(Part 3/4) Snowpal: B2B Sales — How to get started
(Part 3/4) 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 2.
Transcript
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (00:01.406)
Hey there, I hope you’re doing well. This is podcast number three in the series, in the B2B sales series. So if you haven’t checked out the other two, I highly recommend you do so before you watch this one because it helps get the context. I’m simply gonna pick up from where I left off in the previous one. So without further ado, let’s continue. We were drawing a diagram, I’m gonna do a screen share, and then we’ll just go back to taking a look at what, hopefully you can see my diagram here.
Okay, the last one we talked at some length about emails, how email reputation works, or how many mailboxes you can create, or you might have to send these to the cold email reachouts and whatnot. There’s more to it, but I think we got the gist of it. I think we had a lengthy enough discussion, or a more log, if you will. So in this one, let’s look at other prospecting tools. The first one in terms of tools, the prospecting tool was purely,
I mean, I mentioned calls as well, but I also mentioned that we, as a company, we don’t do cold calls. The max we do is cold emails, that too, only after we’ve done due diligence about the prospect, the company, and have a feeling that they actually would truly benefit from what we sell. But I’ve heard and I’ve read that with sales and prospecting tools, it’s possible that
Now a large number of emails do get sent out as well on a daily basis. Now I don’t know, I don’t see us doing that ever, but if it works for you, no power to you, right? Okay, the next one is outside of using a sales tool. What, you know, again, outside of using an automation-based sales tool like the one we discussed, what are some other things you can possibly do? I’m gonna go copy over this diagram.
make it, sorry, this shape and make it a little bit smaller. The size of these die shapes don’t really mean anything. I’ve just picked the one that’s mostly the default and go with it. Here I wanna say LinkedIn sales navigator. And like I mentioned in one of my, either the previous podcast that relates in this series or the one before that, I’m not necessarily not endorsing any of these third party tools. The only tools I’m endorsing are the ones that we actually provide and sell.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (02:26.61)
Snowpal APIs, right? But I’m still sharing the other ones with you. So you actually know which ones are actually out there if you don’t already know it, right? You might know it, but I’m just stating it for what it’s worth. Okay, Sales Navigator is a tool. It’s a LinkedIn tool. We use that as well alongside some other sales tool. We have the annual subscription. It lets you essentially look for prospects, do the search based on criteria, set of criteria saying, hey,
Give me everybody who’s located in Austin, who’s a CTO, for at least like, who’s been working at that company for at least three years or so. And they’re using certain technologies or they’re building systems that, you know, you have a lot of this kind here, right? You can do the search, you can do the filter. It works quite well. And LinkedIn is a beautiful platform, as we all know. And the data is like awesome, right? So,
That’s the biggest advantage, I think, using something like Sales Navigator because the data quality is probably very, very high compared to a lot of the other sales and prospecting tools, which I don’t know where they get their data from, essentially, right? So Sales Navigator gives you that, and then you find people, and then you can use in-mails to reach out to those prospects and pitch your product, and hope, keep your fingers crossed, and believe, hope, and pray that you reach the right prospects, the folks who would actually…
who and the host teams could benefit from your product offering. So they would reach back out to you, right? Now, I don’t know what the response rate for Sales Navigator is. You can look it up online, but I can tell you that people do respond. You know, the more selective you are in sending out to people, the higher the chances of them responding to your reach outs. But do they do it immediately? Maybe, maybe not, right? Because some of us actually use LinkedIn a lot more frequently than other people.
I know people who use it like once every week or once a month, for instance, whereas I use it all the time. You’ve probably seen me quite active, right? I love the platform and I’m not there on any other platform really, to be honest, social media platform. So I have the time to dedicate to a single platform like LinkedIn, and plus I like the platform. So, but there are people who don’t use it all that much, which means they may not even see a request for a while. So that explains the delay.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (04:53.094)
And even if, you know, let’s say that the day they decided to get on LinkedIn after a few weeks or a month or whatever the time period is, they may have a long list of, you know, in mails or messages or connection requests. So some of them may be good, relevant, some maybe not so much. So, you know, they have to get to yours, right? Because I have a lot of these requests and in mails and honestly, I don’t have the time to get it because a lot of them, not all of them are relevant to what it is that we’re doing.
They sound like mass reach outs. I don’t know if LinkedIn even supports it. We actually, you know, look at it, spend like a fair bit of time prospecting. Like it takes almost a half hour before we decide this person or this company is a company we should reach out to. I don’t know what the average time other sales folks spend and before they do that reach out. So I cannot speak to it, but it takes a good half an hour. And after that you send and then if, you know, if you don’t hear back, you just wait, right?
But given the number of messages I’ve seen and the connection request I’ve seen that are not particularly relevant to what we do or what our interests are, I can tell that everybody’s gonna have those numbers of reach outs, which means it’s gonna be difficult to filter and wait through that long list to get to the ones that are immediately relevant to you. So let me write a few things here. You’re talking about Sales Navigator, talk in mails.
