Presales vs Sales: What Really Wins Deals? Lead Hygiene, Follow-Ups, Objections

2:03Dominka: Today we're going to talk about sales at OB2B and sales as a phenomenon, the way we sell it and the way we do it daily. A very important thing to emphasise is that you've done it all. You've gone through all the processes: from being a presales BDR, to being an account executive, to being somebody who does after-sales as a project manager or business development strategist, which you are today. I think you have a lot to tell. But if you are honest, do you even see any sharp, distinct moments in your career where you would say: okay, there was a transformation, this is a point where I know something has changed? Or is everything just a big flow for you?

3:08Anamarija: It is actually a big flow for me, because everything I did at OB2B and everything I was connected to was actually a mixture of different things that are repetitive day after day. Some things have changed, some things I don't do anymore, and I added some things that I'm doing right now. But basically everything runs around more or less the same. So I wouldn't say that at any point I experienced any kind of migration, change or, I don't know, something huge.

3:44Dominka: It's very fluid. It's been very fluid because you've been here from the beginnings of the company, of OB2B as such. And all the changes happened very naturally, at a slow pace, if you look back.

4:03Anamarija: Yes, they did. And as we wanted to change, as we wanted to, for example, expand our business or add some new colleagues to the team, everything happened slowly. So we didn't have at any point a huge amount of, I don't know, projects, new people and so on that we couldn't handle. So that's good.

4:29Dominka: Okay. But still, let's do a little bit of time travelling today in this episode, to give the listeners a little bit of a retrospective on how it is now and maybe what you see happening in the future as well. But if you can think back to your presales days.

Anamarija: Of course. Yeah, I can. It was fun.

4:59Dominka: What would you say is the single most important thing that a presales employee should focus on when qualifying a lead?

5:12Anamarija: First of all, I think it's really important to have some basic information that you can start from, and then build your deal or lead, whatever you want to call it, step by step. The most important thing, I would say, is lead hygiene. This is something that makes your work like a flow. You cannot have any kind of obstacles. You know at every point when your follow-up is, if you are writing everything down: the small transcriptions of your conversations, the names that you connected with, and so on. This can help you a lot to have a really good flow in the business that you are running, which is really, really important in presales. So I would say this is a good foundation for building something really good and moving forward from that point.

6:06Dominka: And on the other hand, what's the biggest failure or the biggest mistake a BDR makes in the presales process? Or that you have made? Maybe you can think back. It was a different time, but still.

6:20Anamarija: It can happen. I mean, mistakes happen every day. Just because some mistakes happened ten years ago doesn't mean they are not happening anymore. For example, it's quite common to make mistakes while sending out emails to prospects, just not typing in the right information. So this is something that is a little bit… I don't know. I really don't like it.

Dominka: Because you cannot change it. Once you send an email, it's really hard to unsend it.

6:51Anamarija: Exactly. And you have to take care of your follow-up. If you don't follow up on time, maybe you are going to lose your warm lead. He's not going to be any warmer. He's going to be colder and colder. So it's really important to take care of your activities. Most mistakes actually happen because you are trying to rush things, and then mistakes always happen. You're rushing, you're trying to, I don't know, make as many calls as you can, send out as many emails as you can. And in that kind of mindset, you will make mistakes.

7:29Dominka: And this is a very important lesson for everybody who is listening, because a lot of people are afraid of making the phone call. Actually, the fewest mistakes happen during the phone call. You can always find a spontaneous solution or find a way to lead the prospect into giving you an answer. Or even if not, you can just say: okay, when I do my next call, I'm going to do things differently.

Anamarija: Exactly.

Dominka: The most common mistakes actually happen in the process of documenting or sending emails, or just not documenting and not putting lead hygiene first after doing a call.

8:13Anamarija: You can always turn the river to flow onto your side when you are in a call. For example, if you forget something, if you just have a huge blockage in your mind, you can just stop, start laughing and say to your prospect: "Hey, this is really not my day. I just had a huge blockage." And then just laugh it off.

Dominka: Yeah.

