(Part 4/4) Snowpal: B2B Sales — How to get started
(Part 4/4) B2B Sales at Snowpal.
In this podcast series, we’ll take a look at some of our learnings over the past couple of months in B2B Sales. If you are new to Sales, or B2B Sales, this should help you understand some of the fundamentals (I hope!).
Go to Part 3.
Transcript
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (00:01.718)
Hey there, welcome to podcast number four in this B2B sales podcast series. And the last one, we talked about the purpose of that first email or the first call that you make, which is essentially to get the prospect to hop on, you know, to set up a meeting with you. So you can have this conversation with the prospect. The purpose was not to make the sale. And I gave you a few examples. The ultimate purpose surely is to make the sale, obviously, but the purpose of the first…
email, you know, the first email is going to be, you know, you can call it a grand success if you’re able to get the prospect to book time on your calendar. So they want to have this conversation. That is the purpose. That is what you’re trying to achieve through that first email or the first reach out of the first phone call. Now let’s pick up from where we left off. So this is podcast number four in the series. And again, I recommend that you watch them in sequence so you get context to the conversation that we are having here. Okay.
So let me share the screen.
Okay, we were talking about, again, the purpose of the first email. Let’s continue from there. You send that first email, and then you’re able to get the prospect, the book time on your calendar. What do you do at that point? We’re gonna talk about that, but before we do that, we talked about tools in terms of sales prospecting tools, sales navigator from LinkedIn, and a couple of other tools. Those are…
Two ways, at least two ways of prospecting, but there’s more, I wanna add some more that we actually do. So you know exactly what some of the companies that are in the business of selling software, SaaS startups are doing. It’ll help, because if I had known this two months ago, it would have saved some of the time I had to spend in learning. So the purpose behind these podcasts is to share these learnings as I go, and as we make adjustments and tweaks and accommodations to what it is that we’re doing, I try to come back and share the experience again. So you know how.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (02:03.074)
things were and how they have changed and how they are actually moving forward. Content creation. So these are, you know, sales tools and sales navigator are a couple of ways of prospecting, but I wanna make sure I was sharing it. But there are, you don’t have to do a number of things. I thought when we started selling, we know you can send emails. You know, here was the ideal scenario. You go, send emails to 10 people.
8 of them respond to that email, 6 of them are super interested, 5 of them sign up and then you’re a millionaire the next day right? Well, welcome to reality. Now I know that that’s not how it works. There was an element of exaggeration there, but I have to tell you that the learnings have been plentiful in the last 6 to 8 weeks. You send a fair number of emails during the course of any given week depending on how
how you want to do your reach outs. What percentage of them end up in inbox is not exactly in your control, even though you can do your best to make, to increase that likelihood, the likelihood of those emails showing up in those inboxes and we’ve talked about it a fair bit. And then you have to pick the interest of your prospects that they have to respond to emails, hop on a call, have the conversation and then continue and then you close the sale. I mean, there’s a lot of steps there.
And none of those steps is any easier than the other. It takes a lot of effort, energy, patience, diligence, passion, commitment, and any more, any other adjectives that you can think of, please feel free to add them there. So you wanna do the best you can every step of the way. Prospecting through sales tools, through something like Sales Navigator and LinkedIn are some of those options. Are they adequate? I mean, nothing’s adequate, right? You’re gonna have to do everything that you have to do.
given the time that you have available for doing those sorts of things. One of the other things that we do, we’ve done that a while, even if inadvertently so. And what I mean by that is, as it turns out, we’ve been doing a number of things out of our own interests, but they’re actually starting to help us when it comes to prospecting time. We did not do any of those things. There are most of those things, almost all of those things, I should say.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (04:26.938)
with the core intent of prospecting, or doing B2B prospecting, because up until early part of this year, we had, all we had were B2C products. And we’re gonna continue to have them, we’re gonna continue to improve our B2C products and add more, but we also have B2B in the mix right now. So we didn’t have a need to even think about B2B type of prospecting. So we could not have possibly done any of those things that we actually did with the intent.
or code and code, I’ll tell you what, if that’s even the right word to use here, of actually making a sale through prospecting. What are some of those things? Let’s talk about them. The first thing, again, moving these boxes is not terribly difficult, but I have to click each one of them, group them and move, and it’s gonna take time. So I’m just gonna continue with the diagram, and actually, because I can, I have to, it actually is gonna take a minute or two, and I don’t wanna spend that time here.
