Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, hello, everyone, and good morning to all of you. Thank you for joining this webinar today. My name is Abhishek Rai, and I'll be your host for next 45 to 60 minutes of time. We'll have some interesting topics to be covered in today's webinar, starting with discussing on what are some of the great sales organizations across the world, including some of your peers as well as competition are doing to leverage technology in terms of increasing their overall productivity and efficiency. We'll also have some interesting insights being discussed with you, something that we do at Salesforce across big and small sales organizations throughout all segments, all scale and size of organizations. But before that, let me thank all of you for joining us here today. I know it's early morning webinar and most of you -- almost all of you would have a lot of things on your table already. So thank you again for joining us. We'll make sure these next 45 to 60 minutes are worth your time. And like I said, we have some interesting conversations being lined up for the webinar today. The first thing that we have is a discussion on the state of sales report. Now this is something that Salesforce does on a yearly basis. We talk to different type of sales organizations across the globe and figure out what are the things that these sales organizations are doing differently to be more productive, be more efficient in their operations. Following that, we'll also have 2 of our key customers coming on the panel and discussing with us in terms of what have they done to be productive and efficient for their sales organizations. And I'm sure after looking at the key findings that we have after listening to our customers. Some of you will have some questions for us as well. So we will -- we have set aside some time to answer some of the questions that you might have. This is a quick agenda for today. And to start with to run you all through the state of sales report. I have my colleague Tanmaiy, taking over the next part of the webinar. Tanmaiy, I'll hand it over to you.

