I used to work as a Solution Engineer at Salesforce, and you know what we insisted on doing before any customer could try our product? That's right, a discovery call. A discovery call was a conversation that took place before the customer saw a demo or tried the product. It was an opportunity to discuss their needs, the problems they were trying to solve, and the goals and timelines of their project.
Sales-led SaaS companies have worked this way for the last 20 years, but as self-service is becoming more common, the ability for sales to run discoveries is slowly disappearing. This makes it hard to pitch the product’s value.
This is a salesperson’s worst nightmare. You need to run the MEDDICC process to predict the deal size, forecast and grow the opportunity, but you can’t run a discovery call, and you can’t ask for all of this information on your sign-up form.
Power has shifted from the seller to the user, and the main questions your SaaS company needs to answer are; why would my users want to talk to sales? What value can they get from talking to a human? What do they not know yet about my product?
To answer those, you need to understand who the users are and what they currently do with your product (or haven’t done).
By knowing these key pieces of information, you can start inferring what the user is after. For example, if someone comes back to your pricing page 3 times without taking action it probably means that they have questions, so prompting the person to book a call might be useful.
By sharing information about what the user has done with your rep ahead of the call, you give them visibility into how they can direct the discussion.
This is the most basic example I could come up with, but you get the gist.
Convincing users to book discovery calls
The first step to bridge this gap between sales and product users is to create a very tailored message based on the interaction that person had with the product. 2 examples of user outreach below
Hey Claire,
I just noticed you signed up to userled, it would be great to chat about how userled could best support making your inbound sales process more efficient. We are partnering with Paddle, Vanta and many others to enable companies to automate most of the touch points with their users and optimize time to revenue. Feel free to book a call here.
Speak soon,
Hey Claire,
It’s great having you on board, I noticed you connected Salesforce to build your first journey targeting VP of Sales. This 5 step process looks fire! If I may, you might be interested in checking out the email template feature. This enables you to save time for your sales folks, saving them from thinking about what to write based on different customer behaviour.
Here is a demo of how it works. I also sent the same email to Cindy, your coworker that you just invited to the platform - it’s awesome to see your team growing. If I can help you in any way before the end of your trial feel free to book a call here.
Speak soon
The conclusion is that the research salespeople need to work harder than ever to get users to book calls, and they can only start a value-based sales cycle from this point on.
But who in the company can help sales get easy access to this data or, even better pre-create these above email templates? Well, if you're at a company with fewer than 200 employees, your RevOps team is your best bet. And if you're below that threshold and don't have a RevOps team, your Head of Growth should be the main point of contact.
One of the main goals of the Revops team is to provide the right amount of data to help reps tailor their messaging and convert their outreach into calls.
The Userled platform helps Revops in their mission by allowing reps to send personalized messages to users in real-time based on their profile information and usage of the product. No longer do sales need to do the work of research; Userled provides pre-made templates, that can be customised by the RevOps team.
See a template of the email you can create within userled below using user variables.
If you’re interested in seeing how it works in action, sign up here