So let’s continue the green shapes here. I’m gonna copy this.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (05:34.594)
here I’m going to say content creation.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (05:44.274)
What are some examples of content creation? I mean, again, in today’s day and age, there’s a long laundry list of what you need to do. So I’m gonna list just some of what we do. Blogging, some of us like to write, so we do write. So blogging on, I mean, we do it, we create articles on LinkedIn, create articles on Medium, and other platforms if you want to.
Check that out. If there’s other platforms that come to your mind, in other words, right?
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (06:22.318)
tool is okay that’s great I’m able to increase it let me actually make it even bigger content creation logging the next item actually let me not group it right now
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (06:41.402)
YouTube channel. Now here you have to do shots and I guess a horizontal videos as usual. We don’t spend much time here to be honest. We just posted for search index SEO purposes but the least amount of time we don’t spend as much time as we would like to there simply because it’s a different you know it is important unquestionably.
We want to grow the channel. So we post the content, but we haven’t spent our energies in doing everything you would need to do to grow a LinkedIn channel. Each of this takes a lot of time. 90% of our time is spent in engineering to actually building these solutions with very little time spent on other things. We are trying to make those adjustments right now because we’ve done a lot of engineering work this year in 2023 for the next three to six months.
We are shifting our focus from a roadmap standpoint, which is completely outside the purpose of realm of this podcast, but I’m sharing it for what it’s worth, because we believe in the interest of complete transparency, even when we don’t have to disclose information, we do because our intent is to help other people who might have to wait through the same type of challenges. So the next three months at least, our hope is to focus on the challenges that we face.
as much on sales as much as engineering, if not more on sales. Now, whether the reality turns out to be that, only time has to tell and I’ll keep you posted. So the YouTube channel is no less important, correct? So we post our content there, we just don’t spend enough time improving the description and tagging and all of those kinds of things to actually have it be found. Something in the list of things to do, just haven’t done it yet, but we still post our…
a fair bit of our content, not all of it, like on LinkedIn, on YouTube as well. So YouTube channel blogging, that was content creation, right? Of course there’s other things, you know, Instagram. I’m just gonna put, do some on very little. I think the last time we were on Pinterest, I cannot even remember when that was, right? So you get the gist of it. So you’re gonna have to find a way to create content and you create content that’s…
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:06.926)
This is, I think a bug. I mean, which two? Okay, let me try it now. Okay. Maybe I have to select the correct.
shape okay um let me let’s copy paste this here
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:29.13)
What else, right? Blogging, creating content on YouTube, Shards and Horizontal, Instagram, Pinterest, posting it and then let’s come to podcasting. We podcast on different platforms and also the types of podcasts, multiple formats and types. What I mean by that is,
The majority of the podcast we’ve posted so far, it runs into hundreds of them. Certainly go to apple.snowpal.com or spotify.snowpal.com to subscribe to follow our podcast and learn with us all aspects of engineering. 90 some percent of those podcasts happen to have been predominantly technical podcasts, architecture, design, and a lot of it is code related. But I’ve had folks ask me to expand the scope of this podcast to include other facets of software development.
And that’s what we’ve started to do. Now we’re talking about B2B sales, which is something I had never done in a podcast before. There were some podcasts that deviated from the core aspects of engineering, but there were a few and far between. But now I’m doing some more because people have asked for it so that you’re gonna have more of these podcasts that talk about how to run a company, start-ups, SaaS, engineering, product management, sales, recruitment.
and the whole gamut, if you will. Podcasting is one of the ways to facilitate content creation because you’re sharing your knowledge, whether it’s paid podcasts, our podcasts, at this point are free. Hopefully at some point we enable monetization, but then gets picked up on search in a variety of different ways. So you need to create rich content.
