5 Steps To Running Successful Enterprise POCs

Intro

If you’re losing deals at the trial/POC stage this one’s for you!

Ever had buyers asking for 1-3 month long POCs? What about buyers ghosting you the moment you activate their trial and then asking for an extension as soon as their time is up? Or my personal favourite: they’re asking for unreasonably high discounts, OR just being told weeks after a POC that they went with the competition?

Time to say goodbye to all of these!

Hi, I’m Viktor, a full-cycle Account Executive turned Sales Manager with 10 years of B2B Sales experience and on this channel I cover topics from prospecting to closing and everything in between.

On today’s episode I’m joined by Alper Yurder, Co-founder & CRO at Viktor, and we’re going to talk about POCs. Specifically what a difference a Digital Sales Room can make so you stay in control during the Evaluation stage and win more deals in less time. This is a video I wish someone showed me 5 years ago and hope you’ll love it. Let’s do this!

PS: You can make a copy of the Mutual Action Plan we showed in the video here: Get the template.

What is a Digital Sales Room and How to Use Them To Run POCs to Get The Tech Win Every Time?

Viktor (00:02.798)

Hey Alper, good to have you today.

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Alper Yurder (00:05.186)

Good to here, Viktor.

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Viktor (00:07.278)

For the folks, I mean, a lot of people already know you who are in the LinkedIn community, especially around buyer enablement, but for the folks who don't, who are tuning in for the first time right now, can you introduce yourself and what you do?

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Alper Yurder (00:21.582)

Of course, I guess I'm an ex consultant turned ex sales person turned co-founder of Flola. We've been building the product for about a year. From our own pain point, I used to be in complex enterprise sales and I know all the pains of trying to bring a deal to the end and at the last minute it falls because of things that go wrong. So we're trying to make sure that doesn't happen to others. So we're building Flola for that.

Otherwise, I like travel. I'm a microblogger on Instagram. If anybody needs tips from Greece, Spain and Italy, I have an Instagram account we can put in the YouTube description. So that's me.

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Viktor (00:59.43)

Fine, work hard, play hard. Well, again, appreciate you being here. For the audience today, on today's session, we're going to talk about POCs. So where we are at the sales cycle is we've got interest, we've done an amazing discovery, both business and technical, and now we are gearing up to run a POC. But what are the challenges that we face in these cases? Buyers are telling us, hey a two week POC isn't enough. We need a one or three month POC.

Or when the POC starts, you agree to a start date, you see that the users aren't engaging with the platform. Now they're ghosting you when you're following up and, hey, like we were supposed to start now. And you have absolutely no visibility in who is engaging with your platform and when, or have they completely deprioritized the project? You're stuck.

And you don't know if you're just wasting time on this project and you should be building pipeline elsewhere. So this is what we are going to solve by using buyer enablement and.

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Viktor (02:09.058)

Alper, so I was wondering, apart from these symptoms that I've been facing that I called out, I know these pains all too well, did I miss anything apart from these three points that I called out?

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Alper Yurder (02:25.639)

I guess probably you're spot on. I mean, these are all things that we've faced. Like the reality of it is what people listening to us trying to, you know, meet their quota, close more deals faster. But what's going to happen with these POCs is unfortunately they haven't included all the right stakeholders. And they will discover at some point that is the case because some GDPR person pops out of nowhere and at the last minute asks you to comply with certain things. So I guess a lack of multi-funding is a very common thing.

The other thing that happens a lot is what is an enterprise deal or a complex deal or running a POC at the end of the day is it's a pilot to make sure that your buyers feel safe, that they're walking on a journey together with you. They're going to buy your product and they won't look stupid with their stakeholders.

They're going to buy your product and it will solve something. They're going to buy your product. You're going to be there to support them. So I think the emotion of it is a lot of fear, anxiety, and worry from the buyer side. So your job throughout that pilot and actually throughout customer experience is to make sure that you are there to support them. So give them a clear timeline. Um, make sure that you record everything because if things get, don't, don't get recorded, they will get confused or at worst maybe a little bit manipulated. I'm sure it's happened to you before. Like

He said, she said, there will be a lot of that. You know, oh, we said, you know, we can start in a month, but now why? So make sure that it's recorded or, you know, your buyer might end up saying, well, you told, your colleague quoted me 20 pounds versus the product is 20,000 pounds. So make sure that everything is recorded. That would be a second thing. And the third thing. Hmm.

