Salesloft MCP Demo Server

# Salesloft + Clari Customer Interview Transcript **Date:** January 15, 2025 **Duration:** 32 minutes **Participants:** - **Mitchell Chen** - VP Sales, Salesloft + Clari Joint Solutions - **Jeffrey Moore** - Chief Revenue Officer, TeleCom Nexus (Telecom Software, $125M ARR) - **Sophia Rodriguez** - Director of Sales Operations, TeleCom Nexus **Location:** Virtual (Zoom) **Recording:** Yes **Transcribed by:** AI Assistant --- ## Opening & Context Setting **Mitchell Chen:** Jeffrey, Sophia—thanks so much for taking the time today. We've been following TeleCom Nexus for a while, and your 5G investments have been really impressive. Before we dive into anything, I'd love to understand what's top of mind for you right now as a CRO. What keeps you up at night? **Jeffrey Moore:** [laughs] Where do I start? Look, we're in this weird sweet spot right now. We're hitting our numbers quarter over quarter, but the stress underneath is real. Our carrier procurement cycles are _crushing_ our forecasting accuracy. We'll have a deal that looks solid—let's say it's a mid-market telecom operator looking to upgrade their billing platform—and then their procurement process drags it from a 60-day close to 240 days. By the time it closes, the original champion has moved companies, the budget's been recut, and we're renegotiating pricing. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And that's just for the ones that don't die completely. We've got deals in our pipeline right now where we literally don't know if they're happening this year or next. It's not about qualification or fit—it's about their internal sign-off processes. You need buy-in from Network teams, IT teams, Operations, and Finance. It's like herding cats. **Mitchell Chen:** That's exactly the kind of complexity we're seeing across the telecom vertical. Let me ask you this—do you have visibility into those stakeholder dynamics while the deal is progressing? Like, do you know when the Network team delays something vs. IT? **Jeffrey Moore:** Honestly? No. We have CRM, Salesforce—it does the job—but there's no way to track where a deal is really stuck. Our AE will log "waiting for network approval," but that's theater. What we don't know is whether the network architect is dragging their feet, whether IT and Network are in a turf war, or whether nobody's actually looking at the deal. Sophia, you deal with this more than I do. **Sophia Rodriguez:** It's a nightmare. We'll call the champion, and they'll say "yeah, we're moving it forward," but we have no way to verify that. So our sales team does a lot of guesswork. They'll spend hours on discovery and qualification, and then we're just... waiting. The pipeline looks full, but in reality, we're not actually controlling anything. And forecasting—don't get me started on forecasting. --- ## Deep Dive: Pipeline Management & Forecasting **Mitchell Chen:** Let's focus on forecasting for a second. Walk me through your quarter-end process. How accurate are you typically? **Jeffrey Moore:** [sighs] We're probably 75-80% accurate on our committed number. But that's only because we've learned to heavily over-weight deals that are 60+ days in the pipeline. Anything in the first 30-40 days of a telecom sales cycle is basically a coin flip. You could have an executive sponsor lined up, a great RFP response, all the technical validation done—and then procurement gets involved and says, "Hey, we need three bids." Suddenly you're not first in the door anymore. **Mitchell Chen:** So you're essentially discounting early-stage deals to protect your forecast? **Sophia Rodriguez:** Yes. And it kills our ability to invest in growth. We have a 95-person sales organization, and maybe 30% of their time is spent on deals that are actually going to close in the quarter. The rest is in limbo. They're doing their job—maintaining relationships, running proof of concepts, answering RFP questions—but it's all invisible to our forecast. We can't tell our CFO, "Hey, we need five more AEs because these 20 deals are going to materialize." **Jeffrey Moore:** And the challenge is that some of this is actually our responsibility. We should have better qualification. But some of it is just the carrier ecosystem. These aren't like SaaS deals where one person can sign a contract. Every major carrier has layers. You've got the operations VP who might sponsor you, but then the CTO has to sign off, the network architect has a veto right, IT needs infrastructure sign-off, and Finance is looking at capex vs. opex implications. **Mitchell Chen:** Are all those stakeholders present in your initial conversations, or do they come in later? **Jeffrey Moore:** They come in later. Always later. [laughs] You might sell to the operations guy first—he owns the P&L for his division. But then he says, "I need to get Network on board," and that's where things get weird. Network and IT often don't report to the same person. They might even be in conflict about architecture decisions. **Mitchell Chen:** That's the multi-stakeholder alignment problem. I'm hearing that your team doesn't have a structured approach to managing those relationships as they emerge? **Sophia Rodriguez:** Not really. Our AEs have their relationships with the champion, usually the operational buyer. But once you need to bring in IT and Network, there's no process. We're not even running dual engagements. We should be—I know we should be. But our