[mannyv]

Having been an Enterprise SE in the past, I love any data about sales and the process.

Do you have data that shows whether 'letting the customer talk' produces more wins? Or faster wins? The consensus seems to be 'customer talking' is better, probably because that shows the customer is more engaged.

This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored.

[wpietri]

> This and support calls should be inputs into product, but I'd guess both inputs are ignored.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Parts of the organization are in direct contact with customers, and are in a position to learn a lot. And those parts are often only connected to the decide-what-to-make parts either informally or via going all the way up to the C-level and then back down. It's maddening.

At one client, I got them to try a cross-functional team for an innovative new set of features. One of the people we roped in was one of the best customer support people. She was hugely helpful. She was very good at spotting potential problems before we shipped. And once we started the test rollouts, she knew what to look for and would get us important customer feedback right away. It was great, and I wish more companies would do it.

[spaniard89277]

I one of those tech support guys who always wonder why our company make such bad decisions, if they only listened to us...

[quickthrower2]

If only companies would actually do agile :-).

[wpietri]

If only! At this point I don't even think they know what it is. Or rather, the term has changed meaning so much that it's almost unrecognizable to me.

[asyncscrum]

This is a good question. Regarding letting customers talk, the teams that were most successful had great salesforce hygiene, and teams with great salesforce hygiene were required to fill in certain data points. This means that there are commonly asking questions and listening more than talking. Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of the data that they provided in salesforce as well as quota attainment. Overall I think the act of listening and asking questions versus delivering a script means you're qualifying your leads more appropriately and they're just better candidates for purchase.

[throwaway432897]

> Regarding letting customers talk, the teams that were most successful had great salesforce hygiene,

CRM hygiene is not correlated with sales success in my experience, but I’ll grant that might be different depending on the market segmentation a given sales rep works in (specifically, it is more important the smaller and thus more numerous a set of customers that a sales rep covers.) I’m a sales manager of a team that has consistently, over a period of several years, been the #1 revenue producer for a large cybersecurity company. Our reps have atrocious CRM hygiene. I spend a ridiculous amount of time chasing them to do the bare minimum to keep the people who care about CRM hygiene off our backs and to handle the one part of the CRM data set that is actually important (accurate opportunity forecast categories are commonly used to drive product demand/manufacturing/capacity planning forecasts.)

> Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of the data that they provided in Salesforce as well as quota attainment.

Sales reps are judged on things like “quality of data provided in Salesforce” only when their quota attainment is poor. There’s a reason nobody on my team has been fired or seriously reprimanded for basically ignoring the CRM for years. It would be like firing Tom Brady for not writing down a play by play analysis of each game.

[gmfawcett]

This is an interesting use of the word hygiene... can you expand on what salesforce hygiene means to you?

[asyncscrum]

It basically refers to data in salesforce being complete, accurate and input in a consistent way. It's a term used around software apps that drive decision making and are useless without the criteria I mentioned.

[manv1]

It's funny how much people hate Salesforce. People used to say the same thing about ACT back in the day. I mean, SF is a total POS, but whatever.

I'm not sure why these sales tools have to be so crappy. I guess there's a market for good sales tools. The Marketing CRM tools (hubspot et al) are much nicer.