Anamarija: And it's also a good thing, because then the prospect can laugh with you, and it's an opportunity to build trust and to build rapport, because you are experiencing things that are only human. It's not like you have to be perfect on every call, but it's easier to navigate these things. At least, if you make such a huge mistake, you can always just drop the call, call again and say: "Hey, sorry, my connection was really bad, so I'm calling you again." So you have some things where you can navigate. But when you send out an email with wrong information inside, a wrong name, wrong personalisation, then you have a problem, because most of the time you cannot withdraw that email. Or, I don't know, you can change the data you typed into your CRM, but you have to be aware of what you are doing.

9:27Dominka: You've experienced presales, you've experienced sales in the form of being an account executive. And actually, the one thing I am convinced of is that you can really only be a very good account executive if you've done presales before.

Anamarija: Yeah.

Dominka: Especially in the part where lead hygiene is concerned. If we look at our partners and the people we work with, they are really bad at that point.

Anamarija: Yes.

Dominka: Because they might be good sellers. Might be somebody who has a really good pitch.

Anamarija: Yeah. Or talent. There are many.

10:08Dominka: But if you do not have a way to document it, if you do not have a way to track it and just show it to somebody else, and it's usually a bigger team, it's not just a one-man show…

Anamarija: Of course, yeah.

Dominka: …you can do so many things the wrong way and not close, just because you haven't done sales in a proper way.

10:31Anamarija: Yes. Because you are always going to impact other people. For example, in our teams you are always working with somebody. You're not alone at any point. You have your own job, your colleague has another job, but everything is connected. And in the end, it's your partner or client who is also connected to your presales part and who needs to continue where you stopped. So if you arrange a meeting for him, he has to have certain information so he can continue with the sales process for his company, for his products, for his pitch, for everything else. It's funny how presales is sometimes connected to sales; they interfere with each other. And if you are making a mistake, it's like a butterfly effect. It can really touch things you don't even see, in the future. So it's really important to just take care of your things that will impact somebody else in the future.

11:37Dominka: All the segments, presales, sales and after-sales, which we're going to talk about as well, consist of one very important thing for sales, which is objection handling.

Anamarija: Of course, yeah.

11:50Dominka: Yeah. Would you say… This is our job, objection handling. Would you say it's easier to do objection handling in cold calls or in sales calls?

12:03Anamarija: Oh, that's a hard question, but I think it's more or less the same. I mean, objection handling is objection handling. And the most important thing, which I find is a connection between presales and sales, is your preparation. I think in sales in general, knowledge is everything. If you are prepared well, if you know your product, if you know your service, if you know your benefits and so on, you cannot have a situation that will surprise you. No objection will come that surprises you, because you will always have the answer for it. If you are well prepared, then any objection is just an objection and you have to push through it. It depends on the person you are talking to. It depends on what stage you are in. But I think the one common thing is: if you have the knowledge, then you can handle any kind of objection.

13:04Dominka: Yeah. But still. Still, if you want, answer my question.

13:10Anamarija: I mean, maybe it's a little bit more difficult when you are trying to do sales, because maybe the topic of money is included, or the budget, if you will. If your partner doesn't have the budget, then this is an objection that you cannot push through. If you want to, you can give, I don't know, a discount or something like that. But it's something you have to navigate, and show which benefits there would be for him, or the return on investment that he's going to see in the future, and so on. So I think objection handling maybe lasts a little bit longer in the sales part than in presales, because in presales it's quite common to hear the same things. And what you're doing is trying to arrange a meeting; it's not that bad. You just say: okay, no problem, let me hear the feedback. If you can navigate that feedback, then perfect, you will continue the conversation. If not, just move on. But it's a little bit more difficult in sales, because you don't have that amount of leads running through your fingers.

14:18Dominka: So you'd say sales objections and sales pitches are more difficult to handle than…

Anamarija: Maybe.

Dominka: …than cold calling?