tooling doesn't support it, and frankly, our training doesn't either. So what happens is the champion becomes a bottleneck. They're supposed to evangelize internally, but they're also trying to manage the deal. **Mitchell Chen:** Right. So the champion is simultaneously selling internally and managing the vendor relationship. That's exhausting. **Jeffrey Moore:** It is. And for us, it means that deals can stall for months while the champion is fighting internal battles that we have zero visibility into. We'll win technical evals, get product champions excited, and then nothing happens for 90 days because two departments are negotiating governance. --- ## Shift: 5G Investment Impact **Mitchell Chen:** Let me pivot for a second. You mentioned your 5G investments are impressive, but I want to understand the dynamic from a procurement standpoint. Are carriers actually choosing between 5G infrastructure and software platforms like yours? **Jeffrey Moore:** That's the elephant in the room. Yes. It's implicit in almost every deal conversation. Carriers are under pressure from investors to show ROI on their 5G build-outs. The networks are there, but utilization is still ramping. So when we come in with a software platform that costs $500K to $2M a year, the conversation is basically: "Why would we spend that when we should be spending it on 5G optimization?" **Sophia Rodriguez:** We had a deal last year that was absolutely perfect. Major regional carrier, needed our platform, technically aligned, even had executive sponsorship. But then 5G roadmap got accelerated, and suddenly that $1.5M budget line got redirected to network infrastructure. The buyer kept saying, "I believe in your product, but I can't justify it to my CFO." And the CFO's mandate is clear: 5G first. **Mitchell Chen:** How do you position against that? Is it a "we make your 5G more efficient" story, or something else? **Jeffrey Moore:** We've tried that. We built a value prop around optimizing 5G rollout and customer acquisition in the 5G context. But here's the thing—it doesn't land because the IT and Network teams don't care. The business case for 5G is already approved at the board level. It's not competitive with software platforms; it's upstream of that decision. So we're always fighting for margin budget, not core capex. **Mitchell Chen:** That's the distinction. You're in the discretionary software bucket, not the required infrastructure bucket. **Jeffrey Moore:** Exactly. And you know what makes it worse? We've got good ROI to show. Our platform helps them bill faster, reduce churn, accelerate new service launches. We can point to customers who've paid off their investment in 18 months. But that ROI is spread across operations, customer success, and product teams—not the one person who controls the budget. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And the person who controls the budget is typically fighting for 5G dollars. So the business case for our platform isn't "yes or no"—it's "not now, maybe in 2026." **Mitchell Chen:** What if you could change the conversation earlier in the cycle? Like, before 5G decisions are locked? **Jeffrey Moore:** That would help, but here's the timing problem. We don't usually get in early enough. By the time we're having conversations with carriers, their infrastructure roadmap is already set. We're coming in reactive to an RFP or inbound, not proactive to architecture planning. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And even if we could get in earlier, we'd need to be talking to the right people—the ones who make infrastructure decisions, not the operations guys who'd use our platform. So now we're not even in the right part of the organization. **Mitchell Chen:** That's a go-to-market issue. You're primarily selling to operations, but you need to have a parallel conversation about infrastructure and architecture? **Jeffrey Moore:** Yes. And we haven't figured out how to do that at scale. We can do it with our largest customers, people we have strong relationships with. But for new logos, we're always coming in through operational buyers, and they're not the ones setting infrastructure budgets. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And frankly, we don't have the relationships to make that work. It's not that we lack the will; we lack the context and the credibility. **Mitchell Chen:** I hear you. But here's the thing—the carriers that are actually deciding are probably already having those conversations with IT and Network. You're just not seeing them. So you're flying blind. **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah. That's the honest answer. We're flying blind. --- ## Complex Deal Structure & Revenue Recognition **Mitchell Chen:** Let's talk about a different challenge—deal structure. When you do land a big carrier, how structured are those deals? **Jeffrey Moore:** Oh man. [laughs] We just closed a $3.2M ACV deal with a national carrier, and it's a textbook disaster from a revenue recognition standpoint. It's a six-year deal, but it's loaded with conditions. The first year is $300K because they're in a pilot. Year two is $800K contingent on us hitting specific integration milestones with their legacy billing system. Years three through six ramp up to $600K a year, but there's a termination right if we don't meet quarterly integration targets. