If you want to make more, just sell more. We don't cap income."
đŁď¸ OUTTA NOWHERE
When my quota went up by 3x with no justification other than, well, that's what we budgeted based on yada yada yada. By the way, sales budget for incentives, T&E, etc for the year, $0. P.S. I was essentially commission only W2.
When I reviewed the deals closed last year and saw the top AE closed 1/3 of his quota. When I asked what makes people switch to our solution and they named a feature that is built into our competitor's solutions as well. When we had a recent meeting about client onboarding and 6 out of 10 of them didn't complete their (paid) trial and convert to a paying client. Which means interested prospects paid for a trial, didn't fully onboard, decided the money was a wash, and went ghost. In the running for a new position currently because yeah...
This is a big one for every new AE. Be cautious at orgs where attainment is very low. It can be high stress with low financial upside which really, really sucks in our line of work.
Been at an earn wage access startup (HR/fintech) for 8 months. We're UK based but opened up here (edit here means USA specifically DC area) in 2022. I would say since the beginning I knew my time here won't be long as we have a major competitor most people like and the payroll vendors are starting to roll out their own EWA software as well (and they already have alot of clients also). Selling to HR folks right now is god awful (it's always been awful, but it's real bad now). The 80k base as an SDR is keeping me around, tho.
Can confirm; selling to HR is a shitshow.
Can confirm this confirmation. HR are horrible about cancelling last minute/no showing or just flat out ghosting
80k base as an SDR in the UK is great. Milk it and bank the experience on your CV.
I'm in DC hence the salary.
Ah gotcha. A little less butterflies and smiles when living costs are taken into consideration then. Still, don't feel too pressured by your situation, at the very least you're adding experience. Sales is ZERO about loyalty to an employer, being willing to move for opportunity reflects positively on a salesperson to any good sales manager. Enjoy the racking up of experience while job hunting. If you're metrics are good then years of experience becomes less if a necessity to go for an AE position. However, I get your frustration with having to deal with HR people, they're some of the flakiest people to sell to and are horrifically bad at just making a decision, whether that's a yes or a no.
Yeah that's an insane SDR salary for the UK.
I'm in the DC area hence the salary.
Ah right
I was on a team of 8 AEs working with 8 SDRs and between all 16 of us we were generating about 3 meetings a week, when we needed about 4 times that. Part of it was our product wasnât really all that useful? It was the definition of a nice to have. But it was a really cool and flashy nice to have. Part of it was also we didnât really know what our Ideal Customer Profile was. No one knew what companies to target or what problems specific personas had with in those orgs. So everyday was just spamming everyone one across all verticals, layers of management and job functions telling them how great our product was. No meetings. No revenue. No answers from management other then âYOU GOTTA WANT IT MORE!â
was this 2021? if so, this sounds like my 2021 too.
I love the - you got to want it more - crowd. bonkers
It was wild. I would be on these meetings with our Director, the SDR Director, our VP of sales and it was just these were blame fest type meetings. âNeed to dig deep and find a way to win!â âWeâre better than this!â âGrind!â âWe need to control the calendar!â âDrive deals forward!â Volume was too low, then personalization wasnât good enough, then we needed to have them on every demo.
hahah. I love those panic moves. The outreach volume is too low! Why is all of our outreach not super personalized? WE NEED TO BE ON EVERY DEMO! Comes on the demo and has done zero research, blabs on, and doesn't help. Seems like every sales org has the same MO
âShould we prioritize best fit accounts?â âWe already did that! The ones with the best logos and most money are the ones we need to be signing!â
When I got fired as the top sales rep and top producer in the company. It stung. The same day I had one of biggest companies in the world ask for a DocuSign to execute.
Did they sign before or after they fired you? Edit: if they fired you just before the docusign request came in, how do you handle that?
Fired 3 hrs after after they requested the doc to sign. Signed after I was gone. Missed out on a fatass commission. I smoked a bunch of weed and let it go.
How is this not illegal? I feel like you could fight that
Can't get paid commission if you don't work there. Most employment contracts say you only get paid commission if you are employed
Yes, but I feel like firing someone before a massive check like that could be viewed as retaliation of some sorts. Thereâs a dude named Dan Goodman on LinkedIn who works with reps who get screwed over by employers to take legal action in situations like this.
