James Kaikis is the Co-Founder of the PreSales Collective and the Senior Manager, Manufacturing Solution Engineering at Salesforce. He started his career in hospitality and brings his customer service training to the role of presales. Join James and Greg as they discuss how our experiences as B2C consumers impacts our expectations as B2B buyers and what SaaS companies need to be doing to compete.
Our personal and business lives are merging. The structure of the workday has been obliterated. People no longer rely on a sales channel to get information. People leverage a constantly expanding digital channel, available 24/7 to collect information. This is not eliminating the need for presales/solution consulting, but it sure is changing it. Less time delivering a "standard" demo. More time spent on better, more qualified leads demonstrating value not features and functions. A change in mindset, process and technology is needed to improve the conversion rate from demo to closed deals.
Connect:
Connect with James on LinkedIn and check out the PreSales Collective's website.
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter
Greg Dickinson: So welcome, everybody to the convenience economy podcast excited today to have James as my guest, James, before we get started with the topics we want to talk about today, tell the audience a little bit about yourself. And also tell us about the free sales collective. I'm excited about that.
James Kaikis: Oh, me too. I'd be happy to Greg. Well, thanks for having me on. James keikis. I'm currently a pre sales leader at Salesforce. I've been at Salesforce for a little over a year and then spent most of my career in startups prior. I've been fortunate because I've gotten to see a lot of different presale organizations in terms of maturity. And what that has kind of led me to was to realize that pre sales is an amazing profession, one that we say many people haven't heard of, but it's kind of under resourced. And from our perspective, I was actually very local in a San Francisco local group, and made a lot of friends made met mentors, how to network as I was building my startups. And I moved to Chicago and realized, hey, there's nothing here. So I started a local group in Chicago, and then talk to a friend who was in Seattle and said, Hey, if you're not in one of these four or five cities, and you're not on one of these big companies that have an amazing ecosystem, how do you connect with people? So we decided to start pre sales collective, which is the first global community for pre sales professionals. We started it, you know, as the pandemic started in April. And here we are the end of the year, nearly 8000 people worldwide join pre sales collective. So it's been an amazing journey.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, hats off to you guys for full transparency. You know, I started my career in enterprise sales at Ariba as a pre sales engineer, you know, with a territory with sales reps and moved on from there. And once a pre sales engineer, always a pre sales engineer. So my hat's off to what what James is doing. Because I think that, you know, it is an underserved area, it kind of pre sales is just taken for granted and a lot of cases right. And, and I think what James is doing is tremendous. And I would also say that even if you're not a pre sales engineer, you're in sales, or you're in marketing, or you're in product management, go to the pre sales, collective calm and listen to some of the pre sales engineers, because their perspective, they're close to the customer, they're close to the product. And and they're kind of bridging that gap between sales and technical, I think you'd love their perspective. So I'm not going to give you a full a plug here. But that's what I really believe, truly believe. And that's one of the reasons I was excited about, you know, what, what James is up to, I think it's really, really cool. But we could spend a whole hour talking about that, but we're not we're gonna move into the podcast and what I want to want to talk to you first about, you know, James is I think, at the end of the day, right, we live in this convenience world, right? People are making decisions based on convenience, where we eat where we shop, you know, they say convenience is more important than price now, right? The Amazon effect our phone effect, do you agree there is a cut on kind of a modern buyer that that really looks at doing things digitally first, and they want things on demand, they want to do more self service, then you know that then then talking, you know, to sales right away? What's your perspective on that idea of the convenience economy?