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Viktor (03:53.882)

Never happened. :D

Yeah, especially if you take over an account, right? Rep leaves, you take over. Hey, a person asked, told me I can get it for 50% off. Like where? I didn't know you're like scouring through past emails in Salesforce or HubSpot, right?

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Alper Yurder (04:14.805)

Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I think those sort of things.

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Viktor (04:30.178)

Yeah, no, love these. I'm absolutely with you there. So what's on top of my mind is, can buyer enablement help even experience sales reps? Or is it more for just juniors and meteors? Let me give you some context on why I ask. In my previous roles, I had a pretty sweet process for running POCs. I got agreement up front on what we're going to do. Especially like what you said document everything, what is the price that we agreed to you need to do that before the call? So that they don't start asking like huge discounts at the very end. So I had set up I enabled the The buyers during the session and we did a recap Session after we ran the POCs and what I'm and this worked for me

I mean, yes, there were challenges, and I'll give you some idea of how I did this. But I'll be interested in your thoughts after I do this quick rundown on how can buyer enablement help solve the challenges that I faced, or it's not really for experienced sales reps because they should just continue doing what they're doing. Yeah, I can't wait to hear what you would say.

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Alper Yurder (05:28.662)

Yeah. I mean, of course, my answer would be yes, because I felt the pain point as an experience as person. I will just like.

Yeah, in the one year of building Flola, I've been talking to maybe a thousand people, sellers, buyers, maybe more than that. And we've been doing some research and getting some interesting insights. I think buyers are more ready for this than you as salespeople. Like as a salesperson, you think your process is complex and difficult and you're trying to like that Greek mythology. There's this guy, I forgot his name. He's carrying the stone over a mountain, over a hill and just as he's doing it, it rolls over.

But the buyer is feeling the same, like whenever I'm trying to buy something, I don't get the right information in the right time. I'm being chased in the wrong time, et cetera. So if you think from their side, there's a lot of complexity that they need to manage as a buyer. So of course, you know, they need more flexibility. They need more autonomy. They need more availability of information. So before you think about yourself as a salesperson, I think, think about your buyers, what a terrible, confusing, complex process they're going through to be able to buy from you in their mind versus how much better of a customer experience you can give.

Because there's a Gartner study that says like 77% of buyers think their last purchase was quite complex. So if you think in that context, there's definitely value for the buyer. And if you have the buyer in your mind, whether you're junior, mid, senior, whatever, doesn't mean anything, first of all, it provides value which is why people come to us and say, like, I close to an enterprise deal with you, because people love the experience. It puts you in a certain different place. If you're looking to stand out from the crowd in the way that you give superior service, that you show that you know your sugar, I think a buyer name element tool can do all of that for you. And then even more no-brainer answer is, selling complex products or managing enterprise deals is

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Alper Yurder (07:49.262)

project management on steroids. And in the absence of a tool like this, you will create your own Excel, you will have your select channels, you will have this, that, no, everything is in one place, it's already created for you. And on the plus side, you will not be ghosted because you can actually see how people interact with your product, what kind of content they're looking at, you can engage with them directly. So there's tons of benefits for everyone.

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Viktor (08:15.686)

I'm interested because you already called me out on a couple of things that I've been doing, but let me walk you through how my process looked. My process looked and then see how dedicated buyer enablement tool, buyer enablement is a process. It's a thing that we do, but do we actually need the buyer enablement tool or can we just stick to our guns? For me, that was, of course, I had a slide deck where

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Viktor (08:45.202)

everything was and we used it for setting up the POC. It had all my discovery notes in there that was relevant to the buyer. Basically, it was a proposal that I created upfront before a POC. So if the client doesn't have a budget within that range that I proposed, it's not even worth wasting my time on POC. And it was a huge help, helped disqualify a lot of people. Then when we got into the POC, we had a separate Excel sheet or a Google sheet where we were tracking, okay, what are all the things that the must haves and the nice haves that the customer wants to or buyer wants to validate before they can say, shut up and take my money. That's always where I wanted to end POCs. So what are the things that we have to do? What's the progress? Check that.