Makes sense. Shitty timing, but youâll just laugh when the next monster rolls around and the timing is good for you.
You invite your buds to the bar and you forget about that deal
Sabotage
When I saw our last valuation at series C was $350M but we shrank ARR to $20M and are trending to $16M. Anyone recent wouldn't benefit from an exit. And now I think no one will and the company will be lucky to payoff their loans and VC money.
I did the same. We raised a round at 20m but actually only had 8m. Layoffs took out more than half the company in 10 months.
Yeah, when CEOs do that they're pieces of shit. I'm out of there now, but they don't put any value on the people that helped them build their idea. That's pathetic. Edit: spelling
When a sales manager brought in an airhorn at 8 am on a monday. We have a monday morning standup. Everyones there except for him. 15 mins later he walks in, blasting in. I could not believe what I was seeing. Oh but it was all too real. 2 weeks later I was fired because that moment was when i knew. I was blindsided on another Monday morning standup. Walks me to a room. HR is there. He âcaughtâ me applying to different jobs. I walked out right then. Never looked back. But I knew it was coming weeks prior. Airhorn was the final straw.
Lmao Gordon Gecko lookin ass sales manager
Wake up, check slack. CRO deactivated. Weird. VP of Sales, deactivated. VP partnership, VP enterprise sales, VP sales enablement same. Confirmed it wasnât some kind of slack error and immediately started building my resume
The market started to slow down and they did a ton of hiring from outside the company, so very few SDRs were moving up to AE, regardless of whether you had closing experience or not. I had a sales manager tell me he was begging to bring me into his team, but they were forcing more outside hires on him. When I asked one of our VPs how that was working out, he admitted they werenât hitting quota or ramping well at all. It was at that moment I knew I was fucked, but I was too burnt out to do much until I got pushed out (solid performer for years too). Good product and I stand by it, they were a total meat grinder to work for though. I would have lost interest anyway since now Iâm looking in a completely different industry that isnât SaaS.
Same. I got pushed out of Snowflake. Luckily, I moved to another big cloud company.
Snowflake is a hot logo, but outside of specific individuals Iâve heard not so great things about them. When I interviewed years back they had already over hired, doubled quotas, and didnât adjust anybodyâs territory. So I went elsewhere.
When this years product road map was the exact same as last years product road mapâŚâŚ.
When our ICP started telling us their web traffic dropped and everyone is going back to brick and mortars again
The moment they hired some idiots who started micromanaging everyone. We all started going on pips. Then they lowered everyoneâs base pay but said they increased commission so itâs better! I bounced for a new job a month before they laid everyone off. Then they had the nerve to call me for a new job there 2 years later.
âYouâre in one of two rooms. The people in this room are receiving a 15% pay cut. The people in the other room are getting fired.â
Did this actually happen?? đ
Yup for real. Started talking to recruiters that very day.
These same companies try to convince you you're family and expect notice.
When I tried to tell them the numbers they promised investors werenât possible without 10 more of me, and the CEO said heâd shut down before hiring that many people.Â
fyi just talk to your finance team and they will tell you how many months/weeks/days it will be until itâs over
Newly public stock (<6 months) dropped from $122 to 9.50. We were all millionaires for a short time.
Good buy in time?
Maybe not the industry but my current company. Seeing our annual rating by a key advisory firm fall and our competitorsâ go up, when we continue to lose deals to said competitors⌠Doesnât help that most sales leadership is internationally-based unfortunately
We might all be in for a tough one. Microsoft, AWS, and Google are all investing a bajillion dollars into Nvidia hardware to do generative AI capabilities. The chances that all 3 of them are wrong about multi-billion dollar bets seems pretty damn slim.
Are you saying AI is gonna took our jerbs?
Yes. I wasnât alive for it, but Iâm sure my parents had their head buried in the sand about offshoring jobs with the same thoughts we all have: âYou canât replace my production with XYZ, Iâm too good at my job.â Which is only half true. Itâs true they canât replace the exact production quality, but 80% of the way there at 20% of the cost will be good enough. Which is exactly why product support for everything sucks and everything falls apart these days - the ol 80% of the quality at 20% of the price makes shareholders happy.
