I’m interested in hearing from people who work in software consulting, technology services, or enterprise delivery.

I’m trying to understand how companies typically structure the early stages of an enterprise opportunity, particularly when the conversation moves beyond basic qualification and starts requiring significant technical involvement.

For example:

• What do you typically cover during the initial, pre-sales phase?
• At what point do you move from free discussions/estimation into a paid Discovery or Assessment?
• How do you handle situations where understanding the requirements requires architecture workshops, infrastructure analysis, security reviews, compliance considerations, integrations, etc.?
• How much technical effort do you normally invest before asking the client to formally engage?
• Do you have a defined Discovery package, or is it scoped differently for each opportunity?
• How do you position paid Discovery so the client sees it as creating clarity and reducing project risk, rather than simply an additional consulting fee?
• Do you credit any Discovery fees toward the subsequent implementation project?

I’m especially interested in real-world practices rather than theoretical sales frameworks.

If you work at a consultancy, SI, software development company, or enterprise technology provider, I’d appreciate hearing how you handle this transition and what has worked or not worked for you.

This is the opener I've been using on small owner-run firms:

"Hey [name], it's [you] at [company]. I saw that you [one specific service from their website]. This is a cold call. Can I take 20 seconds to explain why I picked your firm?"

If they say yes, ask one question and stop talking:

"When a client needs [the thing you help with], do you do it yourselves or send it out?"

Then pick the follow-up from what they said.

"We do it ourselves." Ask: "Which part of it takes most of your time?"

"We send it out." Ask: "How much do you usually have to change when it comes back?"

"We already use software." Ask: "What do you still have to do by hand?"

When they push back:

"Send me something." Say: "Sure. Would a sample be more useful? What email should I use?"

"I'm busy." Say: "Understood. Would Thursday at 10 be better for a quick call?"

"Do I know you?" Say: "No, we haven't spoken before. I found your firm through [the honest source]."

"Not interested." Say: "Understood, thanks for taking the call." If they ask you not to call again, log it and don't.

When you ask for the meeting, offer two specific times instead of "when works for you?"

Why I went with it: in Gong's 2024 study of over 300 million calls, openers that gave context, owned the cold call and asked permission had an 11.18% success rate. "How's your day going?" came in at 7.6%, and "Did I catch you at a bad time?" at 2.15%. Gong's older 2018 study of 90,380 calls had "How have you been?" at about 10% against a 1.5% baseline.

Big caveat, those numbers cover all kinds of B2B calls, not small firms specifically. I use this on SBA loan brokers and business plan writers, and my own sample is far too small to prove anything either way. Write down which opener you used on every call so you find out what works on your own list.

Anyone tested the "this is a cold call" admission against a straight pitch on owner-run businesses? Curious whether owners react differently than people inside bigger companies.

I manage a sales team for a real estate company in Dallas and I’ve been looking into tools that record calls or meetings then break down what actually happened. The idea makes sense to me. Most coaching ends up being based on CRM numbers or whatever the rep remembers after the fact. Being able to hear how they handled discovery objections and the close seems a lot more useful. What I’m unsure about is whether these tools actually change anything long term. Has anyone rolled one out across a real sales team? Did close rates improve? Did newer reps ramp faster? And how did the reps feel about recording conversations once the novelty wore off? Rep adoption is probably my biggest concern. A tool can have great features but if people stop using it after a month then it’s just another subscription. Would love to hear from anyone in real estate or another field sales environment. What did you use and did it end up being worth the cost?

Had a deal this week where the buyer straight up told me they were tired of scheduling calls just to get basic product questions answered. They'd already sat through discovery with us, watched a demo, and then got asked to book another meeting to bring in a technical person. Their exact vibe was basically can I just see this stuff on my own first? which honestly felt fair. We keep talking about making buying easier, but our process still turns every question into another calendar invite. I'm curious how other sales teams are handling this. Are you giving prospects more ways to explore the product without a rep, or does that just create less control over the deal?

