Why prospects hunt us down
A few years ago, we got an evaluation form from a prospective customer wanting to understand more about what we do. In the comments they wrote...
“Please don't chase me down like those bastards at Sisense”
That little nugget of gold told me a lot about the way our buyers want to purchase software - everyone hates talking to a salesperson too early. So we decided to turn our sales process on its head and put all of our technical evaluation content online. The result of this has been really striking.
The problem
Traditionally, most B2B software vendors provide as little information about their product online as possible to force the buyer to engage with sales far too early in the buying cycle. It’s great in theory, but in reality you end up wasting an awful lot of time in the first steps in the sales engagement validating technical fit. Buyers who are highly technical don’t really want to speak to a salesperson and they’ll avoid it for as long as they can.
The solution
We looked at our buyers' journey and realized that there was a very long period of education where people are in the market researching different products. By putting our evaluation guide online, our customers can educate themselves about our product, its possibilities and its use cases. This accelerates their research.
There's two core pieces of information that we’ve put online.
Evaluation Guide
Our evaluation guide, which is about 500 questions that we've been asked through the evaluation cycle. It’s Q&A based and has an easy search function so you can get all of your questions out of the way.
Walkthrough Videos
The second piece are long walkthrough videos, which are about 20 to 30 minutes each. They’re persona based, so whether you're a software developer, a product manager or a data analyst, we'll walk you through the capability of Yellowfin and show you what you can do with the product and how it can benefit you.
The results
By putting all of this content in one place, we can also control the sales message from HQ and make sure that everyone that we interact with has the ability to hear our global truth.
Since we did this, prospects have started to hunt us down. They are literally pounding on our door asking salespeople to call them. They want to talk about Yellowfin and get moving on their project so it's also shortened our sales cycles. We don’t need to do that first demonstration because customers already know that the technical fit is there. So by the time we talk to them we're discussing benefits and implementation which is fantastic.
Importantly, I think it also tells the customer exactly what kind of organization they're dealing with. I challenge you to find an ungated demonstration by any of our competitors on the web, it just doesn't exist. This is a different approach and it tells customers that Yellowfin is a transparent, open organization that wants to help them to be successful.
The importance of Collaborative BI in a more 'remote' working world
The world has turned upside down. You don’t need me to tell you that. And, thanks to weeks of working from home, a new way of working may be upon us when we flip back.