Episode 7 – Winning in the Room: Sales Call, Tech Win & Value Assessment Hives

Too many voices. Not enough clarity. We’ve all been there. This episode dives into how Hyvara reduces bloated calls, proves technical value, and ties it all back to business impact. Learn how to cut SME overload, streamline proofs, and lock in metrics that matter — so you can win the room without wasting the team.

Transcript

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Hey folks, welcome back to the SE Work Life Podcast. I'm Kevin Kuhnz, your host. Today we're going to talk about episode seven, winning in the room. Sales call, tech win, and value assessment hives will be discussed today. In our last episode, we talked about the first three hives that open the funnel, right? Research, qualification, and discovery, the foundation of a smart, efficient, and resource-conscious sales process. Today we're going to move deeper into the deal. We're inside the room or the Zoom, where credibility is built, values proven, and the technical win is secured. So let's talk about the first hive: sales call hive. The problem here is pretty relevant. Sales calls are bloated with subject matter experts, misaligned and repetitive. The customers outnumbered and confused. You've heard me call it many times the Oracle Boss, where you have, you know, six to seven different sales teams, not just subject matter experts, but sales teams showing up to a rather large opportunity. Let's say it's at uh Home Depot. I remember down in Atlanta at Home Depot, we showed up with six individuals, all dressed differently, all have different uh PowerPoints and different objectives. And the customer, well, there were two customers in that same room. So the goal here is to try to identify where we don't need to bring in so many people to expose that the complexity of our platform requires that many people telegraphing to the client that this is going to be a tough implementation, right? So what we want to do is reallocate those subject matter experts to doing things that are important: innovation, ideation, working on learning new technologies and empowering the sales rep to have the knowledge at their fingertips during the sales call without having so many people on it. Now, I'm not suggesting we get rid of the solution architect. We still need an individual who can look at the overarching platform and the customer's challenge and stitch together the right combination. But for the solution architect to have that much knowledge, it's almost impossible, hence the subject matter experts. What we want to do is empower all that knowledge from the subject matter experts into the hive. And the agent in this case will provide the knowledge necessary to guide the solution architect and ensure that the conversation is on point and answers to questions are being addressed appropriately and accurately. What does this agent do? Well, this agent's gonna silently attend and log call data, track key topics, stakeholders, and talk time ratios, prompt SE and AE in real time to address skipped critical technical issues and critical business issues that were part of the discovery hive. So we're gonna ensure that in real time and in line, this is not like Otter, where, you know, or co-pilot, where it listens, addresses, and then at the end gives you a summary. No, we need to happen in real time. And in some cases, maybe even on the call. We're gonna ensure agenda coverage and account-specific value messaging is accomplished. No longer the days where the solution architect's gonna walk into a meeting along with the sales rep, and you know, they bring up the PowerPoint, usually shows the picture of Oracle's sailboat or something to let the customer know how much money the company made and against them, actually, which is comical. And uh the next slide is you know, hey, John, the SE, why don't you take it away? No proper best practices, no introductions, no, hey, this is what we heard from John on our pre-call. Does it map to what your challenges are in the room? Can we go around the room and can you mention who you are, what your title is, whether or not these 10 things we found on the discovery call are your 10 things, or do you want to add something to it? And these are very important sales steps because ultimately what we want to do is paint the customer into a corner. And when we showcase the answers to all these questions and showcase how we're going to solve those business issues, and we get them nodding, yes, I see what you're doing. And then at the end, you go back and review that list, right? You go through the 10, 15 things, and then you sit there and you ask the customer, wow, it looks like we've satisfied all the necessary requirements. This is my favorite line. Thank you, David Jones. Um, well, what's preventing us from moving forward, customer? And you sit there and you wait. It's the best part of the sales process. It's the hardest part of the sales process, not to say something. But by that time, the customer realizes that, oh, you know, we've painted ourselves into a corner here. And that's the best part of the conversation. And these are the things that have to happen during the sales process. Well, we're all too busy. SEs are a little nervous about the demo coming up. The AE is trying to read the room, trying to take notes. We need this always-on, active, real-time, uh responsible agent that can look at best practices and record all the information and ensure what was in the discovery call is being mapped into this process, right? So we alert when buyer concerns are unresolved. We capture verbatim and