James Kaikis: Yeah, I really like this subject. And it's something that has been kind of neared, excuse me near and dear to me for a couple of years. I think the the trend that's actually happening is that B to C is changing the way we influence b2b. And if you look at how we approached b2b, even three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, it was much different. And if you actually look at the way people have a separation of personal and professional life, those have started to bleed together with the internet, right, and our cell phones, and the attachment and people kind of working around the clock and not nearly having as clear cut of a this is work. This is home life. And I think that's what's actually changing things because our the way people want to buy from a b2c perspective is actually bleeding into b2b. And the age of the informed buyer, people are doing their homework a little bit more before getting into a sales cycle. And I think what's unfortunate is the idea that sales generally isn't as trustworthy, so to say, it hurts, right? And that's why I think pre sales engineers kind of come into the fray and can help mitigate that gap. But I definitely agree that people want information they wanted immediately. They also want to do their homework. And so you know, Gartner and Forrester put out information about buyers being 60, 70, 80% down the funnel, prior to talking to a sales rep. I think that is only going to continue to be more and more important. into the way that we sell software in general. Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: I couldn't agree more, right. I love your analogy of, you know, of b2c bleeding in because you know, at the end of the day, right? You took 100 people and said, you can call a pizza restaurant on Friday night to order your pizza, or you can go online and order it 90% go online and order it just the way we are right? And for whatever reason, if you're not afraid that you're going to Best Buy look for a television set. And when someone comes up to you, what do you say 99% of time, we're just looking. And then when you're ready, you'll raise your hand and ask for that help. But until you're ready, you don't want to be bothered, you don't want to engage. And so with us agreeing on that topic, has it changed the way you see sales taking place at your at your company? Or gosh, you have exposure to you know, 8000 members, have you seen kind of a change in behavior or change in, you know, sales strategies because of this?
James Kaikis: Yeah, I think so. Right. So I think for me, I'm at a company like Salesforce, and I don't know that it's changed that much for a company like Salesforce, because the brand recognition goes very far right? People know, Salesforce, they know what Salesforce is, you know, they might not know the breadth and the depth of the products. But they kind of have that understanding, I think where things have potentially changed are some of these startup companies and some of these more niche products that are trying to make an impact into the market. I think what I'm also seeing, and maybe taking it a little bit higher level, and separating it is that the sales motions are changing, regardless of what company that you're in, right? Because a lot of times we did our discoveries, we did our demos, we did a couple demos with the technical team, I think what I'm starting to see now is that more of this workshop component, we're going to need to actually do a little bit deeper dive into the organization to understand, you know, more whiteboarding sessions, and getting a little bit more creative in terms of our approach. Because I think I have a philosophy that if you're comparing products, and you're really splitting hairs, at the end of the day, they are going to probably move forward with the best buyer experience, depending on price, right, if prices on an even playing field, it's that buyer experience. So I think that pre sales teams, and sales teams generally have had to get a little bit more creative in their approach. And it's not as much disco demo, or typical sales process. Because this this buyer is different. For example, proof of concepts and pilots, I think have skyrocketed over the last couple of years.
Greg Dickinson: Absolutely, absolutely. This is a great segue to the next question. And I and I'm gonna put put another little bit add for your pre sales collective. But I'm going to talk now about this idea of product lead growth, or experiential and you actually had if someone is interested in, in a deep dive on this, James did a webinar and it's on his pre sales collective.com website, you can dig into this in detail. But But James, let's talk about it a little bit, right, you know, product lead growth, you know, this idea of people want to get their hands on the product earlier and more often. And you you see you agree with that you see people doing that more often. And the second question is going to be, you know, how do you feel about that as a pre professional pre sales engineer?
