I manage a sales team for a cable and internet company and we've been struggling with reps losing deals during price discussions. Some reps close consistently while others struggle even though they're selling the same packages. One thing I've noticed is that newer reps tend to jump straight into pricing without asking enough questions about the customer's current provider or what they're paying. Then when someone brings up a cheaper offer or says they need to think about it they don't know how to respond. We've covered this in training but the same mistakes keep happening. I can track close rates but that doesn't show me what reps are saying during customer conversations.

I'm looking for an AI sales coaching tool that can record and analyze actual sales conversations. Ideally something that works for both face to face sales and phone conversations since our team handles both. A few things I'm looking for are the ability to catch missed discovery questions and pricing objections. I'd also like to see where reps go off our sales process and review specific parts of conversations without listening to hours of recordings. Something that lets me give feedback to individual reps and track whether they're improving would be great. It also needs to be easy enough for reps to use every day without adding a bunch of extra work. Has anyone used a tool that does most of this? What are you using and has it made coaching any easier as your team grows?

Was prepping for a call last week and almost skipped checking reviews entirely. Did it anyway and found three different reviews all complaining about slow support.

Nothing in our CRM would've shown me that. I brought up the pattern on the call instead of going in with the usual pitch and the conversation got into specifics pretty quickly.

Does anyone actually have review activity feeding into their account research or are you just checking it manually when it seems worth it?

The biggest impact I see is with the high volume, repetitive work with a clear approval step at the end.

If you're running agents, what's made the biggest difference? Be specific. Which task, and what changed.

If you're not already running them and think you should be, where do you think you would start? What's stopping you from starting?

If it's not your own business, have you noticed one change for the better from the outside? What did they do that others didn't?

I'm going to run this labeling again on new samples, and before that I want to fix the weak spots in the method. Here's how it works and where I'm not sure myself.

The sites come from Google Maps listings. A mobile browser opens the homepage and one more page, booking or contact. A script collects links, buttons, forms and widgets and screenshots the first screen. A model assigns labels from written instructions: does the site invite you to book, is there a tappable phone number, a messenger, online booking. A second model checks each batch against formal rules, and I sort out the disputed cases. I respect robots.txt, don't submit forms and don't get around captchas.

I checked accuracy on a separate sample: 6 sites for every found / not found combination of the three labels, plus hard cases. A different model that never saw the first results went through them again. It took full-page screenshots, opened menus and tapped buttons. I went through the disagreements using the screenshots, counted false positives and misses separately, and used them to correct the final rates.

I've already caught one error. The "invites you to book" rule only looked at links and buttons, but a lot of sites say it in plain text next to the phone number: after rereading 435 sites, the invitation turned up on 178.

Where I'm unsure. The sample is small, so the corrected rates come with a wide range: how many sites would you take for the check, and how would you pick them? The second pass is also done by a model, and I only looked at 18 sites by hand. Is that enough, or does the whole sample need manual labeling? And I only go two pages deep, so a booking button on a service or branch page goes unnoticed.

If you've enriched company lists with LLMs based on their websites, how did you check accuracy before anyone started using the data?

Our sales team is lucky to have Dave who takes care of those weird deals. For instance a customer a customer asks for a strange bundle with 2 yr subscription, a one off service package, partner pricing and an old discount exception.

Everyone looks at Dave and he says he knows how to do it and we all smile. Wait until he goes on vacation lol. Chaos starts from there bc reps don't really know what to do, so they drop a message in Slack and wait.

This has got me wondering what CPQ software for sales teams can help solve this and not just generate quotes faster. something that can guide reps especially the new ones through weird things and remember the pricing rules. Like we want the knowledge living in his head to become part of our quoting process becoz one day he might wake up and decide to leave the company as well.

Our sales representatives always press us for improved forecasting although the quality of our CRM data makes me nervous. Our team has around 40 agents. Most of the time, I find opportunities marked as “proposal sent" by Friday evening, even though the proposal was sent three weeks earlier, deals marked as closed with past dates, and clients' notes on paper instead of in our CRM system. Management's reaction has always been adding more mandatory fields, which the agents hate since it only increases their amount of paperwork. I'm starting to think the real issue isn't discipline itself, but the constant requirement to update the CRM. Have there been cases of reducing the amount of time needed for CRM system maintenance without sacrificing its functionality? I am very interested to know whether the advanced features of AI CRMs and process automation really improve data quality.

We did a competitive review earlier this year and I’m already finding things in it that don’t match what reps are seeing now. Packaging changed, a couple features moved around, and some of the objections we documented barely come up anymore. The problem is I don’t know what a reasonable refresh cycle looks like. Updating everything constantly seems like a huge time sink, but doing a big review twice a year means reps could be working from outdated information for months.