And when we're communicating  we want to avoid back and forth emails because people just, you know, end up asking the same thing over and over again. Bring everyone together, but we use Slack for that. Like, why not just set up a Slack connect channel with your buyer organization? They can invite new people in there. Everyone sees who's working on what. It's a quick way to interact. And I mean, it worked. 

It definitely increased buyer satisfaction. I can tell you that. But what I was facing when, you know, preparing for that recap, preparing for looping in the rest of the buyer committee when we're presenting our results is, okay, like where did I communicate this to the client? Was it over Slack? Was it over email? Was it in the G sheet? I was looking for information all over the place and wasn't certain in myself, like, hey, have we discussed ABC? And the other thing when, of course, POCs didn't start because it still can happen when you have a dedicated start date that engagement just drops and you don't know why. So I was using LinkedIn smart links to see if they are checking some of the content there.

Of course, I have some insights if they're checking. What I loved is I only gave access to people, access to people in the proposal that I created for my buyers. I only gave access to the people I was involved in. So if a new person needed access they need to request taxes and then I could map out the account and all of this is huge in Enterprise sales where you just don't know all the people who are involved. But of course, like you already feel my pain I'm using like five seven different tools to manage that single account Will the experience be the same with a buyer enablement tool or Or is the whole pro or does the whole process get simpler?

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Alper Yurder (11:41.566)

Hmm. You can still use all those five, seven tools. What we do is we bring all of them in one single link. We bring everything in one place. If you have your Excel sheet on which an IT has to give a check, they can do it on, on the flow with a flow or what a bio, what a bio enablement tool is really. I think the more common industry term, it used to be digital sales room. It's almost like being in the same room with the person when you're not, because 85% of sales happens internally. You have your discovery call, you leave the discovery call thinking, okay, I'm gonna send you this, that, thinking everything is clear with your champion or whoever you're talking to. First of all, things won't be clear. They won't remember. They don't have the time to go back to your Excel sheet. They don't have the time to search for your emails. Even if you sent the same thing 10 times in the best format, they will still be like, it's easier. They will be like, hey, Viktor, can you just send me this?

How much easier it is then to go back into your inbox and check for things. So because like as humans, we're looking for the easiest, least painful way. And this is why I really love and believe in the future of our tool. It's the buyers just love having access to one single place with all that information. Imagine a CFO 30 minutes down the line. You're convincing everybody you're sending a lot of information.

50 email threads on Slack, you talked to your champion, you created another private Slack because you don't want the private conversation between the champion and you to be seen by the people you're trying to influence at their side, right? Because you're now in team A versus the internal team B. So all of that happening in a million different places and now CFO pops out of nowhere. Okay, so let's jump on a five minute call. She comes in and she's like, okay, fine, but like I need this information, that.

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Viktor (13:19.267)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alper Yurder (13:35.134)

And you're like, yeah, I'm going to share that with you. I shared it with your colleague on an email. This, that, that's just complexity. Like all of that, imagine is in one place, looks decent, a clear timeline of all the steps you need to go through. Those stages that you mentioned, for example, if you don't want IT to see what finance is doing or vice versa, you can keep those conversations private. Everyone is in an apartment. There are separate rooms.

You have the right conversations with them in the rooms. If you want to show or share your conversation with others, you can. And I think even the best thing is we're talking about the external stakeholders, but we're not talking about internal. So, you know, in the absence of a tool like this, how does your client success team know exactly what conversation you had? You need to use also other tools. Yeah. You need, how does your, like we used to use something called Jira, which I really liked back in the day, but it was internal.

Alper Yurder (14:29.674)

like a good internal tool to say, finance, it's now back to you, IT, now it's to you, legal, now legal. And then you would go on Slack again, because nobody's responding to you on Jira, so you'll be like, hey, finance, I put this. So all of this terrible process is in one link. And I'm looking forward to showing you in a minute.

Viktor (14:55.65)

I can't wait to hear, but I just want, in case the audience didn't pick up, you touched on a really important point there, which is collaboration. It's not a POC, isn't just about, you know, giving the enablement to the buyer so that you get to the technical and you reduce their time to value to as much as possible. It's not, yes, that is a goal, but how you do that is through collaboration with the external buying committee and the internal buyers. 