James Kaikis: Yeah, I think it's only becoming more and more popular, but I actually think it's really dangerous. I think it's a very dangerous situation for organizations to think, Hey, everyone wants to go into our product, and they want to test it out. So maybe taking a step back is that I think the idea of product led growth is is really the right step in the right direction. I feel like this was maybe what we called a freemium model five or 10 years ago, and it's just kind of like getting its own term now. But I like to see companies like Slack, for example, that have a, excuse me Slack, where you can spin up an instance, and you can get some of the features and really try the product. You know, before you make a full commitment and get the whole the whole thing, right. And why I think this is this is dangerous, though, is because many companies are not creating product thinking, Hey, we're leading with product lead growth, or we're not thinking of a first time user experience. And so as a pre sales professional to blend your two questions together, I get a little bit nervous about that. Because what I've seen in my career is we give someone access to this environment, and we say, hey, our product is going to sell itself. But if it's not very straightforward, you don't have a good first time user experience. People might make false assumptions on what the product can and can't do. And they can actually hurt your sales cycle. And so if someone makes a false assumption about something that you actually do do, and they're looking at a competitor, you know, you're already going to be behind. So I actually think it's a it's a trend that is in going it's a positive trend and something that's going to happen in the right direction. However, I think organizations really have to be intentional about how they approach the situation because If you make a couple wrong moves or your products, not super intuitive, it can be dangerous.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, James, I listen, I thank you for being honest. Right? Because I agree with you wholeheartedly that that you're the analogy I use when people ask me about this is, you know, back in 2000, Salesforce was a company that was coming out of the sink called SAS. And it was hot, right? And people said, Wow, that's really cool. But everyone couldn't move, migrate to SAS from 2000 2001. It took like 15 years for the industry as a whole for companies to actually move. Why? Well, because it wasn't just the technology. It was the it was the organizational structure of what you had to support SAS, it was the it was the pricing model. And I think, I think the same thing with product growth there are some companies you know slack and calendarly that are like, dead on right you can you and I can pick it up, we can figure it out, we can move forward. But other cases, the conversion rate of these trials of the some of these are like, you know, 2%, that means 98% people got got lost in the product, they didn't see the value, they don't understand it. So I think that's what you're talking about. Right? Is that is that you got to be prepared organizationally. I mean, people don't know that slack has more Customer Success people than sales people. Why? Because they're supporting people using the product as opposed to people cold calling and selling, right. Mm
James Kaikis: hmm. Well, very well said. And I think what's also interesting is you're starting to see some some products and some startups popping up that are actually focusing on this for companies. So I know of a couple companies that are just getting just got seed funding, they're actually approaching companies and say, hey, you're not doing this, right. This is how you should do it. And let our software look into this. Right. It's very early in this in this phenomenon. But again, I'm very interested to see where it can go. Yeah, I think so many times people have written articles over the last like decade, including companies that I worked out around the death of the salesperson. Right. And I, I think it's all I always believed in it. But it's been maybe a little bit over overblown, so to say, but I think we're trying to figure out what is the right role for the salesperson? What is the right role for technology? What is the right role, that product and first time user experience plays? Again, I'm a big fan of customer centricity. And so everything that you're doing with the customer in mind, is the right approach. And I think organizations are starting to get a little bit more savvy, because buying has changed, but our sales processes have not changed as quickly, in my opinion. Obviously, it's a generalization, however, just kind of be a trend that I've seen over the last couple of years. So it is very interesting to see how this kind of plays out over the next year or two
Greg Dickinson: could agree more, right? Because I think that, obviously the production is important and obviously, you know, there are many, you know, great examples. But you know, I think that to your point, right? You have to think through it. And you have to figure out what what what challenges are you trying to solve. It's like an old, you know, lesson I learned as a pre sales engineer, you have a great meeting in a room with 10 or 15 people, you're in the elevator, your sales rep, high fives a great, great demo, right? And what you don't know is in the room, someone's saying, you know, they must not do this because he didn't demo it right in people's mind, because you didn't show it you don't do it. That's the same with product lead growth. They don't know how to get to a certain feature, therefore they think it doesn't exist. And that's really bad. So hey, again, if people want to learn more about that and talk more about that, you then go to your your great site with your webinar. Let's just transition a little bit. You talked a little bit just now about, you know, sales models and changing and what I want to get your thoughts on is we're starting to see right Omedym does a little bit of video stuff. And we're seeing this this idea of of automating the demo process, right? And being able to share, you know, a complex demo replay, you know, using video searchable video, you know, comes to mind what Yep, James has, again, as a pre sale professional, do you really think that this is a good thing? And does it in my opinion, it doesn't replace pre sales engineering, it augments what they're doing. Right? You know, what are your thoughts? Especially top of funnel, right?