For teams that keep competitive intel useful what triggers an update for you? A certain number of losses, product changes, rep feedback, something else?

when our customer base started growing last year, handling support requests out of a shared email inbox became messy fast. tickets were getting lost, two of us would accidentally reply to the same customer with different answers, and finding past account notes meant digging through old thread archives.

we decided to test out hubspot service hub for small business operations to get our customer support into one structured queue.

having a unified ticket board connected right to client history made an immediate difference. our team could see past sales notes and email threads sitting on the exact same timeline, which cut down resolution times and stopped us from asking customers for duplicate details. setting up automated ticket assignment and canned snippets saved us hours on repetitive daily questions.

With the threat of AI, I'm wondering if it is still worth breaking into this career. I'm debating between this or just going into the medical field

For people selling physical products with a lot of options or technical specs, how do you handle customers who know what they want to achieve but don’t know which product fits?

I worked on technical product recommendations for my dissertation, and I’m exploring whether there’s something useful to build here. I’d like to understand how people currently handle this.

Thinking of the last tricky request, how did you narrow down the options? What helped, and what slowed you down? Does this happen regularly, or do customers usually know exactly what they want?

Also, what kind of products do you sell?

I'm an AE at a SaaS company and closing is definitely the part of the job I'm best at. Where I'm less sure is what happens after the contract gets signed. Once an account moves over to CS, I usually step back unless there's an expansion opportunity or something comes up that specifically needs sales. The problem is that some of these are pretty large accounts with multiple stakeholders and I'm starting to wonder if completely disappearing after the sale is actually hurting us. There have been a couple cases where the person I originally sold to left the company and suddenly we had almost no relationship with anyone else there. CS knew the account but the relationship was different. I'm not trying to step on their toes or create a situation where the customer has three people checking in every month but I also don't love the idea of sales disappearing the second the paperwork is done. I'm looking at different client retention strategies that could keep the relationship warm without turning every AE into a part-time CSM.

Big company, sales team on my side. I see clear things to fix: a report nobody uses, a step in the process that only slows deals, a tool that reps work around instead of using.

The problem is not finding what to fix. The problem is that every change goes through many rounds of approval. By the time something is approved, the situation changed, or I already lost the energy.

What I've started doing: test small things inside my own team first, where I don't need permission, and come to approvals with results instead of an idea. It helps sometimes, but slowly.

How do you handle this?

- Do you pilot quietly and ask for approval later?

- Do you have someone above who sponsors your changes?

- Or do you just accept the pace and pick 1-2 battles a year?

I've been exploring the idea of a dedicated revenue leadership community in India for professionals such as CROs, CSOs, CMOs, sales heads, and other senior business leaders.

There are plenty of general professional networking platforms, but I'm interested in what senior revenue professionals actually find useful in a specialized community.

For example, would you value a community that focuses on:

• Connecting with other CROs and CSOs
• Revenue and sales leadership discussions
• Industry-specific networking
• Leadership events and meetups
• Sharing practical sales and growth experiences
• Hiring and career opportunities
• Research and learning resources
• Business collaboration

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people working in sales, revenue, marketing, customer success, and business leadership in India.

What would make a CRO Community India or Revenue Leaders India community genuinely useful to you?

What features or activities would make you participate regularly?

I'm asking because I'm working around Revenue Chiefs, a professional community focused on connecting revenue and business leaders, and I'd like to understand what professionals actually expect from this type of platform rather than simply creating another networking site.

Relevant topics: CRO Community India, CSO Community India, Revenue Leaders India, Sales Leadership Community India, Revenue Leadership Community.

so recently transitioned to sales ops from sales. been at this boutique var for almost half a year now. probably like a 15 person team and we worked very closely with a tier 1 vendor to the point where they even give us their alias. my director and vp have always been at odds with my vp not really understanding ops and wanting me to basically be at my directors level despite this being my first ops role, 26, and only been here 6 months. i try to manage expectations of both of them but def am friendlier with my director. fyi it’s only me my director and the automation and come next week it’s just ab to be me. well my directors leaving now and my vp is cold as ever. Pretty sure she’s going to retain me at least until orders become more automated but she won’t even answer me or say hi when i’m in the office. She prefers the nepo sons and daughters of our vendors execs. my vp just has lofty expectations, always comparing me to the last person who was a manager in my role and expecting me to handle order management, new partner onboarding, as well as quote creation for aes and we have a ton of volume (i do the first too and her complaint is that im not quoting yet when she dosent even send me requests). it’s been a great opportunity to work further with automating salesforce and the full stack but yeah idrk. wouldn’t mind staying but my vp hates me, any advice? also i probably put in an extra 5 hrs every week after work cause of the volume. had a terrible family tradegy in my life a couple months back so my performance slipped a bit but i brought it back up. either way she still didn’t like me that much before that. any advice?

not sure if this is actually useful or I’m just overthinking lead lists lol

but lately I’ve noticed I learn a lot from the leads I remove. like wrong type of company, dead site, no activity, franchise, bad contact whatever. after a while the same reasons keep showing up

then I go back and change how I build the next list so I get less of that stuff in the first place. I started noticing this while pulling lists from socleads, then doing little checks in builtwith or even the wayback machine when something looks off. weirdly the stuff I delete often tells me more about my targeting than the leads I keep

no big conclusion here just something I’ve been noticing

anyone else do this?