So the buyer committee at your customer side, and the sales team, the customer team within your side. And that is usually like even three different departments. You have sales, you have marketing, you have customer success, four, product. So how do you keep these people in the loop? Because a mistake that will happen unless you have strong collaboration culture internally is you do the POC, customer success is never involved, the onboarding fails.

And even if you sell the product, the onboarding fails and then they churn, you're unable to upsell and you just missed out on a huge opportunity, especially if you're in a land on expense. Sorry.

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Alper Yurder (16:03.298)

or you sell the wrong product. I don't know how many times I've built, or you sell the wrong product, or you sell it in the wrong way. Like how many times client success have grilled me saying, like, why didn't you involve us from the get-go? Why didn't you let us know? And I'm thinking, well, because I'm trying to sell and what I sell you will deliver, you know. That's before I was managing client success teams. So building empathy, like as a salesperson, your drive is to sell. And you sometimes cut corners, but then it will hunt you back and you won't have a very long lived career like that, pissing off your colleagues, right? So if you create visibility and transparency about a deal with all your stakeholders, when client success team asks you, have you shared this or that document? Yes, it's there. It's on that flow. Everything is in one place. Can you please check? They don't need to go back to Slack and look for the conversation. They don't need to go back to your Google Sheets. It's all in there.

Viktor (16:39.69)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

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Viktor (17:03.402)

Love it. Okay, so you have me convinced it's now it's time to put your money where your mouth is. Can you show us how this entire POC process of prepping for a POC, all the engagement and managing all the engagement during the POCs and then doing the POC recap, how does a buyer enablement tool like Flola help us do that in practice?

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Alper Yurder (17:27.786)

Okay, so this is the moment of truth. Before I do that, one thing I'll say, I think to manage a successful POC, as I said, just a very simple recap, is to manage everybody's priorities, anxieties, fears, emotions. So what you need is to do that in the most time effective way so your sales cycle is longer. You make sure that you record everything. Everything is in one single place. It's easy to use. So new stakeholders pop out of nowhere.

A, you get insights, you see who is coming, what are they checking? And B, you're able to intervene. C, sorry, third point, if you're discussing your IT specifications or your finance thing, you're having the conversation right under that document. So it's happening all in one place. And the fourth point is you create a timeline and hold everybody to account. And the product helps you to do that.

What I mean, you assign deadlines, you assign due dates, owners to certain actions by next week, you're going to check the trial account. You're going to set up your account. But if you don't hold people to account for it, if you don't send them reminders as a salesperson, you'll be doing the endless chasing and following up. You'll be in trouble. So the tool does that for you too. Okay. So let's jump right into it.

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Viktor (18:45.511)

Yeah. So setting up an action plan, but also making it mutual, like getting buy-in from the customer side as well. And then it becomes a mutual action plan that it's not you who's following up like, hey, have you had time to check this and this or try out this and this feature? No. It's like, hey, if you want to get this impact, you have to do this and...

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Alper Yurder (18:53.483)

Absolutely.

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Viktor (19:07.786)

If I'm correct, you've already done it, but I don't know if you have like, can you confirm that we're on track? Like that's the kind of accountability follow-up that you're doing and not just, you know, hurting cats. That's, I think is a huge difference. And I love that you called that out.

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Alper Yurder (19:18.107)

Exactly.

Yeah, cool. I'm sure it does a million other things, but people have to just go in and play with themselves and it's also a work in progress, right? We're still building it further. So let's see if I can do this on this recording tool. I'm going to share my screen in a second. And I'm going to show you my screen. I won't be seeing you, I think, Viktor. So is everything there on the screen?

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Viktor (19:49.57)

Yeah, I can see it perfectly clear.

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Alper Yurder (19:52.51)

Okay, so this is basically the view that your buyer will see. This is your deal room. This is the private space between the buyer and the seller. This link will have your branded name. So for you, this will be revenue ramp dot flow dot com or even not. If you want to, you know, customize it. This link is a link that you can either make private or share as you like. You can send it in an email. You can send a QR code. I'm saying these things because I get asked these questions all day every day.

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Viktor (20:02.935)

Uh-huh.

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Alper Yurder (20:22.45)

On the left side is basically how you want to run your stages or how you want to run the show. So, for example, you will always have a summary, a recap of all your documentation, different sections. For example, if you want to make it available for people to be able to book a follow-up call with you, they will be there calendarily. If you want to share some discovery meeting results and you know that this will be shared with the CFO, you can even annotate with a little video.

