How B2B sales process could be better (from buyers perspective)

Hello dear SDR! I recently had a call with a company and after the call a friend of mine who works there asked me to give some feedback. At first I was going to say what I didn’t like but instead I decided that it’s not fair and productive and instead decided to focus on how to improve their sales process so I would be convinced. 

I want to share generalized ideas with everyone here with a hope that if it will help at least 1 person it was not for nothing. 

So, if you are trying to sell something to a CTO like me let’s focus on my responsibilities, values, fears and reality. Let’s start with the latter.

I lead a group of 35 engineers in a technology enabled company. Our core business is D2C subscription. We do a lot of in-house development. We have a remote team. All this information is available online. So let use it and see what could be my responsibilities in such an organization:

• People management - I want to retain best people and it means I want to give them tools that save their time, not consume
• Technology management - I want to use services that easy to implement, use, support 
• Business continuity - I need reliable partners who just work and if something is off and I want to be able to contact customer support who is responsive and present
• Budget management - every service that I use should have a very clear ROI

So, let's see a couple of examples of how it could work.

For example, you work for a fintech company. Here is what how you can prepare:

• Understand what is the killer feature that your product can provide me - ability to accept various currency (valuable if we announce international expansion), ability to increase approval rate (always an issue), ability to help with chargebacks (always an issue)
• Once you have that make a research and find who do we use now and provide a list of 2-3 things that you do better and why it’s important now and going forward
• Connect it to your pricing and if it’s higher (there is always a way to know average pricing) than what I use now - prepare an ROI explanation
• Outline how the migration might look like from people and timing perspective and who exactly your team will help us
• Prepare a couple of reference from other subscription (ideally) or e-commerce businesses of similar size
• Don’t use a video with my name on the piece of paper, not cool (for me, so research my linkedin and my posts)

Boom, here is your strategy.

Another example, let’s go to a more technical product and image that you work for the observability company. So, what do I want from such a service as a CTO? I don’t care about fancy dashboards. So here is how it look:

•  I want my team to know about the incident before my CX team comes to me and start working on it together across SRE, back, front, etc. 
• So it means that the killer feature of the the observability platform for the CTO (at least for me) is incident management and ability to gather a response team
• I work for a subscription company so what could be an example of critical incidents? Home page is not loading, 5xx errors during the checkout, 3rd party payment service is not working
• Do research about our stack - blog posts, engineering profiles, what do we talk about on conferences and so on 
• Create cases I describe above on your demo environment

Again, you see a lot of preparation, but this is something that I will notice during the sales process. Only 1 out of 20 SDR does the homework and comes prepared. This could be better. I hope that was helpful and I happy to answer to your questions.