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And then there's the infrastructure deployment piece. We have to help them rip out a legacy system—mainframe-based, been running for 20 years. That's not just a software transition; that's an organizational change for them. Millions in consulting costs, thousands of person-hours. So we're not really selling a platform; we're selling a transformation that happens over multiple years. **Mitchell Chen:** How does that impact your revenue recognition? That sounds complex from a finance standpoint. **Jeffrey Moore:** It is. Every one of these large deals has to go through legal review before we can recognize revenue. And they all have different structures. Some are subscriptions with performance obligations around integration. Some are SaaS with implementation services embedded. Some are kind of hybrid—they buy the software but we're essentially on the hook to deliver a successful cutover of their legacy system. **Sophia Rodriguez:** Which is insane because we're not an implementation firm. We have implementation partners and technical resources, but we're not a Deloitte. So we're signing deals that commit us to milestones we can only partially control. If their internal resources are slow, or their organization is fighting the change, _we_ take the revenue hit. **Mitchell Chen:** And your finance team is probably pulling their hair out trying to forecast revenue based on these structures? **Jeffrey Moore:** [laughs] They are. We have a finance person whose entire job is basically deal interpretation. Is this a subscription? Is it a service? Are there performance obligations? When does revenue get recognized? Our CFO and I have sat down multiple times to try to simplify, but every major carrier deal is unique. **Sophia Rodriguez:** The other thing is customer-specific terms. We price standard, but then every carrier wants something different. One wants to pay in dollars; another wants to pay in equity terms because of foreign exchange issues. One wants a volume discount that kicks in after they've deployed to three regions. Basically, none of them look the same. **Mitchell Chen:** So you've got structural complexity baked into your enterprise deals. That's leveraging your sales team's ability to forecast and plan resources, right? Because every deal is different? **Jeffrey Moore:** Absolutely. Our sales team has to be part consultant, part finance. And frankly, most of them aren't equipped for that. We've started hiring sales ops people who are just there to structure deals and make sure they're legal and financially sound. That's a new cost center for us. **Mitchell Chen:** Have you thought about creating a playbook or template for deal structures? Like, here's how we typically do these for carriers with multiple regions, or multi-year implementations? **Sophia Rodriguez:** We've tried. The problem is that customization is part of the sale. If we say, "Here's how we do deals," they feel like we're rigid. And some of that customization is legitimate—they really do have unique business models. So we end up in this middle ground where every deal is slightly different, and it's hard to systematize. **Jeffrey Moore:** We'd be open to a better way. Right now, it feels like we're solving the same problem over and over with each deal. --- ## Network & IT Misalignment **Mitchell Chen:** I want to go back to the stakeholder management thing, because I think that's where a lot of the pipeline stalling happens. You mentioned Network and IT sometimes being in conflict. How does that usually play out? **Sophia Rodriguez:** It varies by carrier size, but generally, Network owns architecture and infrastructure. IT owns on-premises deployment, integrations, security, compliance. For a billing platform, you'd think that's an IT decision. But for a carrier, billing touches the network—like, service activation happens through the billing system, network provisioning is triggered by billing events, all of that. So it's really both. **Jeffrey Moore:** And they don't have a single owner. Different carriers organize it differently. Some have the Network VP and IT VP both reporting to the CTO. Some have them in completely separate structures. Some have a shared governance council. So when we're selling, we don't even know who the real decision-maker is. **Mitchell Chen:** How do you handle that discovery? Do you ask? **Sophia Rodriguez:** We try to, but it's awkward. The champion—usually the operations guy—doesn't always know or care. He's like, "Yeah, IT and Network will need to sign off." We ask him to introduce us to both, but then we're adding complexity to his life. He's not excited about managing that. **Jeffrey Moore:** And if there's any friction between IT and Network, it gets worse. We had a deal where the Network team wanted a cloud-native architecture, but IT wanted to keep it on-premises for security reasons. That wasn't about us; that was about their organization. But it killed the deal for six months while they negotiated. **Mitchell Chen:** Did you step in and try to bridge that gap, or did you just wait? **Jeffrey Moore:** [pause] We waited. Honestly, we didn't know there was a gap until six months later when our champion told us they'd resolved it. We should have been more proactive. **Sophia Rodriguez:** This is where our team is weakest. We're not trained to understand telecom organizational structures, and we're definitely not trained to navigate internal politics. So if there's misalignment between teams, we either