Well, thank you, Abhishek, and thank you all for joining in. So my name is Tanmaiy Chandanshive. I've been with Salesforce for around 6 years now, been in the industry for close to 15 years, speaking to customers like you, talking about or helping them get close to their end customers. So before we begin, forward-looking statements, please make sure that you're making your purchasing or buying decision based on products that are currently available. I don't think in today's deck, I am going to be covering any product. For that matter, I will be talking about any futuristic product as such. Moving on. So what is the state of sales, right? What exactly is this particular report. Well, it's our biannual research report that surfaces the latest trend for sales team to help them on their path to success in the current climate or for that matter in any given climate that we would see. This year, specifically, we asked around 7,700 of your sales peers across 38 countries across 14 industries and heard about them from how they are adapting to the current situation of economic headwinds. So let's dive in, look at what were the big learnings from this state of sales report. Right. So to begin with, as I said earlier, right, we are in an ever-changing world. The challenges for sellers is -- or probably just don't cease to exist. I think a few years back, we were talking about COVID and lockdown. This year, the challenges are -- or could be something else. But on the whole, it's not doomsday. We have good news. We've spoken to sales peers. And what we found out are 3 specific ways in which they are looking to drive productivity and efficiency. We're going to firstly focus on how sellers are adapting to meet the expectation of buyers, largely by going digital and adapting a more consultative selling approach. We are then going to look at how they are simplifying and streamlining their tech stack so they can focus more on selling. And lastly, we're going to look at how leaders and sales are taking a second look at aspect of employee experience, given the budget constraints that they have, but at the same time, ensuring that they are hitting their quota, they are hitting their numbers and empowering every sales rep to be a star performer. So let's dive deep into each of these. To start with the first one. So what we've looked at is largely that the expectations or what we've heard is largely that the expectations have been constantly changing. The buyer of today is leaning more and more into digital channels, and he's already coming to the table with a lot of information on hand. This kind of marks a big shift, it's largely the buyer today who is leading most of the sales conversations and reps are no longer just transactional in their engagement. In fact, today, they need to provide a far more exceptional value centered on the product information and largely solving problems for the buyer. You can see some of the channels that are already there or you must be aware of, how buyers are engaging with sellers. And in fact, 81% of the reps believe that buyers are increasingly conducting research before they step into or before they engage into the sales cycle. Moving on. So to add to the complexity, I think sellers also are engaging with buyers on various channels and buyers are expecting to have a consistent experience across all channels. be it physical orders. Most of these digital channels are not the conventional ones versus phone and e-mail. But today, these channels kind of changed from WhatsApp. We have chatbots, YouTube, Instagram, Mobile Labs and many more. And to top it almost 1/3 of the sales deals which are closed today are completely virtual, which probably means that the sellers now need to have all the necessary tools and the soft skills required to engage with their customers without an actual face-to-face interaction. On the chart, you would see how we've segregated the different channel based on the sales rep. We've kind of quantified them based on high performers, moderate performers and underperformers. High performers, as you would know, are the ones who have impacted the year-on-year revenue to a large extent, while underperformers are the ones who have not really impacted it, but at times have kept the revenue constant. Moving on. So to deliver to these tech savvy buyers, reps probably need to act like trusted advisers, right? They need to come with much deeper insight and guidance on products and services, which can deliver the best value to their customers. Also, the top sales organizations are much more likely to equip their reps with what they need to succeed, whether it's through technology, tools, training or any of the organization support that we can think of. In fact, 87% of the business buyers, are expected to act as trusted advisers while 82% of the reps say that companies do enable them to act as trusted advisers. Moving on. I think to ensure that reps bring the ample knowledge and expertise of sales conversation, they are largely collaborating with our coworkers and stakeholders, both internally and externally. In fact, 81% of the sales rep say that team selling helps them close deals much better. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons why cross-functional alignment is the #1 tactic for driving growth for most of the sellers out here. However, there's a hedge to this, right? When we have different stakeholders come together. Each one of them comes equipped with different points of view, different goals and different information about the same customer. And largely due to this siloed approach, I think 82% of the sales rep say that alignment with other teams is somewhat challenging. Now this kind of speaks about an important fact where it's kind of imperative how each of the stakeholders come together and are aligned to the common goal of being buyer-centric. Moving on. I think let's focus on efficiency now. Let's look at how organizations are now optimizing their tech stack so that sellers are largely focused on selling. So about another important stats that the report spoke about is, only 28% of the actual time that the seller spent is spent on selling. The rest of 72% is important, but it's largely spent on tedious task throughout the deal cycle, some of which is already mentioned. I think it talks about researching, about your prospects. It talks about getting approvals, generating quotes, I think we all are aware of the pain points that we typically face as sellers, right? One of the other or the most important aspects of the unproductive time if I may call that is also manual entry or manual data entry that sellers often engage in. With this, we did find out that just adding more apps or adding more tools may not actually be the solution for this problem. In fact, sales team in India, all on average used around 11 tools throughout the sales cycle to close that deal. 11 tools which means about a lot of context switching, a lot of training on each of these tools and at a safe type, a lot of record up, right? So it usually is not a problem solver. In fact at times it becomes a hindrance for success. And that's why it is no surprise that 2/3 of the sales rep say that they are largely [indiscernible] by the number of sales tools that we have to engage on forth with. In fact, this technology growth is evident that leaders or majority of the leaders, 94% is what we've seen are planning to