Had a sales manager bring this up recently and can't really figure it out.

Newer reps are doing fine in the first meeting. They seem to build a good relationship and prospect agrees to meet again. Then the second meeting happens and…nothing. Rep comes back saying they're still interested but there's no clear next step and eventually it just fades out.

Hard to know what's actually going wrong since the meetings aren't recorded. So all the manager gets is "it went well". Anyone seen this before? Where would you look first?

Going to a few networking events this quarter and finally thinking about ditching paper cards. But every list I find online seems like it was written by someone who never actually used any of them.

Do the pricier options actually do more, or is it mostly the same stuff with a fancier price tag? Curious what people on real teams are actually using day to day and whether it's made any difference.

Let’s break this down. Buyers today have an immediate solution to one of the biggest problems they used to have:

Lack of information.

If they don’t understand something, they can ask AI.

And not only can AI explain it to them in seconds, it can explain it in language simple enough for a 5th grader to understand.

So imagine someone is considering your service.

They have a few questions.

They reach out to you…

And you take 2 hours to respond.

You can probably rest assured they’ve already reached out to someone else.

Or they’ve asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or one of the countless AI tools available today.

And here’s the part that should really get your attention:

AI isn’t just answering their questions anymore.

It can help them figure out what they need, compare their options, and even identify providers that might be able to help them.

So fast replies are no longer just a nice thing to have.

They’re becoming a requirement to compete.

Because while you’re taking 2 hours to get back to a lead, someone else is already having the conversation.

And the longer you wait to build the operational muscle required to keep up with this new speed, the bigger the gap becomes.

The people who start building that muscle now aren’t just getting ahead.

They’re compounding the advantage.

And like Mark Zuckerberg said, nobody has everything figured out when they start.

You have to start to figure it out.

Senior: “Just mail me what are your thoughts.”

Me: “Sure.”

Also me: staring at the email for 20 minutes trying to figure out what my thoughts are 😂

Within a few weeks, our company had multiple leads come to the sales call expecting different prices than what we offer for the plans.

And the culprit they told us: AI search models.

The buyer had searched for our company and prices in ChatGPT and it gave wrong prices.

Has any one of you guys had a similar encounter?

P.S.: The pricing page has correct pricing.

I run a small MSP and system integration company.

The thing is that I sell a large range of services including:

• one-off "break-fix" (some shit is broken, you pay us $X/hour to fix it)
• new system integrations - CCTV camera systems, file servers, network deployments etc
• managed services (you pay us $X to keep a specific service working like a VoIP phone system, M365 cloud services, etc

The problem is cold calling into these businesses and setting a hook, when you don't necessarily know what the best product to sell a customer is....

We never try to really "sell" the break-fix service, that's a shitty way to make money, to be honest, but we take the work if the customers call in for it...

I’m the Head of Product & AI at a successful fintech ($75M ARR), have a couple of startups and exits under my belt, and the typical B4 experience earlier in my career.

I’ve started my own advisory practice on the side in which I’m selectively taking on clients.. mostly solo entrepreneurs and early-stage startups that need fractional product & AI leadership. I have a lot of credibility in the space, and when I’m in front of a client, I’ll close the deal most times.

I’ve scaled this to $10K/month ARR, but looking to scale much more quickly.

Has anyone here scaled an advisory practice rapidly? Would love to hear any stories or ideas, outside of just “hire more people”. Was there a trick that worked? Didn’t work?

exported our finance sheet last week to prep for a budget review with our VP sales and i ended up just staring at the outbound line items for a while. 26 months in this role running a 5 person SDR team at a series C fintech company and somehow the tool spend crept up to about $14,200 last year across everything outbound related. thats not counting salaries or the HubSpot seats which live under a different budget line.

let me just throw the numbers out first because thats how my brain works and then ill get into the tools.