don't see it, or we make it worse by picking a side. **Mitchell Chen:** What if you had visibility into those dynamics earlier? Like, if you knew that Network and IT had this tension point, could you position your solution to address both concerns? **Jeffrey Moore:** Maybe. Our product is flexible—it can be deployed on-premises or cloud. So theoretically, we could work with both. But you'd have to know that the tension existed, and you'd have to know what each team actually cared about. Right now, we're just assuming everyone wants the same thing. **Mitchell Chen:** Have you thought about a dual engagement strategy? Like, running separate tracks with Network and IT? **Sophia Rodriguez:** In theory, yes. In practice, it feels complex. You're essentially asking one sales rep to manage multiple stakeholders who might disagree. And if they disagree, the AE could accidentally fan those flames. **Jeffrey Moore:** Plus, most of our AEs don't have enough domain knowledge to have credible conversations with a network architect. They can talk to an ops VP because both are business-focused. But network architecture? That's technical. We'd need to involve our solutions engineers, and that's an expensive resource. **Mitchell Chen:** I hear you. But here's the thing—the carriers that are actually deciding are probably already having those conversations with IT and Network. You're just not seeing them. So you're flying blind. **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah. That's the honest answer. We're flying blind. --- ## MVNO Segment Dynamics **Mitchell Chen:** Let me shift gears one more time. You guys have MVNO customers too, right? **Sophia Rodriguez:** We do, maybe 15-20% of our revenue. And they're completely different from incumbent carriers. **Mitchell Chen:** Different how? **Jeffrey Moore:** Everything. MVNOs don't have the organizational complexity. They're smaller, leaner. Their procurement is faster. But their buying criteria are totally different. An incumbent carrier is worried about integration with their billing system, compliance with regulations, SOX compatibility, all of that. MVNOs don't care about half that stuff. **Sophia Rodriguez:** MVNOs care about speed to market and cost efficiency. They want to launch new products quickly, and they want to pay as little as possible. So they're looking for agility and economics, not robustness or enterprise-grade features. Our standard enterprise features are actually liabilities with MVNOs—they add cost and complexity. **Mitchell Chen:** So you'd need a different product offering for MVNOs? **Jeffrey Moore:** Not different, but lighter. Simplified. Our platform has billing, rating, charging, provisioning, mediation—all the stuff you need for complex carrier operations. MVNOs need billing and basic provisioning, maybe some self-service portal. That's it. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And pricing is completely different. An incumbent carrier with a $1B revenue base might pay $2M a year for our platform. An MVNO with $50M revenue wants to pay $100K a year. **Mitchell Chen:** How do you handle that? Do you have a product tier for MVNOs? **Jeffrey Moore:** Not really. We've tried to discount for them, but it's almost like a different business. The lifetime value is lower, the deal size is lower, but the sales effort is still significant. You're still doing discovery, RFPs, negotiations. You're just doing it for less money. **Sophia Rodriguez:** So right now, our MVNO business is almost a loss leader. We do it to expand our network effect, get more case studies, and stay top of mind with carriers who are becoming MVNOs. But from a unit economics standpoint, it's not great. **Mitchell Chen:** Do MVNOs have different buying processes? Like, is the champion the CTO instead of an ops VP? **Jeffrey Moore:** Typically, yeah. MVNOs are smaller, so you're often selling directly to the CTO or VP of Engineering. Which means the sale is faster—one person, one decision—but also means the conversation is more technical. They care about API documentation, cloud-native architecture, uptime SLAs. They don't care about enterprise features like compliance reporting or audit trails. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And they want to own the platform. Incumbent carriers are often outsourcing operations to us or our partners. MVNOs want to integrate it into their infrastructure and run it themselves. So it's a different customer success model too. **Mitchell Chen:** Have you thought about having a separate sales motion for MVNOs? Different reps, different product team, different pricing? **Jeffrey Moore:** We've talked about it. But it feels like it could dilute our focus. We're primarily an enterprise company—our revenue is concentrated in the big carriers. MVNOs feel like a side business. **Sophia Rodriguez:** But they're growing faster, honestly. MVNOs are more open to software innovation than big carriers. They're also earlier to adopt new technologies. So from a product innovation standpoint, they're actually really valuable. **Mitchell Chen:** Interesting. So there's a strategic question there: are MVNOs a growth vector, or are they a distraction? **Jeffrey Moore:** I think they're a growth vector, but we haven't fully committed to that thesis. Right now, it's kind of ad hoc. If an MVNO inbound comes in, we handle it. If not, we don't go hunt them. Which is probably leaving money on the table. --- ## Solution