14:26Anamarija: Yeah. And maybe just because of the number of leads that you are handling. You have meetings, which means the conversation lasts longer, and more questions will come up throughout the conversation. In presales, if you are doing cold calling, you have conversations that last, I don't know, maybe two or three minutes if you are on the phone with a decision maker. And usually you are prepared for any kind of objection that will come up, because you usually already know what people are going to ask, what kind of pain points they are going to have and how you can solve them. At least if somebody names a pain point, you can always say: "Hey, this is a really good question. This is a really good point that you brought up. I will connect you with my colleagues who are specialists in this area. So let's arrange a meeting." And then turn this deal to your own benefit, because your goal in presales is to arrange a meeting.

15:24Dominka: I fully disagree. Next year I'm going to have my tenth anniversary at OB2B, and then you can do this interview with me. You're going to get a completely different answer. Perfect. Good.

15:40Dominka: Another thing which is really important to take care of in sales pitches is how your pitch and your approach are focused on the lead you've gotten from somebody in presales. So what do you think is the most important soft skill you have, or that you brought with you into sales, into your account executive time? What was something where you think: this was a really important point that I've learned, and it has brought me new clients?

16:19Anamarija: Oh, this is an easy one. It's definitely cleavage. Well… No, that was a joke. It was a really sexist joke. I'm sorry. But it's true.

16:40Anamarija: So the answer, the true answer, is the freedom that you gain through your cold calling. Because when you start, you're quite scared. You don't know what will happen. You're scared of every call: who is going to be on the other side, how they're going to react and so on. And then over time you just gain some kind of freedom. You just release yourself from all of these fears. And this is something that happened in sales, where you can embrace this freedom, improvise and try different things. This is something that made a huge difference for me personally. It can be something else for somebody else, but for me it's the freedom and improvisation that I had. And of course not making fun of somebody, but having fun throughout these things. Just integrating humour into everything can help a lot, especially with building the relationship and trust. Definitely improvisation and freedom.

17:53Dominka: Yeah. Okay. Maybe I agree with this one.

Anamarija: Maybe you do.

17:59Dominka: How much time do we have left? Okay. We've skipped ahead a bit. You started in 2015, right?

Anamarija: Yeah.

Dominka: It's going to be ten years. So we were in… 2017?

Anamarija: Yes, let's say.

Dominka: And then we were in 2020. And when did you start doing the after-sales part?

18:50Anamarija: The after-sales? I'd say it's 2022, maybe. But I had several projects before, because it was easier to navigate. When I started with after-sales, or project handling if you will, it was mostly at the beginning with some clients that came from other countries rather than the DACH region. For example, Poland was actually one of the first projects that I ran, or, I don't know, Finland and so on. Over time the number of projects just rose. So it was quite natural. As we said at the beginning of this episode, it was just a flow, because I was always somewhere dipping into projects: not only working on projects as a BDR, but also running some things that are also my job while handling the projects. So it was quite natural, and it's a little bit hard to determine at which point over the years I took over after-sales.

19:56Dominka: Okay, but I think it's been two years that you've been doing nothing else than after-sales?

Anamarija: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Dominka: Okay. Okay, good.

20:13Dominka: From all those three segments of sales, which one do you find the most difficult?

20:24Anamarija: The most difficult one was the presales part.

Dominka: Yeah?

Anamarija: Yeah. When I was a BDR. It's the thing where you don't just do your job, like you just pick up the phone, you just send out the emails; you have to really think about what you are doing. And it takes a lot of energy, to be honest, so kudos to all of our BDRs. It takes a lot of energy to be yourself, to adapt to any kind of situation you are in, because you are switching between situations with every call. But it's also highly rewarding, because you can see your results very, very quickly. So I would say the presales part is definitely the most difficult, but actually the most rewarding one.

21:20Dominka: I again fully disagree. But I like this.

21:28Dominka: I have a question which I've written down for myself, and I can't wait to read it out loud. It's an after-sales one: can you share an example of turning a challenging post-sales situation into a satisfied long-term client?

21:47Anamarija: You mean when I got a client where I needed to handle something to turn him into a long-term one?

Dominka: Yes.

Anamarija: Or… this is something that happens all the time.

Dominka: Okay.