I’ll also put connection request.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (06:28.914)
and how you reach out, it’s entirely up to you, right? So that’s a second way to do sales navigator or direct LinkedIn based prospecting. So we talked about sales tools that are dedicated to doing automation based prospecting. LinkedIn, I haven’t seen much by way of automation and I have to believe it’s an intentional decision. So you cannot send, you know, do mass reach outs to like 20, 50, 100 people. You have to do one by one and, you know, take, do your due diligence and finding.
finding those people as well, right? So Sales Navigator, let me actually.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (07:17.838)
Okay, what else? Let’s keep going. What else do we actually use? I’m trying to think. We’ve actually pretty much rely on LinkedIn as a primary way of prospecting, finding companies and people who could benefit from our offering. We use sales tools as well. How much of what we use?
depends on the type of prospecting we are doing and on who’s doing it as well. If you’re doing prospecting for our courses and our course platform, we do it slightly differently. When we’re doing prospecting for our APIs, we do it slightly differently. So those are two methodologies that we use for prospecting. I’m trying to think, there’s probably, there’s a number of other things we do, but I’m just trying to think what those are. But let me talk about, let me move.
Some of, I think, let me try to move.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:20.303)
I should have drawn this part of the diagram.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:25.482)
tool is good but it’s not easy enough to
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:38.982)
I’m taking a bit of time. So I’m gonna leave that be where it is. Okay, I guess within this sales we talked about, I’m just gonna say prospects, maybe tools.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:06.538)
The second one.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:12.311)
Okay, let’s continue. And then I’m actually going to say methodologies is probably…
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:26.934)
Hmm.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:38.012)
That’s the bug in this tool where sometimes it wraps and you can’t fix it really. Okay.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:44.958)
What do I want to talk about methodologies? The overall approach of how you’re approaching the problem. You have products to sell. Like I mentioned, we have several different products. How you decide to sell a product is driven by a number of factors. The product you’re selling, who in your team is going to be doing that selling? Is it a salesperson? Is it somebody who is also…
part of your development team. And the reason I mentioned that is you’re wondering why would a salesperson be necessarily part of a dev team? Most perhaps not, depending on the size of the company, but for if you’re a startup, a lot of us play a lot of roles and wear a lot of different hats, right? So if the salesperson is part of the dev team is also doing sales, then they have a bit more awareness about the actual changes, changes that the code level that are happening.
Now, why would that matter when you’re prospecting? It does matter because I’ve been on calls where you come up with a plan, you get on a call and have a conversation, and then you are asked certain questions that you weren’t necessarily prepared for, right? Because you understand so much about the prospects domain, the business they are in, and you get to the call. But you don’t know all the details. Only details you know are the details presented to you by their marketing pages. And you learn a lot more during those conversations.
And if you’re a part of the dev team, it actually helps because you know certain things that you may not otherwise know, and you approach it differently. But if you are actually not a part of the dev team, but part of the product management team, and then you’re prospecting, then you have a slightly different perspective. So again, depending on the product you’re selling, depending on who you’re selling it to and who is doing the actual selling, and the tools they’re using to do that selling, all of that plays a significant role.
in the sale, in the potential sale of that product. The methodology, and that’s what I mean by methodology, you need to define, have clear patterns, design patterns and methodologies for each of these sale mechanisms, if you will. How you do it, how you document it, how you diagram it, and how you present it to your team internally and your prospects externally is entirely up to you. But it should suffice to say,
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (12:03.754)
that there needs to be those defined methodologies. And it needs to be very specific to your team, your product, your prospects. Now you can read up online, learn from a lot of the different people who are sharing the knowledge, but come actual runtime, if you know what I mean, as like a product running in a production, come runtime or come showtime. Maybe that’s a better word to say, right? Better phrase. You’re gonna have to make those decisions yourselves. You have to make the decision yourself
the questions that you’re gonna be asked during the conversation with the prospect, during the call, trust me, no matter how much preparation you do, you’re gonna be surprised because that is gonna be a question that you are not ready for, simply because you don’t know your prospect’s business as much as you actually thought you did. And no matter how much you’ve been able to say in the 300 words you got to make those reach outs, your prospects do not know as much about your products and offerings as much as you would like for them to know.
So that first meeting is an important meeting, right? The idea behind prospecting is not to make that sale. Of course, eventually you wanna make that sale, otherwise none of this makes any sense. But the idea behind sending and doing these recharts, at least the first step is to get the prospect on the call and have the conversation. That’s a Herculean task in itself, right? And after that, you can go build, you know, you gotta lay the foundation and then build the building. The first thing is the foundation is…
getting the prospect on that call. Now I say this now, was that super clear to me like two months before? Not necessarily, right? That’s why in the previous podcast, I think I mentioned how big my first, what the length of my very first email reach out was. It was like four or five paragraphs because we were trying to complete that sale in that email, but that doesn’t make any sense. You’re, it’s unlikely, you’re probably not gonna make a sale in that first reach out unless you’re selling.
I mean, we do prospect for our courses and you can go check out our courses on like, say learn.snowpals.com and they cost less than a drink at Starbucks. They’re like five bucks and we talk about all aspects and nuances of technology, something you probably couldn’t find $5 or $7, $6 or $4 elsewhere. We are quite certain about it. For those kinds of recharts, maybe the sale happens, the sale does happen with the single email, but that’s a different, that’s not a B2B sale necessarily, right? I mean,
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (14:25.93)
It’s a B2C-ish type of sale. But for a B2B sale, you’re selling problem, solutions to bigger problems with the bigger solutions. It’s going to take a fair number of calls and these sessions. So the purpose of that first email reach out of the cold call, the phone reach out, or whatever the reach out mechanism is, is to get your prospect interested enough so they actually hop on that particular call, on that next call, and set up time with you. So do what you can.
to essentially facilitate that. Now I’m gonna take, I’m gonna pause here for a second and then I’m gonna continue.
Go to Part 4.
Snowpal’s Products:
Backends as Services on AWS Marketplace
Mobile Apps on App Store and Play Store
Education Platform for Learners and Course Creators