consolidate their tech stack in the next 12 months. Moving on, another piece to the puzzle is optimization, right? So CRM, I mean, be a Salesforce, CRM is something that comes largely on top of our mind. But that's one of the most commonly used sales tool, but largely, what we've seen that it's grossly underutilized. In fact, 37% strongly agree that their organizations are not fully taking advantage of CRM. So now we have a dual problem, right? We have single-use tech, techs which are focused on one specific process within the sales cycle as well as the underutilization of the investments that they've already made on CRM. And with this dual problem, I think most of what sales operation is looking for is the possibility of creating an efficient workflows by pulling some of the functionality like automation and intelligence into CRM. Now the ultimate goal out here is to create a single source of tool with greater visibility, at the same time, reduce cost, reduce the unnecessary tech and continue to boost efficiency by minimizing the context switching. Another of the stats that we talk about, we largely spoke about how AI and automation is something that kind of plays a key role out here. So boosting efficiency and productivity is not just about consolidating tech, right? It's more about picking the right tech, which would be useful. So we found that high-performing teams are almost 2x likely to use AI as compared to the underperformers. In fact, 8 in 10 sales leaders say that AI has made a moderate or greater improvement in how reps are using their type. This could be use cases like lead prioritization, understanding customer needs and insights or at times making those personalized offers to the customer, depending upon which part of the sales journey that they are in. Moving on. So we looked at the aspect of changing buyer expectation. We looked at optimizing the tech stack. Let's now focus upon boosting rep efficiency, right? The big focus out here is giving sellers everything that they need to thrive at that job, especially when the resources are limited. So let's look at what are some of the stats when we're looking at the rep efficiency as such. Right. So here, we're talking about how reps are struggling. Today, when we look at most of the turnover, that there is -- it's largely the attrition that we're talking about. So the most biggest or the elephant in the room, obviously, is retention, right? It's been one of the major concern for sellers across organizations. And in fact, 25% of -- or is the average attrition of the turnover that we've looked at when we spoke to peers across. And looking at the current situation, I don't think there is going to be a drastic improvement or reduction in this particular stat. Alternatively, 85% of sales leaders say that they are struggling to get additional budget and additional headcount to support the kind of growth that they're looking for. So if organizations continue to make budget cuts, the situation is only going to get worse, right? It's only going to go south, which largely means that organizations still have to hit their targets with the resources or with the resources that they already have, which brings to the important point, right, the most valuable resources, what organizations have today is the salespeople, right? That's where they will now be focusing more on. Another stat out here is, right, when we spoke about how we don't have enough budgets or how we have those resource constraint for most of the sellers that we spoke about. We've seen that retaining and maximizing the productivity and satisfaction for each of the sales rep kind of becomes very, very critical to the bottom line. On a separate study that Salesforce did, it found out that B2B companies that prioritize employee experience almost double up on the customer stats, right? And these customer KPIs could be CSAT or retention for that matter. So let's look how leaders are actually improving upon the employee experience. A few of the things I have put on the slide deck out here. These could be engaging in task, which provide team building opportunities or additional sales benefits to the sellers. It could talk about streamlining the sales process, making it far more efficient. It could also mean providing the flexibility of working hours or schedule or for that matter, the location flexibility that has been provided or largely, it could be improving in the sales enablement or the trainings that each of these sales rep often engage into. So talking about sales enablement, I think coaching is one of the most important topics where we look at how that kind of impacts the sales growth for organizations. Now it's one of the most efficient way in which organizations keep professionals or sales rep engaged and productive at the same time, most of this sales professional agree that they do get valuable feedback from their managers, but it's usually a minority, right? It's only 26% of them believed that they have the one-on-one trainings scheduled on their calender at least once a week, right? So as we know, sales managers time is also limited, right? The amount of time that they can spend with individual sales rep is limited. There are multiple other tasks that sales managers also need to focus upon. And that's where technology solutions can actually supplement this one-on-one coaching, right? Whether it's in form of training needs or any other learning softwares that you would have seen in the market that are there. But only 53% of sales leaders say that they do use the right tools that are required for this. So for that matter, sales coaching could be another tactic that sales leaders can or should be considering. There are a few stats that are already there, where we spoke about, what are the kind of tools that are almost half of the sales leaders across are investing in these coaching tools as such. Well, so to summarize, largely, we looked at 3 imperatives or strategies for growth. These were largely on how to improve cross-functional alignment. We looked at how sellers can look at adapting to a hybrid or a virtual selling environment. At the same time, how they can improve upon the training or modernizing the tools and technology that they used for their day-to-day aspects. Similarly, the 3 challenges that we spoke about is largely adapting to the buyer expectation, simplifying the tech stack and improving upon the buyer -- or improving upon the employee experience as such. A few more stats that we looked at. We found out that 28% of these sales professionals do expect their team to hit their annual quota. At the same time, only most of it or 75% of the sellers are actually confident on their all's ability to train the reps and ensure that they are successful in the ever-changing landscape. To help drive this, I would highly encourage all of our attendees to dig deeper into the sales report. In fact, the next slide talks about where you can actually get a view of this particular stage or a complete view of the state of the sales report. The URL is salesforce.com/in state of sales, right? So that's the URL, highly encouraged all of us to possibly go there and look at the report in detail. I think that's largely from my side. I would be around. I would stick around here to look at any Q&A that I can probably participate in towards the end of this particular session. I would now probably pass it back to Abhishek.

