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The secret sauce to your sales success? It’s what happens before the sale. It’s the planning, the strategy, the leadership. And it’s more than demo automation. It’s the thoughtful work that connects people, processes, and performance. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, the pre-work—centered around the human—still makes the dream work. But you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what great sales leaders do best. Combining vision with execution. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to build and lead high-performing sales teams. You’re not just preparing for the sale—you’re unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales leaders who make a difference, their challenges, their wins, and the human connections that drive results, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Everybody, welcome to V5, where we spend exactly five minutes getting on some of our hottest takes, hottest topics in all of B2B SaaS and sales. I'm honored because I'm here with a two-time, the first ever two-time, first-ever two-time guest, my man, the one and only Mr. Bill Balnave, who's the VP of Technical Services at Mezmo. I don't know Bill's take. He said, I'll tell you when we, when we push forward. So let's, let's get into it. Bill, what's, what's the hot take? Five minutes. Let's cook.
Bill Balnave [00:00:30]:
I gotta tell you, I am tired of the way that we sell software and I'm tired of the way that people buy it. And it's just dumb at this point. And what do I mean by that? But first of all, like, so I'm looking at how we're approaching the market at Mezmo, and I think, look, you've been a big believer for a while. You want your prospect to be knowledgeable of your product before they come and talk to you. Like, the website should provide a wealth of information and I should be able to go and explore and touch and feel and all of that. Mezmo has built a business without ever actually having to talk to prospects. Like, if you look at our 1700 customers and some of them are big, some of them spend a lot of money, never talked to a salesperson. That was possible because our initial product was fairly straightforward.
Bill Balnave [00:01:15]:
Like, pop up, click, click, click. Life is good. Away you go. We've expanded the platform. It's maybe a little less intuitive, but we fully expect that will be the norm. And then really my job will be making sure that once people have bought, like, it really becomes a more of a customer success role. And then it'll be, let me show you where you need to consume more or how this will do better or other use cases or all of those kinds of things. You know, I've had people say like, well, that only applies because, you know, you have a technical product and technical people buy it and they understand the tech.
Bill Balnave [00:01:47]:
And I'm like, that's garbage. You can't tell me that Workday, Salesforce, like, all these apps can't sell their stuff. Like, come on, if I'm an HR person, I'm not afraid of my computer anymore, right? I'll go to my browser, I'll fire some stuff up. You can walk with your configuration. Like, why? And here's the controversial part. Why would I pay a guy a woman, a person, millions of dollars a year to sell a product that should be selling itself. Here's the thing where I'd talk about the buying side. There was one place that I worked that did this and I've become a firm believer in it.
Bill Balnave [00:02:20]:
The deal is the deal here is our MSA. No, we're not going to redline it. There's not going to be an exchange between your council and our council and all that. If you don't like the MSA, fine, don't buy the software. It's SaaS. You log in, you get it, you use it. Here's when it's available. If it goes down, we're going to help you.
Bill Balnave [00:02:40]:
If it goes down for a certain period of time, we're going to give you a little bit of money back. But, but you don't need to come in and redline this or we don't like this phrase, you don't need to do that. Like, how much cost does that add to everything? And like here you're thinking like, oh, I'm really going to put the screws to the vendor. Yeah, put the screws to the vendor. You're actually making it really difficult for us to help you because now I got this ridiculous deal, this thing, this language that I got to carry from, you know, year to year and things change. And this other, stop doing that. Just buy as is, click, start, trial, do it, provide credit card, educate yourselves, don't worry about special language, you know, you don't need to negotiate some special deal or whatever.
Bill Balnave [00:03:17]:
You want to talk pricing? Yeah, great. Like if you want to go from here's the pricing on my website to that doesn't really fit for us. Like, I get that and I think we're in situations where in fact we're working with a couple of like our really large customers where it's like, look, when we renewed you, you estimated you were going to use this much. You're tracking to use, go way past that. I'm like, let's stop doing silly stuff like that and just say like, let's just figure out a flat rate where you don't, you're not caring about like, oh, am I going to go over, Am I going to under. Like, no, you just use the product and life is good. The implications of all of this though, dude, I think are think about the selling process as it is now. And if I'm a buyer and I'm experiencing this because I'm buying software, right, I get a reach out from an sdr, I know immediately this poor person knows nothing.