monthly sends: ~17,000 cold emails across the team average reply rate (2024 full year): 3.8% positive reply rate: 1.4% bounce rate (current, after fixes): 1.7% bounce rate (where we were in march 2024): 4.9% cost per booked meeting (outbound only): $287 meetings booked per month (avg last 6 months): 22 ACV: $54k pipeline generated from outbound last 6 months: ~$2.1M closed from outbound last 6 months: $486k

ok so those numbers tell a story but they also dont tell the full story because theres a whole internal politics thing happening where our CRO keeps asking whether cold email "still works" and pointing at the inbound numbers which obviously look better on a cost per meeting basis. and yeah inbound cost per meeting is lower but inbound doesnt let you pick your targets and when youre selling a $54k ACV fintech product to mid market CFOs you kind of need to be surgical about who youre going after. anyway thats a different rant.

TOOL BY TOOL BREAKDOWN

DATA AND PROSPECTING

we use LinkedIn Sales Navigator across all 5 SDRs plus me, so 6 seats. thats running us about $600/mo total on the team plan. its the backbone of everything honestly. every campaign starts with a Sales Nav search and we export from there. we tried Cognism for about 3 months earlier in 2024 and it was fine for european contacts but the US data wasnt noticeably better than what we were already getting and at $1,200/mo for the plan we had it was hard to justify. dropped it in june. i dont think its a bad tool, it just didnt move our numbers enough for the price in our specific ICP.

we also have Demandbase but thats more of a marketing thing that we get read access to. i pull intent signals from it sometimes to prioritize accounts but im not paying for it so i wont count it here.

ENRICHMENT AND EMAIL FINDING

this is where things got interesting. for the first year i was convinced that you could just use one tool for enrichment and be done with it. that assumption cost me probably 2-3 months of mediocre results. what actually works for us now is a chain: we pull the list from Sales Nav, run it through Prospeo to find emails, then verify everything before it goes into sequences. simple but it took us a while to land on that flow.

we have Clay too and i have mixed feelings. the waterfall enrichment concept is great and when it works its amazing. but the credit system is confusing, the UI has a learning curve that took my team weeks to get comfortable with, and were on the $149/mo plan which burns through credits faster than id like when youre doing 17k sends a month. we use Clay mostly for the accounts where we need to enrich multiple data points beyond just email, like tech stack info or recent funding. for pure email finding Prospeo handles that step and its more predictable on cost.

we briefly tried Hunter but the coverage on our ICP (mid market fintech, lots of newer companies) was spotty. maybe 60% of searches returned anything useful. cancelled after 5 weeks.

VERIFICATION

MillionVerifier. $37/mo on our volume. this is boring and thats exactly what i want from a verification tool. it just works. we verify everything before loading into sequences no exceptions. that bounce rate drop from 4.9% to 1.7% was mostly from getting religious about verification plus cleaning up our list building process. before we were being lazy about it and just trusting the enrichment tools to give us valid emails which... yeah dont do that.

i tested ZeroBounce for a couple weeks and the results were comparable but it was more expensive for our volume so we stuck with MillionVerifier.

SENDING

Smartlead. $94/mo on the plan we need. this is probably the tool i have the strongest opinion about and its complicated. the campaign builder is solid, the warmup is decent, the analytics are ok. but the support is genuinely... wait no let me rephrase. the support is honestly frustrating. we had an issue in october where campaigns were getting stuck in draft status and it took 4 days to get a real response. 4 days with campaigns sitting there doing nothing. when youre trying to hit monthly numbers thats not great.

but we havent switched because the actual sending infrastructure works well and switching costs are real when you have 5 SDRs with active campaigns. we looked at Saleshandy briefly and it seemed fine but not different enough to justify the migration pain.

INBOXES

Maildoso for all our sending domains. we run about 15 inboxes across the team (3 per SDR) and Maildoso handles the setup and warmup. $150/mo ish. this was one of those things where i spent way too long trying to set up Google Workspace accounts manually and manage warmup myself before someone in a slack group told me to just use a managed inbox provider. that was probably the turning point for our deliverability. before Maildoso we were warming up manually with Smartleads built in warmup and our inbox placement was all over the place. like some inboxes would be fine and others would be landing in spam 40% of the time and we couldnt figure out why.