Thanks, Tanmaiy. Thanks for running everybody through that state of sales report. I found it to be very interesting. Some of the points that I've noted is, obviously, I never knew that on an average, the sales organizations use about 11 tools to do the reporting work. And also another insight is about buyers getting smarter. So on one side, we have our buyers getting smart and smarter every day. On the other side, we are overloading our salespeople with about, on an average, 11 tools to be productive. So that's quite interesting. And I'm sure a lot of people would rate with some of the findings that we had in the report. Thanks for that, Tanmaiy. And to get on to the next part of the webinar today, this is perhaps the most interesting part of the webinar because this is where you get to hear from some of our key customers about what they are doing for their sales organization. We have Mr. Gautam Trehan. He heads the sales strategy, digitization and analytics at Godrej appliances. And we also have Mr. Sidhanth Mally. He's a Director of Revenue Operations at SaaS Labs. To have a conversation with Gautam and Sidhanth, we have our Vice President of Enterprise Business for Salesforce India, Ms. Mankiran Chowhan. Mankiran, I'll hand it over to you. And thanks, Gautam and thanks, Sidhanth for going to be part of this conversation.

Thank you so much, Abhishek, and thank you, Tanmaiy. A very insightful conversation indeed. And Gautam and Sidhanth, thank you so much for joining us. Looking forward to learning from your experiences as we talk about what's changed in the world of sales. So Gautam, if I could come to you first. The last few years have been a game changer in many aspects, including the pandemic has been a great learner, a great teacher for a lot of us. What I'd love to understand from your perspective is how have you in your industry evolve digital sales to meet the experiences that the customers are now asking you from?

To what -- with the current economic environment and the inflation in place, competition becoming very, very safe and even the buyer expectation has increased. So we have done a few changes in Godrej, which has given us good results. So I'll name a few of that. As rightly said by Tanmaiy that a sales rep used to operate with 6 tools for us, 6 different tools, which we have moved to 1. So right now, the sales rep only uses 1 tool for all his operations, including order booking, cloning reports and everything. So that has helped us. And as rightly said, 28% of their time was going into only selling balance they were spending time on reports and everything. So that has come down for us -- the other thing that we have done is that we have moved to quick response and approval through software, again, using technology in place. So there is a single platform that helps a sales rep to take any approval, which is acquired and the visibility of complete chain is there with him. The third thing I will say is hybrid working. So the seller -- the expectation of buyers is to meet sales rep at multiple channels, social media, hybrid, online, offline. So that is where we have done. We have done a soft skills training to our sales lab from a sales point of view. How to have a closer on online platform, how to have a closer of a sales when using online platform. See increasing headcount has become a challenge because of the all the constraint of the economic environment is there. So the only way we can improve and build on the volume or build on the sales is to increase the productivity of the current headcount. So all these things have helped us drastically over the last 1 year. If I have to put a number, our productivity has increased by 26% over the last 1 year. So these are a few things which has helped us during last 1 year.

Thank you for that, Gautam, and it's great to hear. The specific measures and Sidhanth I will come to you for the next question, but when Tanmaiy was talking about, he spoke about the 1.8x increase in customer KPIs when customers -- when employees focus on employee experience. So with that as a question and with the fact that every dollar now needs to give us more ROI. Gautam just spoke about increased productivity, how are you prioritizing investment in the area of employee experience?

