Do salespeople really want another tool?
Ok, I admit it. I think about this question a lot. Sangria is 51% buyer tool and 49% sales tool, so this is about 49% of what I think about.
Let’s address an elephant in the sales enablement room: there are a lot of sales enablement tools, and there is way too much overlap. The functionality venn diagram of the top ten tools in sales is far too circular for any of us to be throwing the word “innovation” around in full confidence. I’ll even admit it’s not much better among early stage start-ups like ourselves.
There’s a number of (very good) comparable products to ours in the MAPaaS and deal room space, and they would look like the same exact platform with different colors if they didn’t all have the same colors.
So, I asked a VP of Sales about the big question: is there room for another sales tool? His answer stuck with me:
”I don’t need another way to do the same thing again, but if there’s no room for more technology in sales, then why are my reps putting so much sh*t together with glue and popsicle sticks?”
The modern version of glue and popsicle sticks is email and spreadsheets. You can build just about anything with enough time, email, and spreadsheets.
So, what is your team still building? Is it notes? Is it prospecting approaches? I love UserGems because they are one of the spreadsheets I used to have (employees who have left customers for new companies)!
In my experience with sales, nothing has ever been more spreadsheet-ed than the journey from demo to deployment. Hours are spent trying to create and forge a path forward. Here’s the thing: the shared buyer/seller journey exists in every. single. deal. Why, then, is it a bespoke exercise in wheel re-invention?
My answer: we still haven’t fully understood how to translate the language of the buyer/seller relationship into a vital platform. Languages never exist in a silo. They’re a representation of culture. This is why there are more Inuit words for snow than Greek words for snow. As a native Minnesotan, I could absolutely stand another half dozen words to adequately describe what kind of snow we got last night. Basically, snow is a lot bigger part of life. This means that Google Translate isn’t going to grasp the nuance a (admittedly rare) native Inuit-Greek translator would. The disparate culture of buyers and sellers have led to similar translation errors. A seller’s “deal” is a buyer’s “project,” and those aren’t quite the same thing. Instead of an adequate platform, we rely on skilled translators like account executives and CIOs to bridge the gap between the interest of the seller and that of the buyer: thus, the glue and popsicle sticks.
To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a sales tool, everyone is a lead. So maybe we don’t need another sales tool, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for something altogether different. The invention of the assembly line was an order of magnitude more influential than the invention of the car.
We need a platform to guide mutual success at scale. Buyers and sellers are too good at what they do to be failing at a nearly 90% clip. The $260B lost in failed IT projects every year is too great a cost to continue to throw our artisans some more glue and “hope for the best.”
Sangria is building something intentionally different. We’re the language for a different culture of buying and selling. We’re built around a common language of transparent and collaborative empathy. We’re built around a language of winning together. Sangria is a language of harambe (all pulling together), no translation required.