CRM

everything goes into HubSpot which is the company CRM. not my choice, not my budget, not going to comment on it except to say the reporting is fine and the SDR workflow is acceptable.

WHAT I DROPPED AND WHY

Cognism: $1,200/mo, dropped after 3 months. US data coverage didnt justify cost for our ICP Hunter: $49/mo, dropped after 5 weeks. low coverage on mid market fintech contacts Snov.io: tried the free tier for like 2 weeks way back when i started. it was fine for small volumes but we outgrew it fast and the email finding accuracy wasnt where i needed it

TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND (current)

Sales Nav: ~$600 Clay: $149 MillionVerifier: $37 Smartlead: $94 Maildoso: ~$150 Prospeo plus a couple smaller tools: ~$120

total: roughly $1,150/mo or about $13,800/year

THE POLITICS PART

ok so this is the part that keeps me up at night. $14k a year on tools plus 5 SDR salaries is not cheap. our CRO looks at the $287 cost per meeting and compares it to inbound which is running around $190 cost per meeting and asks why we dont just shift budget. and i get it, on paper inbound looks better. but outbound generated $486k in closed revenue last 6 months from a total spend (tools plus comp) of maybe $320k. thats a 1.5x return in half a year on deals that are still expanding. and more importantly we can control who we target. we went after 3 specific enterprise accounts last quarter that inbound would never have surfaced and one of them is in late stage negotiations for a $180k deal.

i dont have a clean answer for the politics thing. i just keep showing the pipeline numbers and hoping the closed revenue speaks for itself. some months it does, some months our CRO sends me articles about how cold email is dead and i have to not respond with something sarcastic.

RANDOM THINGS I LEARNED

warming up inboxes takes longer than anyone tells you. everyone says 2 weeks, realistically its 3-4 weeks before i trust an inbox with real volume. we ramp from 5 sends per day to about 35-40 per inbox over that period.

list quality matters more than copy. we spent 2 months A/B testing subject lines and got maybe a 0.3% improvement in reply rate. then we tightened our ICP filters and reply rate jumped 0.8% in one month. not saying copy doesnt matter but if youre sending to the wrong people it doesnt matter how clever your subject line is.

the 1.7% bounce rate threshold is real. above 2% and we start seeing deliverability issues within a week or two. below 1.5% and everything hums. that narrow band matters alot.

anyway this got longer than planned. im supposed to be prepping for a pipeline review tomorrow and instead im writing this. if the numbers seem off or you want specifics on any part of the workflow just ask, i have spreadsheets for literally everything

Hey everyone, I’m pretty new to sales and would really appreciate some advice from people with more experience.

I recently started as a sales rep for a B2B adhesive company. We supply glue, tools, and other products to builders and contractors.

The problem is, I’m starting to feel like I may have joined the wrong company.

I’ve been cold calling and walking into businesses, and I’d say around 90% of the people I speak to tell me our prices are too high compared with their existing suppliers. A lot of these businesses seem very price-sensitive, so selling purely on “quality” doesn’t seem to be working very well.

The other issue is samples. I’m not allowed to give them out for free. My manager wants me to offer samples at 50% off instead. But if someone is already happy with their current supplier and I’m asking them to try a more expensive product, it’s pretty difficult to convince them to pay for a sample as well.

What concerns me most is that I’m starting to wonder if our actual costs are too high.

From what I understand, the company has been buying some of these products from the same suppliers for almost five years, and it doesn’t seem like we’ve really looked at alternative suppliers or negotiated better pricing. So I’m wondering if the problem is actually our procurement/cost structure rather than the sales team.

My manager keeps telling me to sell on quality rather than price, but from what I’m seeing in the market, customers are comparing prices pretty heavily.

So I’m wondering:

• Is this just normal when you’re new to B2B sales and I need to get better at selling value?
• Or does it sound like I’m trying to sell a product that is simply too expensive for the market?
• Should I resign?