Yes, yes. So firstly, it's kind of important to realize why we need to kind of invest in employee experience or moving to virtual selling, I think it was about 70% of all deals today are virtual. Honestly, for us, it's almost 100% because most of our teams are remote. So it's not so easy for a seller to go up to somebody and ask for help. So it's important for us to be investing in employee experience at a very, very high level. And it's also kind of important from a tool perspective that we established certain ROI metrics, not just vanity metrics in terms of tool NPS and stuff like that, right? So what we did actually was that we wanted to kind of empower sales reps itself to kind of give us this decision, right? We knew that we needed to kind of invest in enablement, but we want to sure in terms of what tools to invest in, how much to kind of invest in and stuff like that, right? So we made a simple change in the opportunity workflows where we actually empowered sales reps to give us this input at the time of creating an opportunity, which tools actually help you create this opportunity, right? So ranging from your engagement tools to enrichment tools to knowledge base to stuff like that, which tools help you create this opportunity. So here, we could tack pipeline and which tools then help you close the opportunity, and then we could track closure, right? The funny part was when we looked at this data like 3 months later, we saw that the tool which helped the sales reps, the most was actually the knowledge base and the LMS because they were able to kind of leverage a lot of knowledge from here. And then we decided that, hey, enablement is a key area that we really need to invest in. And we could actually see the amount of pipeline that was created by sales reps actually referring to some of these knowledge-based articles. And that's why we decided to sort of double down on investing in our LMS and other knowledge-based articles and other enablement initiatives as well. Yes, that was pretty kind of game changing for us to tie ROI in terms of pipeline creation as well as closure or tools, yes.

I think it's a really good word you used in your response, multiple times, Sidhanth was empower, right? I think how do we empower our sales organizations to leverage the tools that are available? So Sidhanth, continuing on the same conversation then, if I could get your point of view in terms of Gautam mentioned about productivity, you mentioned about tools. How do you measure sales productivity and performance? And how do you leverage the tools to rely on the same?

Got it. Yes. See, for us, I think, see productivity is always going to be like a leading indicator and performance is going to be something which is lagging. So from a productivity angle, obviously, you have traditional metrics in terms of activities, calls made, emails, et cetera, et cetera. But I think it's also key to kind of tie this into like outcomes as well in terms of conversion rates and stuff like that. Performance is obviously kind of easy to measure today in terms of attainment and stuff like that. But I think the key point here is visibility, right? It's important to tie both of these aspects in when you're kind of running your reviews or when you're kind of talking to your reps, right? Honestly, for us, how we're kind of doing this today is we're kind of combining this in our pipeline reviews and manager for casting reviews where we're actually using sales off, which kind of gives us visibility in terms of what activities are done, which is productivity-oriented metrics? And how is that tying into performance, which is something related to like attainment, right? So if a manager can see both of these metrics together in tandem in terms of, hey, the reps doing these many activities, is that actually yielding into something with respect to a better forecast or better closures. That's the visibility that we want to actually provide to our managers and our leaders, right? And if you're able to kind of get that visibility on one tool, I think that's critical. And you can ask the right questions, why aren't these activities -- what are the activities that are actually leading to a sale, right? And ask those hard questions to a rep, I think at that point, you'd truly be able to kind of tie in productivity and performance and kind of actually tie them into outcomes as well, right? So yes, that's what we're doing today.

That's a great response, Sidhanth, and I'm a huge believer myself, they do the right things and the right results follow so when you speak about the leading and lagging indicators, the infra -- of course are the surest ways of recipe. Gautam, if I could come to you, we've spoken about productivity, we've spoken about performance. But I'd love to get your sense in terms of where do you see the high performers do differently as compared to the average one?