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Viktor (20:43.482)

Nice.

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Alper Yurder (20:52.322)

such as this one, et cetera, et cetera. So this is me in the midnight with my eyes. If you want to have your recordings, your passcodes, your due dates, except everything is here. And the idea is to, once you share this, for example, let's say you share a certain document, like here's the purpose of this POC, here's the buying committee, the selling committee, it's super easy for your buyers to engage with you. Once they receive this thing, they can give it a like.

They can start a conversation with you. They basically have all the panel of different stakeholders who are involved in this deal, their contacts, et cetera, because this then behind the scenes helps us show you the insights. Who's checking your flow? What documents are they looking at? New people coming in, how much time they're spending, et cetera, et cetera. Final thing before I take a pause, if you want to start a conversation, like I think you're already invited to this, Viktor, so you will receive this immediately.

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Viktor (21:58.05)

Okay, so if I really wanted to, I could replace Slack or for the purpose of collaborating or just partially.

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Alper Yurder (22:06.238)

Yeah, I think it's a farfetched for now. Yeah, I think it's a farfetched. Now keep your Slack. We also use Slack. I don't want to go as far as just yet saying like we replace Slack, but I think the way I see people interacting with it is when there's a certain document like POC results. Conversation about that POC result happening here. So there's a documentation of some facts, but of course you're not having your behind the scenes chat yet on a flow.

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Viktor (22:35.447)

Okay.

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Alper Yurder (22:36.074)

you know, which you can have on a Slack still.

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Viktor (22:37.926)

Oh yeah, yeah. No, I was just thinking of, okay, so it's more like an augmentation of the Slack Connect channel that we would set up for.

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Alper Yurder (22:43.91)

Exactly. I think you're being very generous and kind. To be honest, the vision for me was I hate creating multiple Slack channels for people. Can I have a place where I have the document and we have the conversation pertaining to that document so that I don't have to refer it, refer to it? You know, I realize I did it the opposite way. If you don't mind, let me give you another minute of presentation about the mutual action plan. Is that okay? Excellent. So once you send your document, sorry, your link.

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Viktor (23:07.44)

Yeah.

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Alper Yurder (23:13.626)

And in this flow, what you will have is your steps about the POC implementation. So this is a very simple one. Yours might be more complex, but my suggestion is keep it as simple as possible because if you have 10 stages, 20 documents in each, nobody cares. Like you're basically, you know, in the priority list, you will be one of the things they wanna do on the weekend because they need to give you time. So I would say keep it simple, a few steps. These steps are very realistic.

You generally set up a trial account for the buyers. So there you go. Once you take some action on this, for example, maybe you can go to the flow and start interacting on it with me. I mean, we never thought of doing it this way. I don't know. If you have the link with you, you can. OK, no problem. So I'm going to just say something like, OK, this stage is taken care of. OK, I'll send that message there and this action will automatically be done. So all these notifications will go immediately to your stakeholders if you want them to see an action has been done. If you don't, they won't. And you can switch between to do in progress done canceled in all of these. And again, you can record a video and deliver this message automatically, right? So for all...

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Viktor (24:18.584)

Oh.

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Viktor (24:32.095)

Oh, that's sweet.

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Viktor (24:39.206)

So I no longer have to follow up with my buyers on, hey, like where is this coming or how is this coming along? I can see that, okay, that task is in progress.

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Alper Yurder (24:47.038)

Real time, yeah, and they get a notification. But if you see that something is not happening, by the way, you will notice that once I have taken that step, the mutual action plan, which was four steps is now a little bit changed because we told the product to modify it. Once a certain step is taken, maybe you have new steps that come into play like a chicken number two.

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Viktor (25:10.593)

So there's always an overview of what needs to be done at a single, at an ice mass without having to look for the next step in the sections.

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Alper Yurder (25:16.745)

Exactly.

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Alper Yurder (25:21.018)

Exactly. And if this deadline, for example, is not being met, your stakeholders will get a notification again from Flola. You won't do it. Flola will do it for you. Like you were supposed to take this action. Can you please do it? Maybe not. Let's not boil the ocean. I mean, if you have any questions, feel free to ask, but...