Exploration & Needs **Mitchell Chen:** Okay, so let me summarize what I'm hearing. You've got four really distinct challenges: One, your pipeline is full, but it's not actually full because deals are moving really slowly through procurement. You don't know which deals are legitimately progressing and which are stalled. Two, 5G investment is crowding out software spend, and you're not positioned early enough to be part of the infrastructure conversation. Three, your large deals are so structurally complex that they require specialized finance and legal expertise just to close them, and revenue recognition is a nightmare. Four, you've got organizational misalignment between network and IT that you can't see, and your reps are walking blind into those situations. And then there's a fifth thing—MVNO is a growth opportunity that you're not fully capitalizing on because you're treating it like a side business. **Jeffrey Moore:** That's... actually, that's a pretty good summary. All of that is true. I don't know how to fix most of it, but yes, that's our reality. **Sophia Rodriguez:** The question for us is, is this something we can solve with better tooling? Like, are we suffering because we don't have good visibility and orchestration? Or is this just structural to how enterprise carriers buy? **Mitchell Chen:** I think it's both. Some of this is structural. But some of it is that you're trying to sell an enterprise deal with a sales motion that works for a different market. You're using a playbook that works for SaaS companies, and telecom is different. **Jeffrey Moore:** So what would a telecom-specific playbook look like? **Mitchell Chen:** Well, let me ask you some questions first. On the pipeline visibility piece—what would you actually need to see to know whether a deal is progressing? **Sophia Rodriguez:** Honestly? We'd need to know who the actual decision-makers are, not just our champion. We'd need to see activity from those decision-makers—like, are they reviewing our RFP response? Have they scheduled a technical validation with our solutions engineers? Is there any movement? **Mitchell Chen:** So basically, stakeholder visibility and engagement tracking. **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah. And it would need to be updated by the people actually involved, not just our AE guessing. So we'd need IT and Network teams to somehow signal engagement, even if indirectly. **Mitchell Chen:** That's hard because they're not in your system. They don't have logins to your CRM. **Sophia Rodriguez:** Right, but our champion would know. If the Network architect reviewed the RFP and said, "We need clarification on X, Y, Z," the champion knows that. So if we could structure the conversation so that the champion is feeding us that intel, we'd have better visibility. **Mitchell Chen:** Let me ask differently. When you look at the deals in your pipeline, which ones are you most confident are actually happening? **Jeffrey Moore:** The ones where we have technical POCs running. Because that's not something that stalls; it has momentum. It requires infrastructure, time, data. So if a customer is running a POC, something real is happening. **Mitchell Chen:** So technical engagement is a leading indicator for deal progression? **Jeffrey Moore:** Absolutely. When we can get them to say, "Okay, let's run a proof of concept with your platform," that usually means a legitimate decision-making conversation is happening. **Sophia Rodriguez:** But even that stalls sometimes. We had a POC that ran for eight months. Eight months! Because they were waiting for their IT team to provision a test environment. **Mitchell Chen:** [laughs] Okay, so even POCs aren't a perfect signal. But they're better than nothing. **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah. They're maybe 60% predictive that a deal will close, vs. deals without POCs which are maybe 20% predictive. **Mitchell Chen:** Got it. So what if you could get more deals into POCs faster? **Sophia Rodriguez:** That would help. But POCs are resource-intensive for us. Our solutions engineers have to scope them, set them up, run them. We can't do a POC with every prospect. **Mitchell Chen:** Right, so you'd need to be selective. You'd need to know which deals are worth investing that resource in. **Jeffrey Moore:** Which brings us back to the stakeholder question. We'd need to know that there's actual organizational buy-in before we invest in a POC. **Mitchell Chen:** Okay, and the 5G budget crowding issue. Is there anything you can do to preempt that? **Sophia Rodriguez:** I don't know. Once they've decided to invest in 5G, I don't think we can change that decision. It's at the board level. **Mitchell Chen:** Right, but what if you could position your solution as enabling or accelerating 5G investment rather than competing with it? Like, if your solution helps them reach 5G customers faster or monetize 5G services better? **Jeffrey Moore:** We've tried that. The problem is it's not that compelling. 