Bill Balnave [00:04:03]:
Like, you really don't. And sometimes, like, they're smart enough to be like, pass me on. But a lot of times it's just like, they want to keep asking me questions. I'm like, don't. I already know more than you do. And as an SDR, you should assume that, like, trust me, your prospect doesn't want to talk to you. They don't. They've educated themselves.
Bill Balnave [00:04:20]:
They're ready to go. Like, to me, that's a role that has to be completely revolutionized. It's got to change. Then I talked to a rep. Well, hey, Bill, let's talk about what you want to do. And let me tell you about the company. I was considering a CS platform, and within five minutes of talking to the rep, he was sharing his screen and showing me stuff. And I'm like, I'll now not buy a thing from you, dude.
Bill Balnave [00:04:48]:
Who is the person that I really wanted to talk to the SE. I need to talk to somebody who can tell me if the product's going to do that. Is it going to do that or not? Is that a smart thing to do? Is there a better way to do it? And quite honestly, most sales, most software sales reps can't have that conversation. No software SDR that I've met can have that conversation. Now, I am not at all saying, like, get rid of your salespeople and just have SEs because they have a different problem. Right? But think about the five steps, the six steps that I have to go through as a buyer to finally get to the answers that I want and all that. I'm educated because your website was decent. I could see the product.
Bill Balnave [00:05:24]:
Guess what? I had actually had a chance to talk to other people about it. Right? I've already talked to some other people about it. I've seen your demos on YouTube or whatever. Maybe I caught something at a conference. I want to get very specific now. And our process puts people all the way back to the tell me about what you're doing. And then it's like, I'm good.
Jarod Greene [00:05:43]:
I don't have time.
Bill Balnave [00:05:44]:
It's too laborious. And then people just go to open source, at least, right? When you can get open-source. And that's kind of one of the things that we run into. It's like, I'm just going to do open source, dude, because you know what I don't have to do? Talk to anybody. I just get the stuff. I'll maintain it myself because I don't want to talk to your SDR. I don't want to talk to your sales rep.
Jarod Greene [00:05:59]:
Your time's too valuable. And the price to engage is a lot more than the price to just manage and administer. I really like this notion of just how you reduce and remove all that friction. Like everything you just described is like a friction point and it's been baked in. I think sales processes that, you know, you and I have been a part of, been in a room designing sales processes or adhering to sales processes that are 20, 30 years old that, you know, work. But like, I think to your point, on a, maybe a more modern workforce, though, they want to use the age thing, but a workforce that has grown up using a computer, buying things on the Internet, talking to digital strangers, not a problem.
Bill Balnave [00:06:36]:
100%. 100%. Look, I've said to other people, there's a generation of people that have to retire in order for us to do the streamlining. Right. Because they just, they simply won't give up. And look, I get it. 50 years ago, my knowledge about technology came from a vendor. Like, in fact, I think about, my dad was a CIO for, I don't know, 20 some years.
Bill Balnave [00:06:56]:
His best friend, hanging out on the weekends, playing golf with like families getting together. Like, that was his IBM rep. That was his best friend. Why? Because his IBM rep was the guy. Here's the latest stuff that's going on, Joe. Here's what IBM is bringing to market. Like, this guy would sit in his budget meetings, this guy was in his planning meetings. Guess what? My IBM rep is not my source of knowledge.
Bill Balnave [00:07:17]:
In fact, he's the last person that I typically want to go to. So everything's completely flipped over. But we still act like the rep is this important key component in getting a deal done. I'm sorry, you're not anymore. You're just not. And we as vendors need to rethink and to your point, remove the friction points, make it as easy as we possibly can to buy. And when you're a buyer, stop trying to bring your swagger and think that you can tell the vendor what to do. And I'll just.
Bill Balnave [00:07:45]:
Don't do that. You make it easy yourself. Like, because you're making it hard on yourself to buy. Yeah.
Jarod Greene [00:07:51]:
Terms of the terms. Product is the product, outcome’s the outcome. The faster you get to all three, better off we'll all be.
Bill Balnave [00:07:58]:
Yeah, all of us. Right, all of us. Let's do it.
Jarod Greene [00:08:00]:
So Bill, this is, this is great because you're two-time guests, you get double the time. We're not going to cut you off, we're going to let you cook. So we appreciate you, man. Thank you so much for joining us for V5. I think this is the one where we go back and say, hey, who do we bring back and how do we keep this thing going? I think this will be the top of the list, man. I appreciate the time today, man. Thanks a lot.
Bill Balnave [00:08:18]:
Thanks, buddy. That was good seeing you. Good talk too.