22:00Anamarija: Okay. Yeah, sometimes, which is quite natural I would say, you are going to get a partner, a new client, who is scared of the cooperation. He's never done this before. He has his own wishes, his own expectations and so on, which is completely natural and fine. And it's the most rewarding thing in my job currently: with our work, with everything we are doing, with our transparency, we see them become happy with the cooperation. We are bringing them results, which also make them happy. To be honest, this is something that is really important for them. And then they decide not only to continue our cooperation, but maybe to expand it. This is something that happened this year with one of my partners, and it made me really, really happy, because I thought: hey, they're quite, I don't know, unsure. So maybe they are going to last with us a month or two. In the end they actually expanded the project, they took another BDR, so our team expanded, and we have been working with them for more than six months. From the first position until today, that's a huge change.

23:14Dominka: Yeah, I remember an even worse situation you had, where you had a client who was really dissatisfied after two months. They were already sending signals, or at least letting you know, that they weren't really happy with the cooperation and that they wanted to quit. And then you came up with a new list, a new idea, a new approach, and we kept them for several months.

23:47Anamarija: Yeah, that is also a thing that can happen.

Dominka: I don't know if you know who I'm talking about.

Anamarija: Not at this point.

Dominka: It was a Swiss company.

24:02Anamarija: Okay. Yeah, I understand now. Yeah, sometimes it can happen that the strategy we decided on together at the beginning of the project is just not the right one. Sometimes it takes time to realise: hey, this is not working. And of course your client is not going to be satisfied, because it doesn't work. But the really important thing is to take a stand. I don't mean take a stand and punch them, but take a stand and say: "Listen to me. Let's try something that I have a hunch for, or that I have experience with. Let's try another list. Let's try another industry. And then we will see if that works. I have a feeling it's going to work, but let's test it, if you are open to that solution." So if that happens, you always have to take a stand, change the strategy and say: "Hey, listen to me. This is something I'm really good at. Let's do that."

24:58Anamarija: There's also one example where we started another project. We started to contact the end customers, but the results were really bad. Really, really bad. So we proposed contacting companies to which we could introduce ourselves as partners, rather than just, I don't know, acquiring new clients. And that was also a turning point, because it brought so many new partnerships for our client, and new projects within those partnerships. And after a while, we had worked together for more than three years, at different times of the year: we worked for two or three months, then stopped, and then again. And because of that approach, they even managed to hire another employee. So they really grew at that point. This made not only me but everybody connected to this partnership really happy, because it showed us really, really efficiently how changing the approach can benefit everyone. So it happens all the time.

26:16Dominka: Okay. Good. Last question. Where do you see yourself in ten years?

26:22Anamarija: Hopefully I'm going to be alive.

Dominka: Oh, yeah. Me too.

26:27Anamarija: No, I don't know. I'm really not the person who can look that far into the future; I'd rather have some smaller goals and walk towards them. But I definitely see us at OB2B being a little bit bigger, maybe with more employees, maybe with some changed perspectives, because I can see that whenever something new happens, we adapt really, really quickly, as we've talked about a million times with AI, which is quite new right now. And then let's see, maybe we are going to be some huge enterprise company that buys a lot of other companies. And we are going to be rich.

27:13Dominka: Good. Well, remember these questions that I asked you? You're going to interview me on the same topic next year, at this time, maybe?

Anamarija: Deal.

Dominka: That was it. Thank you for your perspective and retrospective on ten years of sales, which I can say you've done very successfully.

Anamarija: Thank you.

Dominka: And I'm really happy to have been part of your journey so far.

Anamarija: I'm really happy too.

27:40Dominka: Good. Yeah, that's it. We're done with our thirty-third episode. More or less. Yeah. Perfect. It's our thirty-third episode of Dialing Out, the OB2B podcast. Feel free to watch the whole episode every time. If you haven't…

Anamarija: It's a shame.

Dominka: It's a shame. And there are very cozy weekends ahead of you. So grab a blanket, your iPad, your laptop or whatever, and binge our 32, plus this episode.

Anamarija: Thirty-fourth?

Dominka: Thirty-third. Yeah. No… You didn't quite listen to what I was saying. Thank you. Subscribe, comment.

28:41Anamarija: Add us on LinkedIn.

Dominka: Find us on LinkedIn and add us on LinkedIn. That's it. Yeah. Rocking this. Bye, everybody.