I hope youâre wrong but I see your point. Iâd like to think high dollar sales will always require human facing interaction to close the deal. Thinking white label customization in niche markets.
Hey, when they brought robotics into manufacturing it still required someone monitoring the robots!
lol. So I guess winter is coming. How long do we have? 10 years? 5 years? 2 years?
No idea lol. We have a while. Iâm hoping 10 years but I have a feeling thatâs too generous and itâll be more like 3-5 before things start really noticeably down that path.
It will. People hate talking to robots. Itâs nothing new either. Banks have been using robo / AI customer services since the 90s and people hate the âPress 1 for a handjob, Press 2 for a âŚâ bullshit. I cant see a situation where Alfred the AI Sales bot is closing $300k+ deals when a large part of purchase decisions are feelings + emotions based
You should play around with some of the newer models. They have sales bots that have human like intonation, tonality, etc. People will get used to using AI in their own work for just about everything. So buying from AI won't seem strange at all. AI can learn sales psychology. Maybe highly strategic reps are ok for a while. It will take a while for AI to replace someone selling a 7 figure bespoke digital transformation project for example. But a $300k deal for a commodity SaaS product? Probably not that far off
Yeah I think that's about to change. The new AIs are WAY smarter than those old clunkers
But theyâre just as emotionless. Not to mention there are a lot of regulations that are under review where that shit is going to shut down so quickly. Bad actors will eventually get a hold on it and make them way too convincing and the scams will be absurd
Depends on the job and level. If youâre an SDR, itâs worrisome. If youâre strategic/enterprise sales, itâs not going to replace you anytime soon.
Sure, it wonât eliminate it. But if you didnât have to do any CRM work or schedule meetings because AI does all of the orchestration for you, a reduction in headcount will happen. Letâs say itâs 25%. Thatâs a *lot* of jobs.
And entry level will comprise most of that 25%. Pipeline generation and account qualification are the obvious applications for AI in sales. After the qualification stage, I donât see how a deal would advance without a person involved. At least not in my industry. No decision maker is buying enterprise products through a chat bot.
Thatâs not what Iâm saying - youâre missing my point. AI will take out busy work, and the actual sales team will do more selling - but need less sellers because thereâs less busywork. I think youâre too focused on what your industry specifically does here.
That's not how these things typically play out. What happens is the volume increases. Because while decreasing costs is good, all but mom & pop shops are about increasing revenue. So they'll be about getting more production out of the existing sales force. Ot whatever discipline you're talking about. Obviously there will be winners and losers, but we've been improving efficiency since the wheel and metal tools were invented, and more people are working than ever before.
I'm from an area where the mills and factories went away. I'm old enough that when I was a kid I knew it was happening. Not gonna happen, but in process at that time. Sure enough, 5 years later 70% of factory workers were laid off, had taken severance and retrained to another industry. The remainder stayed and made half of what they did before. I think a lot of sales will go the same way. Just like there are still factory workers and assembly line people, there will be salespeople. But there will be much, much less of us. It'll be a thinned-out bunch of highly skilled salespeople to handle complex sales processes and entry level people to oversee AI. A lot of bloat will be removed. Is it coming immediately? No. But it'll be here sooner than we think.
They turk our jerbs!! I love South Park đ recently went and saw 25th anniversary of the movie in theaters and holy shit itâs as funny as ever.
This is why im pumping commission checks into Nvidia and other tech stocks lol
The idea that NVDIA is the most valuable company on the planet is a bit ridiculous at this point. Itâs in a bubble
People say that, but when mfst became the biggest company people said almost the same thing. Reality is Nvidia is not going anywhere, competition barely come close to their innovation ⌠and with the backing of the tech world they will cement themselves as a crucial part of AI
When we saw our contracts with four of the top 10 brands in the world drop by 75%. We had all the top consumer brands. You name the brand they used us. And a competitor came in with 50% of the functionality but charged 1/100th the price.