however you wanna create them. You might like to write, you might like to create videos, you might like to do, you have a YouTube channel, you might like to do podcasting, audio podcasting, video podcasting, and by multiple formats, I mean a few different things, right? I’m gonna say audio podcasting, I’m gonna say video podcasting, I’m gonna say solo podcasting, and then collaborative, collaborative podcasting.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (11:50.766)
I suppose these two are in their own category and these two solo and collaborate our own. I can obviously change them here. Bothers me that they are a flat list of bullets. Okay, multiple, let me do that, multiple formats.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (12:09.502)
using those words loosely. So solo podcasting is just one of us sharing our knowledge between a camera and recording audio or video. Collaborative podcasting is what we’ve started doing recently, reaching out to other folks to hop on our podcast and having a very interesting conversation on different aspects of engineering and software development and running a company. So that by virtue of doing that, we have a way to, you know, it’s a win-win because
our guests are able to tap into our network and we’re able to tap into our guest network. It’s just helping each other essentially. Podcasting, what else do we do by way of content creation? Now, there’s some other things we’ve done outside engineering, meaning we’ve tried to write some creative scripts, something that’s work-related humor and published it on a few other platforms. We’ve not done that necessarily very consistently.
which we hope to change moving forward. I’m just gonna say essentially meta, right? With meta platforms, I guess we could say Instagram, WhatsApp.
Facebook and more so I’m gonna remove that here. I’m just gonna say others I’m gonna say WordPress etc
Right? So these are, this is by virtue of content creation. Now let’s keep going. I think we’ve talked enough about that. Let’s say I’m gonna go here.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (13:52.206)
to say campaigns. This is a broad topic. I did one podcast on this a long time ago. So I’m going to say campaigns on Meta, Google, where else? LinkedIn.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (14:12.338)
YouTube. Google. I just mean google.com here which is why I’m writing YouTube separately even though it’s all part of the same.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (14:25.25)
What do I need to do to increase? Okay, takes a few clicks, but that’s all right.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (14:38.114)
campaigns. There’s a lot more areas when it comes to campaigns. But again, it depends on your budget, right? So we also have done campaigns on Apple, App Store, for our mobile app, because our mobile app is used for managing projects for folks from all different walks of life. And we are also on the Play Store. Google App, and we have paid features. Most of the features on the app are actually free. But there’s a handful of paid features on our courses and the education platform.
The courses are available on our mobile devices as well. So definitely do check it out. Go to ios.snowpal.com, android.snowpal.com or just learn.snowpal.com if you want to go to the web. We place ads on, you know, we have, you know, we use our budget carefully to place ads and create campaigns on these different platforms. And each of them couldn’t be any more different from the others. You need to get yourself acclimated.
with each of these platforms, the campaign managers. The B2C tools that a lot of the companies provide, including these companies, is actually quite easy to use. Really easy to use, as we all know. But the B2B versions of what they provide, is it just as easy to use? I’m not so sure. I’ll let you be the judge of all of these tools and their campaign managers. But my experience, our experience has been that
They are not necessarily easy to use and they’re very different from each other as well. So there’s a learning curve as to how much time you have to spend in getting these campaigns done correctly. So just a quick recap. We talked about prospecting tools. We talked about Sales Navigator, which is also a prospecting tool, but slightly different from the automation, a heavy prospecting tools. We talked about content creation. We’ve talked about campaigns under content creation. We talked about a number of different ways to create content.
And then we’re talking about campaigns. Now there is, you know, probably one more I would like to, one more thing I would like to add here. The one thing we’ve not done enough of and we want to do it just haven’t had the time to do this. Going to Evans, right? There are so many of these Evans happening all the time, depending on the city you live in, right? There was, I think recently, there was an AWS.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (17:02.158)
VEInvent, isn’t that what it’s called? AWS has a summit, I believe. Our APIs are deployed on the EC2 and AWS infrastructure. So you can go to aws.snowpal.com to check out our APIs, sign up, get the API key, go through the free trial, and then realize that this is gonna help you immensely in churning out applications and going to market much sooner. So you will hopefully hit one of us up and have this conversation.
We are on AWS, but again, we’ve had clients ask us, hey, can you do this, support this on Azure or GCP? So that’s another fish to fry for another day. Alongside licensing and APIs, I’m sorry, alongside selling them as services, back ends as services, we’ve also had clients ask us if we could actually license, sell commercial licenses to our APIs, something we had not originally thought about.