So I will again go to Tanmaiy report where the safety seller is looking for the adviser, trusted adviser from a sales rep point of view. So the engagement with the customer to understand their need is the first theme, if I have to put that point. Second will be how can we can add value from a customer point of view? What value addition we are doing to this process, everybody is tied with the value addition in terms of cost. That is a challenging situation right now from an economic point of view. So adding value to our customer proposition is one thing which they do pretty well. The other thing which I feel is from a cross-functional, again, Tanmaiy touch on that. The cost function alignment for the higher performance is very, very good. So they are able to align cross-functional team very well. Communication with the customer across the life cycle of the sale is very, very high. Even after sales, once the closure of the deal has happened, the touch point is always there with them. So they keep touching their customer regularly for the feedback for the improvements. So all these are the things which differentiate between a high performer or a normal performer. And the other thing which helps high performer do this is technology. So high performer is very, very well-versed with the technology, with the tools, he's ready to do the change management if the new tools come in. He's the first one to go and take the advantage of those tools. So these are things that differentiate between a high performer or a good performer.

I think that's so true, Gautam. And If I could continue the thread of cross-functional alignment, I think in Tanmaiy's report, I was the #1 tactic for improving for driving growth. As an organization, what are you doing to facilitate more of that cross-functional alignment across your organization?

See, so as environment is again changing, so few things that we have done in Godrej is, we have clear communication of goals and process and metrics. I think that is the starting point when you have a cross-functional team operating for you, clear-cut goal and expectation has to be set for everybody. The other thing is one data point, which is very, very critical. So generally, what happens in a large sales organization, everybody is looking at data from a different lens point of view, a different point of view. So having a single source of data is very, very important so that everybody is looking at the same metrics, the same way. And they're integrating the data in a singular manner. So having 1 data point is very, very important. Then the third thing I will say, is the cost functional metrics and KPIs. So we have to ensure the KPIs of the cost functional people complementing to each other. That helps to drive the common agenda and point of view. The fourth thing I will put is weekly S&OP meeting, which all heads of function comes connect for the NR where the business discussion happens, what is happening from a function point of view. That makes connect with all the functions. So that is very, very important. And with all the decision on anything which is having a roadblock from a business point of view can be taken and can move forward. Again, the use of technology and tools become very, very important, the approvals. So what happened during the sales rep here to go for marketing, then commercial, logistics, different functions. So if there is a single flow of window that is there with him. And all the approval can be happened through that single window. That makes life of our sales rep very, very easy. So all these things helps you become very, very strong and instead of operating into silos, we'll operate into one single unit. And the customer will also feel that way that the approval process is pretty fast. Their internal decision-making is very, very quick. So even the customer will feel that this organization is better responsive to my inquiries.

Absolutely. I think it shows up. It shows up on how we finally operate on the field. One of my favorite quotes I use all the time at Salesforce in my role is if you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. And I think that's really the outcome of cross-functional alignment in play. Sidhanth, I'll come to you for the last question and then hand it back to Abhishek for Q&A. I see there are a bunch of questions that have come in. We've spoken about performance and productivity and tools. And what I love to pivot a little is in terms of coaching methodology. What do you follow for sales coaching methodology? And do you rely on more tribal knowledge or classroom-led training?

Yes. Yes. So I think, see, what's key to note is that over the last 3 years, obviously, everything has been remote. SaaS Labs as well is 100% remote company. So we initially try to take the traditional approaches, obviously, of like classroom-led kind of trading, obviously, in a virtual environment where we had like webinar sessions, sharing documentation, creating this knowledge based on confluence. I think what helped us from a structure perspective, which I kind of mentioned above as well as kind of introducing an LMS or an enablement tool to push the content at the right times to sellers as well as have access to this content at the right times. But to be very honest with you and being very practical about this. I think virtual training can only take it to a certain extent. It's important that we do have in-person sort of training. And for us, the kind of impact that we saw our revenue kick off like last week, right, where we kind of reinforced a lot of these trainings where we had the head of PMM, we had the head of marketing, et cetera, kind of talk about some of the -- we actually rolled played discovery questions where someone is sitting on top of the stage and kind of actually enacting that out. So something like this helps you kind of reinforce your message. It's important that we do invest in sort of in-person trainings as well because that -- when we kind of do that, the alignment that we see across leadership, across sales reps, and just the kind of camaraderie that's built in terms of communication is kind of incredible, right? So for me, I'm going to say it's going to be like something which is a hybrid, where we do have the virtual training sessions. We do have the LMS tools and the enablement tools. But we need to kind of supplement that with some sort of in-person training maybe once a quarter, maybe once in 6 months. But it's very important that sales reps be in front of leadership and kind of get aligned in terms of what that overall messaging kind of looks like. So that's what's actually worked for us.

