An open letter from the sales team
Dear Colleague,
Hope you’re having a good day! I know you may be surprised to hear from us, but all of us from the sales team wanted to share a quick note with you.
We all celebrated and enjoyed the achievement of a milestone we have been targeting for a while. It was a deserved pat-on-the-back for all of us.
For every ambitious target in the company, the onus is placed on the sales teams. And upon achieving it, we’re the first to be recognized.
Today, we want to talk to you about what often happens behind the scenes in sales, some of which you may or may not be aware of. And we wanted you to see how much we appreciate your help.
Regardless of the size of any deal, a good proportion of prospects come with questions and scenarios that have us hitting a brick wall. The questions could surround legal compliance in a country, which we’d have to google to comprehend (the country, not the compliance), product roadmap for features within a feature, live updates on security audits, and so on.
Hence, hardly a day goes by without us needing help from different teams. We can imagine, how we collectively cram the inboxes and chats of product managers, engineers, and every other team in the company. We know how disruptive that can be when you are trying to do deep work. But despite being a constant source of distraction, each one of you has always been willing to help without tire.
I’d like to mention a few examples of our experience in working with different teams.
The security team: Starting mid-last year, prospective deals were pouring in across our products and our security processes were rapidly evolving to meet them. The entire sales organization had heavily depended on the security team to a point that at times, it had taken up their entire day to clarify our prospects’ long list of questions.
Despite the occasional frustrations — security folks, we’re glad we’ve worked towards a process that’s working great for both our teams. You’ve achieved what we thought was impossible — help us understand the GDPR.
To the legal team, your processes and internal SLAs have always helped in setting the right expectation with prospects. On a different note, we love how you’ve made a sometimes tedious internal document, light-hearted!
Do we have internal SLAs while collaborating with these teams? Yes. Are we restricted to follow process without a choice? Absolutely not. For cases where deadlines or solutioning become a deal-breaker, processes have been taken into regard as seriously as Labrador retrievers for guard dogs.
Apart from established dependencies between teams, we often face situations where we’d just need another team’s help or expertise.
Early this year, a couple of us were working on an important deal — a well known brand in the UK. One of their requirements was complex, something that we couldn’t find a straightforward solution for. We approached the product team to check if it could somehow be solved.
We soon found ourselves in an ad-hoc meeting with the Director of Engineering, Director of Product and some engineers — we were trying to follow their conversation like a 7 year old would follow a documentary on the Theory of Relativity. 15 minutes later, we had a very simple solution for the prospect.
That prospect is now one of our loyal customers.
This is just one example among hundreds of instances. If you’re reading this, regardless of the team you belong to, I’m certain you’ve helped propel a deal. There isn’t a single team I can think of that hasn’t played a part in improving our customer experiences. For every late-night phone call, mid-meal ambush, last minute requests, and the mid-holiday urgencies you’ve gladly helped us with, we’re extremely grateful.
Your genuine interest in helping us and our customers has had a significant impact on our customers’ love for us and what we achieve as a sales team in Freshworks. We are grateful to have the satisfaction of working at a company where everyone works towards one common goal — the organisation’s success.
Thank you.
The Sales and Pre-Sales Teams
Freshworks.