James Kaikis: Yeah, I mean, the augment word is is the right is the right word here. Um, it's funny, because with pre sales collective, because we've been growing, I'm getting a lot of questions from people in the community. And this tends to be a question that I am getting a lot. And I've gotten a lot recently and and my stance is that you don't look at this as a replacement for pre sales. I think so many times, people look at this and say, Oh, my gosh, this is gonna replace my pre sales team. It's not it's it's augmentation. And in reality, what I see that this does, is actually qualifies leads better because so many salespeople, or excuse me, so many pre sales, people complain that the leads that they're working on are unqualified, and with the pre Sales Collective we actually just did a survey of the community. And that was the number one complaint that sales engineers and solutions consultants have their sales counterparts. And in my opinion, if you have this demo automation, and videos where people can kind of self help and self serve a little bit, it's actually going to give you the insights and the analytics. If somebody's serious about buying, it also starts to educate them. Because that's what people want. They want a little bit more education. They want to be on their own doing their own homework before they get into the sales cycle. So I actually really like this type of technology, I think it will only continue to help, like you said, at the top of the funnel, it also helps expand, potentially who might be interested because you start to get analytics on other teams and other departments. I think it allows us to be more sophisticated. Again, I think that the comment I made previously about sales organizations, not necessarily catching up, I think this is one of these topics where people just don't know what to do yet. They're like, hey, this technology exists out there. success rates are high, you know, how do we bring it into our organization? How do we do it, right? And there's a little bit of like, hey, we've been doing this forever. This is how we do things. But that mindset has to shift because sales organizations again, need to be changing, like buyers are. So I like I like this trend. I hope it's more than just a trend and actually becomes part of DNA, so to say, but I definitely definitely, definitely believe in this type of technology. Oh, good.
Greg Dickinson: I kind of hope you're right. We have a little bit riding on it. But But yeah, no, you know, geez, I talked to another, you know, very high level, you know, leader of a major company that runs presales, and her comment was that you know, about between 12 and 15% of the quote unquote, demos convert to a customer, that means that, you know, let's say 85% of the demos you've given are for people that that are maybe not ready to buy now, or maybe never were ready to buy, they were just, you know, kind of kicking tires. So to your point, right? That's a lot of resource drain. And, you know, if you can expand the audience of people saying this software can do X, Y, and Z and help them I always say top of the funnel, it's, it's more about, can you do something? And as you move further down the funnel, it's how do you do it? And that's where the pre sales engineer jumps in, and is able to specifically show you Hi, but early on, let's get some automation, let's increase your audience. And let's allow those people that maybe aren't going to buy right this second, they're just do they're an analyst, right? And they're just doing research to understand, you know, is this something your company wants? I think that's what you're you're talking about, is this get better qualified opportunities, so that, you know, professionals like you and me, right, are working on the right opportunities.
James Kaikis: I think so right? Like sales and pre sales, people are finite resources, no matter what anybody tells you, they can only work a certain amount of hours per week. And even if they work too many hours, I think that there's a diminishing return, right? So we need to be spending those expensive resources. spending their time in the right places. And I think technology like this, as you mentioned, again, augments and allows us to have more focus in terms of where we're spending those those hours. Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: yeah, cuz like, Listen to me, the Gartner research says that, you know, today's buying journey, right, they only spend 17% of their time with the sales team, which if you're looking at three providers, that means you get 6% of their time. If I have a pre sales engineer, it's going to an hour, I want it to be engaging, high impact and hitting all the right notes. So having that person have some experience ahead of time of you know, of the high level stuff the product can do. And then you have the analytics to know where they focus their time and their energy so that your meeting is very engaging. I think that's a great win for both sides of the of the of the of the buyer and the seller.
James Kaikis: I agree, I agree. And I used to sell sales enablement technology, and we had some technology where we would, you know, send material, follow up a meeting and see what they looked at. And I tell people all the time, like, I would utilize my own product, because if I was going into a meeting, I said, Hey, Greg, we haven't heard from from the last meeting, you know, what's going on? Are you interested? Instead, I actually know that you looked at document A, B, and C, and I said, Hey, Greg, like that use case was definitely, you know, impactful and important to you. Like, let's talk about it more and just getting that type of analytics, getting that type of data. It allows for better conversations at the end of the day.
Greg Dickinson: You don't want to waste time, like I wrote in my book, you know, the kind of convenience economy I talked about the fact that you go to a car lot with your significant other and the salesperson sees you and says Oh, let me talk to you about the and you know, how fastest car can go zero 60 they didn't know that you just had a child and you're really looking for a car for safety. Right? So they wasted your time because they didn't understand buyer intent and buyer signals you're there for safety, you understand about car seats, and and airbags, etc. Not how fast it will go. But salespeople sometimes jump to that conclusion without having the great, you know, analytical data. So, hey, we've got a few more minutes here. I really want to spend a little bit of time on the on the pre sales collective and what I want to talk to you about for a second is success has been through the roof. Congratulations. Why do you think that is right? Do you think it's because the role of pre sales is changing or what have you been able to put a hug, got a finger on it? why you've had, you know, zero to 8000? In, you know, in six months cmon man that's, that's phenomenal success. share with the audience Yeah, why?