Got it. That's lovely to hear. I think all of us humans are social beings, so it's -- I couldn't agree more. But Abhishek I'll hand it back to you. I think the themes that have come from Gautam and Sidhanth are clearly around productivity and how we're driving efficiency and preparing for a growth even with economic uncertainty. So with that, I'll get that back to you, Abhishek.

Thanks, Mankiran. Thanks, Gautam. Thanks, Sidhanth for very insightful conversations. Really appreciate both of you taking time. Now we get on to the last part of the webinar, which is where we have a lot of questions coming from the webinar attendees on the call on the webinar. I'll read some of these questions, try and answer some of these questions as well and Gautam, Sidhanth, Mankiran, Tanmaiy, please add if you have any points to add to these questions.

The first question is from [ Mr. Guru Raja Jayanti ]. The question is, what are the symptoms of a good sales rep in modern industries? And what is a traditional -- what is traditional things to effective manager. I'm not sure if I understand the last part of it, but I'll answer -- try and answer the first part of the question. Symptoms of a good sales rep. I guess, what -- some of the things that we have seen because we are an organization which works with mostly the sales organization of our customers' organization, right? And what are -- what we have realized is some of the very successful sales people really know how to make the ecosystem, the larger team work for them, right? It's never an individual salesperson who wins the war. At Salesforce, we have our salespeople working very closely with customer success with marketing with our partners with solution engineering to make sure that everybody is aligned to the success of our customer. And I guess when everybody comes together as a team, eventually, the salesperson becomes a successful one. So it's not only a salesperson. It's actually the whole ecosystem around him and how he engages with them to make him a successful one, right? Anybody has any other points? Or I can go on to the next question?

Abhishek, I'll add a point to that in terms of -- I think you're absolutely right in terms of cross functional alignment. And I think one other differentiator is the beginners mindset, the growth mindset, right? So much has changed in our world. There was a time we used to talk about -- there used to be a time we're saying, look, things change is the only constant, change is the reality right now, right? So I think the mindset to say, this is not how I did things and this is there for how the approach is going to be. I think it's a very fundamental recipe for success that needs to be regardless of how many years someone's been or how much they've sold -- the experience, the beginners mindset on how they approach, how we all approach every day into something's changed. The pandemic didn't exist before. And now pandemic is the reality that we'll all plan for the future, right? So having that mindset to say, yes, stuff has changed evolve. Cloud didn't exist before, now it does. So there's so many things that are changing, and we are off to constantly adapt to it.

Absolutely. I guess that's a very important point. Thanks for bringing that out, Mankiran. Sidhanth, Gautam, any additional points you would like to add?

Yes. I mean just kind of going on Mankiran's point as well, Iike just the ability to kind of leverage tech as a seller is kind of very, very important today. I think Gautam touched on that as well. It is a true differentiator today from a good or an average performer to a top performer. So if they invest in themselves, by kind of actually upscaling and wanting to learn more. That is what's going to kind of differentiate a top seller from an average or a good seller.

Thanks, thanks, Gautam and I guess that partially answers -- sorry, sorry, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.