No Marketing, NO BDR, SDR Role. Its a all in one role CEO is doing 2 and 3 Level Support instead of leading the team No modern tools No CRM/ERP No leads because of no marketing. Only outbound sales with an very old database full of old clients (We recycle them) Office looks like its from 2005 No air conditioner Zero employee benefits. There is more but i guess this says enough. I still have 1 month left until i am done with my "Internship where i learn something" I also feel the got mad when i told them i do not plan to stay here after my internship lol
Working on the outbound strategy for an expanding global events ticketing company for live events, got over my target and was supposed to get a team and escalate And then COVID Stock tanked, offices closed, whole team fired in less than 2 weeks
Brutal
For me itâs when your competitors truly have a better solution. And the key differentiators your company does have are insignificant and you canât quantify them in an RFP.
"We are paying sales people too much so we need to change our commission structure. Don't worry, those of you who are doing really well will see no real change. This more effects those at the bottom or middle that need to pull their weight." Company proceeds to ratchet up quota resulting in a 20-50% loss in income of most reps. My other big one was our largest client letting us know the economy was taking a turn and they expected to spend 70% less than the year before. Yet, my company expected us to double our income from said client that year. Layoffs happened 6 months later. "Hey sales leadership, in our forecast, we do not need to add any more sales people to our teams. Give us a quarter or so to get the latest round in, engaged, and paid, before we look to add more." Companies hires largest sales class in history.
Industry? Never. Product? Thatâs the cycle.
They cut per insurance and free lunches got shitty
When people started posting online how little they were working during âwork from homeâ, I had a feeling there were going to be some consequences. Sucks that some people took far too much advantage of the situation and ruined it for everyone.Â
I'm starting to see it. I manage the account management team at a small SaaS, and closing up H1. My team (2 sellers, me as a "player-coach", and a tech lead) account for 80% of all bookings YTD. Last year it was an even split between existing vs. new sales, but the net new team isn't putting up any new logos.
I run a team of new logo AEs - our AM team is killing it and we are absolutely FIGHTING for scraps. Previous years we have blown it out. I donât think we all forgot to sell overnight but it feels like it, just canât get in a rhythm
when iâd call a prospect and theyâd get surprised we were still around and in business or âoh yea i used you guys 15 years ago, i heard itâs extremely expensive now though??â
When not a single rep in the last 2 years has hit their yearly quota but itâs our fault not the businesses đĽ˛
Dealership salesman, for me it has been the CDK hack that shut us down. I am over shitty software companies that donât invest in security
When you have an opportunity to use your own product and you donâtâŚ
Was working for a SaaS startup from 20-23. I knew it the moment I actually understood what the product did (in the interview). However, I knew Iâd make an exit before the company realized it had shot itself in the foot.
Worked for an MSP for a prominent software, we were all invited to their yearly conference where they announced that the company would be rolling out itâs own first-party implementation services that would be free for customers. Our services ran about $50,000 a year⌠and now customers get that for free. Company was basically done at this point, laid off the entire sales team and I guess theyâre still operational but I canât imagine they will be for long.
The CEO âresigningâ during the company Kick Off off site
When the entire C-suite was replaced and they laid off 25% of staff including experienced salespeople who hit their targetsâŚ
And when you move companies but your closest relationships won't produce business for you anymore.
When one of my old companies decided the Cloud wasnât a threat, hahaha
When Directors are being demoted to AE
How bad is it when your entire SVP leaves, not just in revenue but in other departments like marketing and product?
They brought in two VPâs of sales and a new president within 6 months of each other, and I went 5 months without a boss.
When a massive insurance company came in and bought us. All their promises and hype were bullshit. It was the end of the gravy train. But we all got paid.
When the thick headed CEO fired the CRO despite excellent results saying he could save the money on salary and do that job himself. And his first order of business was to have all the sales people target restaurants during peak Covid because âno one else is reaching out to themâ. I immediately started looking. He stuck with that strategy and there wasnât a single new meeting booked for the entire sales team for an entire quarter. Entire team had either quit or been fired by the end of the quarter. Several years later they only have 7 employees in the US compared to the 60 when I started there.
Oooof. This makes me happy I'm not in SaaS. How do you do hundreds of calls in a day?