stakeholder sentiment, recap each call with AI-genated summaries and action plans. We identify trends across all calls in the opportunity. That's the important one because sure, at the end of the call, you know, the human in this case, the sales agent and solution consultant, they have to go into the CRM and update their notes. They never take good notes and they always update it half-assed, right? So at the end of the day, the information is poor and you're making business decisions off of poor information. We need the agent to ensure the accuracy of that detail across the entire lifecycle of that relationship, the buying and ownership side. The agent will suggest what subject matter expert involvement will be necessary when it's critical, not to waste their time. Ultimately, we're going to reduce sales meetings by 40 to 50% while improving buyer clarity. So, what's the business benefit or the so what factor, right? By cutting unnecessary subject matter expert attendance, sales call hive can save thousands per meeting in hidden costs. A single senior SC or even a subject matter expert, as mentioned before, costs about 400,000 FTE cost annually, meaning every avoided unnecessary meeting is a four-figure savings. It also creates a cleaner buying experience, which increases buyer confidence and accelerates decision making, aka shorter sales cycles. Next, let's talk about the technical wind hive. Obviously, from a sales engineering standpoint, this is hugely important. Also, from a sales standpoint, if we don't have technical buy-in, what's the sense of moving forward? Problem here is proving technical value is inefficient, inconsistent, and often disconnected from business value itself. Too often, and I see a lot more of this nowadays, I've been tagging along with the Adobe Sales Engineering Department for the last year and a half while retired, helping a really good business partner of mine ensemble. And it's amazing to me how we've fallen back into just features, advantages, and benefits and not really mapping the technical and business challenges together along with value. And we'll talk about the value assessment hive in a minute, but they're all intertwined, right? We need to have joint execution plans. There needs to be a technical, a closed plan, no different than a closed plan. What are the minimum requirements for the customer to nod and approve and say these magic words? We've selected you as our vendor of choice. We're not looking at any other vendors, and we will sponsor you to move forward in the sales process. These are critical conversations that need to happen after a technical win. So, what does this agent really do? Well, first, it's going to monitor proof requests, demos, pilots, proof offerings. Like I mentioned before, I've got chapters and both actually all three books talk about proof offerings because it's such a rabbit hole and a time suck for most solution engineers. It's going to score likelihood of technical success by use case. It's going to recommend reuse of top-performing demo flows. Wouldn't it be amazing for you to be able to see how many of your other SE colleagues, colleagues, have come across the same or if not similar pattern of requests? And maybe they've built out a demo already, they've already dealt with those challenges. Maybe we should contact them. Maybe we should get their source code, and maybe we should have them on the call. Why reinvent the wheel over and over again? I remember John Hogerland years ago built out a uh SE dashboard. Actually, it was the ensemble team that built it out. And we used to be able to share code across the entire country with other SEs. And when those deals won, those SE demos actually rose to the top as best in class. This is way before SaaS. And I think this was all server-oriented architecture. And uh, I don't know if you guys remember, but Adobe had this thing called Air, which was Adobe Integrated Runtime. It was actually uh rich internet applications belt backwards, by the way, for those that are paying attention. Um, so we were very much ahead of ourselves back then. So we're gonna track the SE effort and impact on win rate. We're gonna create technical close plans aligned with risk mitigation, draft joint execution plans, outline shared responsibility, flags when the customer hasn't invested no skin in the game. Too often, sales reps are want to give stuff away and not really ask for enough in return. We give so much more value away and we don't get equal requirements back, and we don't force the customer uh to essentially put some skin in the game. And that could be either in the line of, hey, pay for this proof of concept, or hey, bring in two or three leaders into the conversation, we'll happy invest our time. So we're gonna surface red flags and blockers pre-sign-off. We're gonna improve tech win rate, reduces wasted SE time on unwinnable POCs. Now, you know, the business benefit here is clear, right? Tech win hive ensures every proof effort ties directly to business outcomes and risk mitigation. By avoiding unwinnable POCs and reusing proven assets, teams can cut POC cycle time by 20 or 30% and reclaim hundreds of SE hours annually. Every POC avoided on a bad fit deal represents 30 to 50 grand in savings and higher win rates on deals you keep. Now let's pivot into that value assessment hive. I'll tell you, I learned a lot about the values uh team within Oracle. Uh, we partnered up on a lot of different opportunities, and these guys were brilliant in their ability to identify hard dollar costs and soft dollar costs and really uh present to the customer the necessary