But given the number of people who are asking for it, we’ve actually started to explore that option. And now our APIs are available to be purchased as commercial licenses. So if you did that, then you can run them on your own infrastructure. It’d be very seamless to run it on AWS, but we want to make it easy enough for you to run it on other cloud platforms as well. So the reason I mentioned that, you know, it was a bit of a segue or a digression, but I want to say that attending these events, all kinds of events, there’s AWS events, there’s Mongo events,
like mongo, db, evans
Apple Evans, et cetera, et cetera. I guess one et cetera is enough. I know I said it twice, I’m sorry.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (18:47.714)
take every opportunity to attend these events. The only tricky part is they are not all, a lot of them are priced, you gotta pay for it. And some of them are pretty expensive and they don’t happen in your cities. You’re gonna have to fly out or take the train or drive. So there are a lot of logistics and logistical issues that you may have to confront. But if you have a team, you have the time, you have the resource to actually do this, I think it’s certainly.
worthwhile for them to actually make those trips. I believe there was, you know, API days was a recent conference that happened in France. If I’m not wrong, I’m just gonna tag API days on this podcast. I would have loved to go there. I’ve never been to France and I only heard beautiful things. I know it’s probably a beautiful country with lovely people. And now that I needed one more reason to go there, but there was API days, but again, you know, we could not make that happen this year.
hopefully next year or maybe if a day comes to the US and it’ll be not too far. And sometimes, you know, given how big America is, you know, maybe someplace else is closer too. I don’t know. Anyway, so making it, attending these events is gonna be really, really cool. It’s gonna be exciting, interesting. You have avenues to socialize and chat with people. So that’ll be pretty cool as well. So those are, I guess,
or just looking at where we are at into this podcast, those are a fair number of tools and processes and methodologies. We’ve talked about a number of these things in the podcast thus far. Before I end it, I wanna see if I’ve missed anything else. Maybe I’ll add a couple of more things before I end. The whole process of sales is both interesting, exciting and intimidating at the same time.
It’s going to test your abilities to do many, many things. You know, as a developer, some of us are, you know, we work on a single language, in a single language, in a single platform or framework. There’s others where we enjoy doing, working on multiple platforms. There’s no right or wrong answer. You can pick what works for you. Personally, me and professionally, and a lot of my team members, we work on multiple different stacks at the same time on any given week. That’s what we enjoy doing.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (21:08.106)
It doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, right? It’s there’s no right or wrong answer here. We enjoy doing that. We work on numerous different stacks and our ecosystem is built on a variety of different languages and platforms and frameworks because we choose the right tool for the job. Just because we have a hammer, we don’t treat everything as a nail. But I know companies that are as good as ours that use a single language in a framework. It works well for them. It’s totally fine. Now, why am I mentioning that in the context of sales?
The reason I mentioned that is, if you are not part of the dev team and you’re doing the sale, you know, you’re prospecting, you’re reaching out to folks and you’re doing all of these things that we mentioned and talked about. How much understanding the salesperson needs, it depends on the team, the product, the platform, the company, the culture, the paradigms, the salesperson and the dev teams and a number of other factors. But as a developer who’s actually also doing, getting into sales right now.
I have an interest in knowing how things exactly work because I might be talking to a client, they may have a very specific question. Now I can say, hey, you know what? I can come back with an answer in the subsequent call, but then setting up that subsequent call might be just as difficult a task as the first one was. So you don’t want to not have answers to questions you wish you had answers to, if it’s related to your product and if the question is a fair enough question. So you want to be prepared to the extent possible.
Again, each of us has our own skills. We gravitate towards certain aspects of what we do and that comes naturally to us and other things do not come that naturally. So we’re not gonna be just as strong. It’s completely understandable, but I’m just saying we all have to get out of our comfort zones and do what it takes. So let me give you an example as for sales as a developer who’s actually also doing sales. The first time I went to these calls, and then after the prospect was on the call,
I didn’t know what to expect, so I was talking a lot of technology, a whole lot of technology, in the first five, 10, 15 minutes. And then as we had more calls, I realized and we realized that maybe that’s not the way we want to have these conversations happen. We want to speak less and have the other party talk, do most of the talking. That’s when we learn about their problems and try to see how we can sort of customize our solutions to fit their needs. By doing all of the talking, we’re never going to figure that out, are we?