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Viktor (25:39.946)

Yeah, so I loved how in the overview of our solutions section, you basically had, OK, why are we still talking and what is the thing that we want to validate? And then we go into the actual back and forth enablement part. I think that's pretty much spot on. Maybe one thing.

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So I called out the specific use case of account mapping. And I only used to give access to, let's say, the presentation to people who I've already been in touch with. And this way, if they share internally, I don't know if they're sharing internally, right? Until they click the link and request access.

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Alper Yurder (26:29.503)

Now you know.

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Viktor (26:33.602)

So is that also something that Philo notifies me of that, hey, there's a new stakeholder coming on board. You're probably better off getting on a call with them and do additional discovery to make sure that this project stays on track. Is that something that Philo helps with?

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Alper Yurder (26:50.451)

Absolutely. I love how you set me up so I can show off a bit more. Thank you so much, Viktor. This wasn't planned, but I like it. So I'm going to show you two things. One, the insight section where you can do exactly this because 26% of winnable deals, they don't close due to three main reasons based on our research. One is you're left in the dark. You're being ghosted. So there is a bit of problem of visibility, both for you as the seller again.

But for the buyer too, because always remember, you might be thinking, oh, now the ball is in their court. They are not thinking that. They don't know, they don't care. They have a million other things to do. The second point is sales rep missteps. So things like not following up enough, not multithreading, not knowing which stakeholders to involve from the get-go, a myriad of things. And the third point is reducing complexity to the process. You're thinking by adding more steps, more stages, you're creating visibility. It's the opposite.

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The only way to make sure that you handle the first bit, which is being in the dark, is you need some tool to give you a bit of insights about your deal. And Flola does that. Let me very quickly show that to you too.

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Alper Yurder (28:04.219)

One second. There we go. So this deal, the flow that I showed you is what your buyer sees. They will only see what you want them to see, right? So this is what's happening behind the scenes. So this is the seller's view of how to create, how to add new stages, add new action points, et cetera, et cetera. And the real beauty, the valve point for everybody is the insights that we provide. So once you come into the deal,

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Viktor (28:13.539)

Yeah.

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Alper Yurder (28:33.514)

What you will see is a dashboard of how your flow is generating some buzz with other stakeholders. So you will see your engagement score, how much of the flow is completed, how many views it has had, reactions, so on and so forth. You will see exactly which stakeholders joined it. You will see how your content is being engaged with, like which steps. So, for example, when I send a... We don't use Flowlogist for like managing the deal.

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Viktor (28:40.856)

Nice.

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Alper Yurder (29:02.262)

but actually from the get-go, we send it as a follow-up flow, which is how the relationship starts. And almost exclusively, people look at your pricing, your demo. If you have 10 stakeholders looking at your demo for over a minute, that means there's buzz there. You need to close that deal as a good salesperson. And finally, you will see session by session how they're interacting with it. So for example, you joined on October 23rd.

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Viktor (29:22.979)

Yeah.

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Alper Yurder (29:29.942)

You spend a minute and 38 seconds. This is good. This guy might be interested in my tool because he went all the way down, et cetera, et cetera. That way.

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Viktor (29:40.378)

This is sweet because the thing that we're missing, I think, most in sales is how do I reach out to the right people at the right time? And this does it. Without, especially in Europe, we have GDPR. You can't track. There's a limited thing of personal information that you can track. And here, you're saying GDPR compliant, basically. But you’re also getting the insights that you wouldn't have otherwise on who's engaging, when they're engaging, what they're engaging with. And it lets you ask targeted questions specific to the pains or interest area that they have. So you become a steward, a helper, a supporter of this buyer instead of a money hungry salesperson who's just following up and trying to make a quick buck. Love how that

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Alper Yurder (30:36.331)

Yeah. Even when you follow up, you follow up in a meaningful way. And the funny thing is once an STR from one of our early users started using it and he was like, have you ever used it before cold calling? And I was like, no, of course not. And he told me, well, now before I cold call somebody, I send a flow, I know what they're looking at and I have a bit of an information rather than being completely in the dark.

Although it wasn't the main use case, that's how he was using it. So I think visibility throughout that sales process, not being in the dark is something we help with.

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Viktor (31:08.006)

Love it. I think just to stay on track, we've already been talking for 30 minutes, but I already see how using a dedicated tool for this can be a game changer. So me as a seller, I'm able to do my job better, close more deals with confidence. But we have been talking about a lot of things. So if you had to call out like top three, five things that our audience should take away from this session, what would you say those should be?