Other point, which I was putting is that understanding of a consumer need is the basic differentiator between a successful lab and a successful sales closure.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I had another question, I guess, Sidhanth, you partially answered that question, which was around how to improve sales and skills. I guess it actually depends on the industry kind of sales team that you have, the segment that you sell in. But I guess a lot of focus on learning, understanding and you also mentioned it, Gautam that focusing on what customer requirements are, are some of the areas that you can look at in terms of improving the overall sales skills of your sales team, right? I'll quickly jump on to the next question. I know we are almost done with our time. One last question. What does the sales report say, the main difference is between a hard sell and a soft sell? Well, I guess, in my personal view, soft sell is where you would closely align with customer and kind of engage with him over a longer period of time to make him successful. Hard sell is mostly considered in an environment where you don't intend to have a longer relationship. It's a transactional-based sales where the soft sell is where you are aligned with the customer on a longer-term vision, you are aligning your developments, your strategies alongside the customers focus on the next year growth or 5 years growth and perhaps allows you to dig deeper into making your customers successful. That's what I can think of. Anybody else Gautam, Sidhanth, Mankiran, if you guys have any other points, please do add.

Abhishek, the way I heard the question was hard selling skill versus soft selling skills. So a hard selling skill could be negotiation or it could be a product knowledge, whereas the soft selling is really a listening or the business value understanding or selling based on value, right? So there are different aspects to it. And like you said in your response as well, there'll be different industries that will need a different flavor. Of course, I'll give you an example of my -- I took my mom for shoe shopping recently. And she has arthritis, and there was only a certain type of comfort shoe. And we went shop after shop after shop to try and get the perfect shoe. And we walked into this one shoe store. The guy looked at her, looked at who she was with. And before she had even sat down, had 3 pairs of shoes, we ended a buying -- but 5 pairs of shoes from that place, right? And what I'm saying is for that person, the skill, the hard selling, because the hard soft skills were really high. He's been in the business, he knew what the business is. But in our industry, where we are selling business value, the understanding of what's the impact in Godrej Appliances versus SaaS Lab versus just the audience here, what is their business, there's a different level of listing that we need to be applying in understanding the business value, right? So different things, different points, and you need to have both. I don't think you could live with just the soft skills and not have the hard skill or vice versa, would be my submission to that.

Thanks, Mankiran. Anything from you, Sidhanth, Gautam?

Yes. I think honestly, like I think hard skills is something that we've always kind of invested in, in the past and that's like kind of honed over time as a seller. But soft skills is so much more kind of important today considering the economic climate and stuff like that, right? It's important to kind of understand customer sentiment before you sort of go hard on them in terms of kind of closing the sale before kind of quarter-end or month-end or something like that, right? It's very crucial to kind of put yourselves in the champion shoes and kind of understand where it is coming from -- and that's something kind of -- established through like honing your soft skills and something that companies should definitely kind of invest in the near term for sure.

Gautam, any remarks from you?

See, as even Tanmaiy said that most of the sellers and buyers are getting connected over multiple channels. It is becoming more hybrid. So it is very, very important to have soft skills when you're selling in. So because we are touching the customer on the multiple points, multiple channels. So it becomes the new thing or it is a new investment that the company has to make so that their sales rep is well trained on the soft skills as compared to as hard skills also.

Right. And I'll just add that one of the findings of the report also spoke how 1/3 of the deals are closed virtually, right? And that's where the soft selling aspect really becomes important. I mean these are skills where initially we may, may not have looked at. But in this current environment or in the changing world, I think there is a little more tilt towards the soft selling aspect. Again, it's not that one takes over the other, both are equally important. But I feel the report talks a bit more about those new selling skills that the sellers should hold to become successful.

Great. I guess we have a few more questions, but we'll answer those questions through an email to all the attendees. But with that, thank you so much Gautam. Thank you so much, Sidhanth, Mankiran, Tanmaiy for being -- agreeing to be become part of this webinar. I'm sure the attendees on the call had a lot to learn. I sure a lot of these guys would have made notes as well. And I'll highly encourage all of you on the webinar to go and download that state of sales report to dig into some of the details that we discussed today. With that, thank you so much, everyone, for joining the webinar today. Have a great day ahead. Thank you.