James Kaikis: I think so one, I really appreciate that I think it's a couple things. For one, this role is becoming more important in sales and more and more important software. And I firmly believe that without pre sale engineering teams, depending on how complex your software is, deals can't get done, right. And I think the role of sales has changed a bit too. And, you know, as I think, you know, talk about software for a second, like as people have migrated the software, people that necessarily don't have that background, are starting to learn software. And so ramp times can take a while. And so someone might take a couple years hit their potential from a sales perspective, right, so you're relying on your sales leader, you're relying on your presale engineer, I also think that this, this group in this community is just underserved, right? When you go to an organization, so many of them, just train the salespeople, they train the bdrs. And they say, pre sales engineers, you're the smart people, you guys can figure it out. And that is the wrong approach. And we're there are some organizations that take the right approach. But a lot of teams are left kind of to figure things out on their own. And you look at the industry, and there's so many groups out there, and there's so many communities for salespeople and bdrs. But there's nothing for this profession. And naturally, we're very collaborative, right, this role is collaborative, or collaborative sharing people, I just think that this community was good timing. And we've we've really focused on execution, ensuring everything we do is at a very, very high level, and bringing impact and value to the community. And we've been relentless in that. And I like to say that we jumped off a cliff without a parachute from a content perspective, and we haven't stopped, right we are we are putting so much out there. And talking to amazing people, people are putting time and energy, and they just believe in what we're doing. And so I think it's a bit of timing, it's a bit of execution. And it's a bit of the vision that what we see for the pre sales profession over the next couple of years.
Greg Dickinson: Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, yeah, listen, and, and and Enough said on that topic. I mean, you've got, you know, great success, and I want to beat a dead horse there. But I do have, I do think that you also right what you have going for you in addition to what you described as a fact that the role is changing, right? If the product is moving a little bit further up in the sales cycle, and and there are more of these trials and premiums and you know, kind of try before you buy it and and how does the pre sales engineer help with that process, not hinder it? How do they help with that, I think you're helping to teach those skills to say, don't fight that trend. They're not trying to replace you. They're not trying to, you know, move you this is an augmentation of taking some of that, listen, you know, and I know that oftentimes inside sales, right, or pre sales gives the same demo five days a week, or four times a day, right? That's not a good use of anyone's skill. So if we can, if your organization can help people to understand and embrace, then that's another reason I think, why you're attracting people, because you're having a little bit of difference in thought, and you're helping them understand and grow.
James Kaikis: Yep, I mean, very well said, Greg, absolutely. Well said.
Greg Dickinson: Beautiful, hey,let's wrap up with it. What I always like to close with is, people are gonna listen to this podcast, they're gonna, they're gonna get out of their car, they're gonna go to work, they're gonna go back to the living room, whatever it is they do. Give them something they can take back to work today, and be better than they were yesterday.
James Kaikis: Wow, put me on the spot. I love that. Um, don't think about things from your perspective. Think about them from your customers and your prospects perspective. I think so many times the curse of knowledge is real. And we do things because we've done them 100 or 1000 times again, put yourself in that first time user experience shoes and everything that you do.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, I love that we, you know, we say here at Omedym and help your buyers buy, right because for the last 20 years, it's been all focused on salespeople and pre sales and marketing tools, tools, tools, tools, tools, data, data data, but But what about that buyer? So hey, James, you know, thanks for your time. Great to have you today. How can people get in touch with you? or How can they learn more about the presales collective if they want to?
James Kaikis: Yeah, appreciate that. So I'm always active on LinkedIn. So it's James Kaikis k AI K is me on LinkedIn, and also pre sales collective.com. Give our website and check out also our LinkedIn. We got a lot of content out there. I'd be happy to interact with anybody. So definitely appreciate the time, Greg.
Greg Dickinson: Hey, James great to have ya great be on the show today and appreciate your time everyone, check out James's information. Thanks and have a great day everybody.
James Kaikis: Thank you.
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