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (23:33.57)
So that was a learning. But that learning comes sometimes when making mistakes. You know, they say that real smart people learn from other people’s mistakes. Unfortunately, I’m not there. I try to learn from my own mistakes. And sometimes I do the same mistakes twice, but if I did twice, I’m okay. But if I did it more than twice, I’m not happy. I’m not a happy camper. So whatever the process you wanna follow to improve based on the previous meetings and sessions you had with your prospects.
You know, make mental notes, document them. If you like to write it down or draw diagrams as not so pretty as those diagrams might be. You know, even though this diagram, it’s not a pretty diagram, right? I’ll be honest, I can accept it. But seeing these things visually reinforces it for me. If I had written them in a Word document or Google Docs, it doesn’t make the same impact. These separations, the shapes of these, you know, these boxes or the shapes that are different, even though they’re not…
particularly different for any good reason, simply that they’re different tells me and helps me jog my memory at a later point of time. So you do what you need to do to make yourself productive, but just be aware that you are going to be surprised when you go to these calls and conversations. Be open-minded, accept what your tool does well, accept what it doesn’t do well, accept what you can possibly do differently. Make those adjustments.
Nothing is etched in stone, certainly not if you’re a startup, because you will be, I guarantee you’re going to be asked questions that you never ever, ever thought about. Being, you know, we’ve had a lot of different scenarios, situations before we got on these initial conversations about, you know, selling our back end services, which is a core part of what we do. Little did we expect a lot of the companies and the clients asking us that they would want to license it.
And that would be the only way they would even want to engage. Now, we could say, nope, we don’t want to do it. Not difficult, but we could do it. But me, I may not make sense. If we see the rationale behind why the client is asking the question, and we know now why they do, we’ve actually said, you know what, that makes sense. We totally see that. Now, we are happy to license our solutions. So you’re going to have to make these changes. And some of these are, trust me, seismic changes.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (25:58.646)
You go to the field, you figure this out, come back to the dev team and say this. It’s don’t be surprised if folks freak out. If the same person as me wearing two different hats, if I wore the development hat after I wore the sales hat and said, sure, why not to the prospect to ask that we actually sell commercial licenses. I would react. I would freak out as the same person wearing this other hat. So if it’s another person, it’s completely justifiable that they do.
because that’s not what was on the table. We never had those conversations. So you need to make sure you educate your teams outside the sales teams to be aware of this because like someone told me the other day, everyone is in the business of sales. In a company, whether they’re actively doing the selling or not is the only difference, but they are in the business of sales because how good is it if you made a fantastic product that you never could sell? It’s absolutely useless, right?
So the developer, the architect, the product manager, the project manager, the scrum master, the dev manager, the director of engineering, the VP, the sales engineer, the marketing person, the human resources, legal, documentation, tech writers, everybody, creative team, everybody is in the business of selling. Just that they contribute differently to selling than a direct salesperson does. That’s the only difference. That is a big difference, but that is the only difference.
So make sure your team is aligned. So everybody marches towards making that first sale happen and the second sale and the third sale and the thousand sale happen. I think that’s basically it. I wanna wrap this series here. I mean, there is a lot more to talk for sure, but what I’m gonna do is call this done for now. And then we can pick this back up as we’ve done a bit more sale, we’ve been on the field a lot more.
And you know learned more things or I come back tomorrow and think of something else that I completely forgot to talk about I might end up doing another recording. Hopefully you like it if you do like it, you know I don’t they don’t say this for podcast, but I’m just gonna say it I think we get the reach by folks actually liking sharing commenting yada So if you found value in these sessions if you if you learned a thing or two We would appreciate it. If you know, just give us a shout out on LinkedIn
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (28:24.35)
or other platforms that you might use, that would be much appreciated. Till next time, thank you.
Go to Part 3.
Snowpal’s Products:
Backends as Services on AWS Marketplace
Mobile Apps on App Store and Play Store
Education Platform for Learners and Course Creators