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Alper Yurder (31:43.71)

Yeah. I think for me, selling is advising, consulting, and running a POC is the very first. It's not the very first, but it's a very intense moment in time where you show that you are not just an hungry salesperson as in your words, but you're an advisor. I call it a bit like a therapist. You're the therapist trying to figure out the problem. And if you can solve it, you'll solve it together. Now you're a team. It's private. It's between you. They feel safe.

So I would say if you want to be a good salesperson, you need to master consulting skills, advisory skills, and a tool like Flola or a buy enablement tool either shows you the best practice or if you know the best practice, it enables you to do that. Right. And the second point I would say is you're thinking that selling is terrible. You're losing sleep over it. Buying is also very fear inducing.

Because when your buyer is making a buying decision, they either look good with their colleagues or not. Their problem is either solved or not. They either have a new problem because you're not a great salesperson that they need to constantly seek help from you or not. So your job is to give your buyer an amazing experience because they seek for it. There are studies that show that buyer enablement will be growing by probably double in size in the next two years because people are looking for flexibility, autonomy. So if you give everything to them in one place in all transparency, you're doing a great service to them. So your buyers are looking for this kind of experience, whether you think or not. And probably a third point I would say is a bit in connection to this. Change is very difficult.

So maybe changing the way you used to manage Google Sheets, Slack channels, et cetera, and moving to something like a deal room is going to be hard for you. It's going to get easier because all your early adapters will be using it. So at some point, you will have FOMO. But if you want to stay ahead of the game, you can get started with a template. You can get started with just from an HubSpot integration. All you have to know is that.

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Alper Yurder (34:00.074)

Your buyers, when you send them something in one place, Flola or any of our competitors or a deal room like ours, that will place you in a better place as a buyer in their eye. You will be the person who knows what they're talking about. They will feel comfortable that you're project managing it so well. In the words of our buyers, Flola helps me stand out. Flola helps me sell better. Flola helps me close this deal because...

All the mistakes that you do, inevitably, we help you overcome them and we help you give a better buying experience. And in an environment where there's probably 10 other products, which can do the same thing as you, you need to stand out in some way. So why not in the way you sell?

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Viktor (34:38.692)

Love it.

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Viktor (34:46.606)

That's facts. So by the end, you are showing your buyer that they're better off with you than without you. So even though buyers prefer a seller free experience, maybe in your case, they'll make an exception because they see the value that you bring to the table. Amazing.

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Alper Yurder (35:02.658)

Thank you. You said it much better than I could ever. Thanks.

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Viktor (35:05.986)

No, but you said it in more detail. Now we're complimenting each other back and forth. But Alper, thanks for being here today for sales reps and sales engineers who are eager to give Flola a try or want to get in touch with you. Where can they do that?

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Alper Yurder (35:08.402)

It's a good joke.

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Alper Yurder (35:24.97)

Absolutely. Well, I'm on LinkedIn all day, every day. Aren't we all? So that's very simple. Floor.com is the place to start. You can just start with a simple sign in. If people are interested in this template, let's just share it in, you know, the way you want to share and people can just take it and meet you. There's just like a notion template basically. And, but I guess. Yeah.

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Viktor (35:46.858)

Yeah, I'll include a link to it in the description below so everyone has access.

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Alper Yurder (35:50.526)

Because I'm sure a lot of people will be already using a notion or sending a page. It's just a static page that nobody interacts with and people don't look at it. Like, let me tell you this. So give a better tool, let's say.

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Viktor (36:03.262)

And is this just a show and tell template, or is this something that people who are interested can duplicate for themselves?

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Alper Yurder (36:12.094)

Absolutely. They duplicate it. Actually, when they go into the product, we have an inspiration hub where they will have access to all the templates, all the different, like people use it for outreach, closing, complex deal, follow-ups, fundraising, they will have access to other people's flows that they create for themselves and they can just steal them. Obviously that's because most people give permission to that.

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Viktor (36:37.08)

So from the community. From the community. Yeah. No, that's amazing that you don't have to start from scratch. Alper, lovely having you today. Keep in touch, and I'll see you soon. See you around.

Alper Yurder (36:45.582)

Thank you, this was great.

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