business case that they needed in order to prove a budget within their own department. This value assessment high is not going to replace those great people. But you know, the problem we have is even when technical value is proven, the business case often lags behind, making it harder for buyers to justify the purchase internally. What this agent does, it'll start capturing cost savings, efficiency gains, and revenue impacts in real time. Now, it's too often when we ask the customer questions about um ROI and costs, they they want things faster. Things take too long, things are hard, uh, it takes too many people. These are the words we hear. What we should be asking are questions around like a formula. You know, back in the day when we learned algebra, A plus B equals C, we when you ask someone how much does it cost, they don't know what that C equals. But if you ask them how many people are involved, and they say three, and then you ask how many hours does it take those people each to do their job, and they say two hours apiece. Well, now we're at six hours, and then you can plug in the FTE cost per hour, and voila, you got C. The computer can do this for us. And the computer can verify when hearing to the conversation, the AI agent will provide a response saying, hey, uh, they said faster. Can you dig a little bit more into that and identify what they mean by faster? How long does it take today? What do they like to see? What happens if they don't hit that SLA? Are they out of compliance? These are all the key value questions that need to be asked. And we're going to link this to technical outcomes to measure those business values. It'll auto-build ROI models and total cost of ownership comparisons. It'll suggest industry benchmarks to strengthen the case. It'll track stakeholder alignment around value drivers. As we go through from the discovery heck, you know, really from the SDR on, there's always going to be some element in that conversation that's going to refer back to budget and costs and revenue. We want to capture those across the entire life cycle of this relationship in order to build out this value assessment. We're going to surface gaps between buyer goals and technical deliverables. See you too often. You know, they ask for a lot, but at the end of the day, some of the things they're asking for are just unattainable based on the amount of savings it is. Sure, you spend $100,000 on something, it's going to save an hour's worth of time. Is it worth it? These are the conversations, the hard conversations we need to have. Because somewhere along the line, someone in the finance department is going to smell this out and some CTO is going to look at it and go, you know what? The juice is not worth the squeeze, right? So we need to generate a one-page executive-ready value brief and provide C-level friendly narratives that tie to strategy and KPI so we can actually bridge those gaps. And I remember too often, we don't ask those hard questions early on. I might have mentioned it early in one other episode, but one of the things I do every single time and in a call, I always ask, so, you know, I understand we're pretty far along the way here in this conversation about the technology. Just question um, have you verified and validated the budget on this with your executives? Have you conducted an ROI model? And sometimes they'll go back with us and say, well, no. And then we obviously return their favor and say, well, we'd be happy to come in and do a value assessment so you have the necessary documents to go to the board in order to get approval for a budget. Alternatively, they may come back and say, Yeah, we've done a full ROI announcement. Uh and it's so funny, we we many times don't ask the follow-up question, which is, oh, well, that's great. Is there a chance we can get a copy of it? We don't ask that question because we're afraid of the answer, the answer being no. But we should be afraid of not asking the question because sometimes, and from my case, nine out of 10 times, the customer's like, yeah, happy to share that with you. And voila, you've got the justification and all that documentation you need up front. But these are the things that the AI agent can help guide the sales team in order to ask the necessary questions to get the answers to ensure the deal value is on target with the assessment of your pipeline. So, in closing, uh, since you know we've talked about the three additional hives, sales hive, tech hive, uh, tech win hive, that is, and value assessment hive, these three stages where Hivera turns friction into momentum. We're no longer just managing the process. We're accelerating it. We're protecting our resources and giving both the seller and the buyer clarity at every turn. Now, a little preview for the next episode. We're going to cover the handoff and expansion side of the funnel. This is going to include the transition hive, stakeholder hive, and expansion hive. That's where customer lifetime value is won or lost. So excited for the next uh conversation. Uh, it's my pleasure. My name is Kevin Kunz. I'm the host of the SE Work Life Podcast Series and one of the founders here at Hivera. Very excited to see what comes of this. Uh, again, like I say in every closing, if you want to be a part of the design partner or you want to participate in a podcast about this storyline, you know, click the button, submit the uh form, and we'll ensure that we get you connected with the team. And uh, you know, good luck selling out there. You're not alone. We've got a strong village of resources and availability to those people.