5G monetization is probably three to five years out. Right now, they're just trying to get the network to work. **Mitchell Chen:** So it's an infrastructure play right now, not a business case? **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah, pretty much. The business case is about completing the network so that customers can use 5G. By the time the business case shifts to monetization, we'll be well into the technology. **Mitchell Chen:** That's a market timing issue. You're probably not going to sell aggressively into 5G-driven procurement budgets for another couple of years. **Jeffrey Moore:** Which is painful because we'll probably have higher churn from deals we have now that get caught in that rebalancing. Some of our installed base will face budget pressure. And we might lose some new logos that otherwise would have happened. **Mitchell Chen:** So for the next 18-24 months, you're probably fighting headwinds on software spending against infrastructure spending? **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah. And that's actually baked into our guidance. We're expecting slower deal velocity for a few years while carriers work through infrastructure investments. **Mitchell Chen:** Okay, so that's a bit of a market condition you can't really fix. But let me ask about the other stuff. On deal structuring—have you thought about building templates or playbooks for different deal types? **Sophia Rodriguez:** We've talked about it, but we don't have the bandwidth. Our sales operations team is pretty lean. **Mitchell Chen:** What if you had a platform that could help you automate deal structure? Like, you answer some questions about the customer—their size, geography, implementation approach—and it suggests a deal structure based on similar deals you've done? **Jeffrey Moore:** That would be actually useful. Our current process is kind of a free-for-all. Every deal is shaped by whoever happens to be negotiating on our side. If our legal person is conservative, we get conservative terms. If our deal person is aggressive, we get aggressive terms. There's no consistency. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And it probably costs us money. Like, I bet we're leaving money on the table in some deals and over-committing in others. **Mitchell Chen:** You probably are. Okay, what about the network/IT alignment thing? How could we help you see that dynamic? **Jeffrey Moore:** [thinks] I don't know. I don't think there's a tooling answer there. It's more about changing how we sell. We'd need to have AEs who understand telecom organizational structures and politics. We'd need to train them to ask better questions during discovery. We'd need to have a conversation plan that accounts for organizational misalignment. **Mitchell Chen:** That's probably true, but here's the thing—your AEs can be trained, but they can't change your customer's organizational structure. What they can do is see it coming. **Sophia Rodriguez:** How do you see it coming? **Mitchell Chen:** In your discovery, you ask about decision-making structure. Who reports to whom? Are there any known tensions between teams? What does a typical infrastructure decision look like? Those conversations will surface organizational dynamics. But then you need to track that intel and let it inform your deal strategy. **Jeffrey Moore:** So basically, we need better intelligence gathering, and then we need to use that intelligence to plan our sales approach. **Mitchell Chen:** Exactly. And that requires tracking a lot of information that your AEs probably know but isn't captured anywhere. It's in their heads or in ad hoc notes. **Sophia Rodriguez:** That's a change management issue more than a tool issue. But if you had a tool that made it easy to capture and structure that information, it might help. **Mitchell Chen:** Right. Something that says: "Here are the stakeholders, here are their interests, here's what we know about organizational dynamics, here's our engagement plan for each of them." **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah, that would help. Especially if it was visible to the whole sales team, not just one AE. --- ## Closing & Key Takeaways **Mitchell Chen:** Okay, last question. If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing about your sales process, what would it be? **Jeffrey Moore:** [long pause] Visibility and predictability. We need to know which deals are actually progressing and why. And we need to be able to forecast with confidence. That would unlock everything else—resource planning, territory planning, compensation, hiring, all of it. **Sophia Rodriguez:** Yeah, I second that. Right now, we're managing in the dark. We have data, but we don't have visibility. We know what deals are in the pipeline, but we don't know what's actually happening inside them. **Mitchell Chen:** And the second-order question: would that visibility help you change your sales approach? Like, once you could see the network/IT tension, would you know how to address it? **Jeffrey Moore:** Probably not immediately. But knowing about it would be half the battle. Right now, we're not even seeing it. **Sophia Rodriguez:** Yeah, we'd need to build the playbook. But at least the visibility would tell us we need one. **Mitchell Chen:** That makes sense. Okay, so the biggest insight I'm taking away is that you've got structural problems—organizational complexity, budget competition, deal customization, market timing—that are limiting your growth. And those are all real. But underneath all of that, there's an information and process gap. You're not seeing enough of what's happening inside your customer organizations. **Jeffrey Moore:** That's fair. And if we could close some of that visibility gap, we could probably improve our close rates by 10-15%, reduce our sales cycle by 30-40 days, and improve our forecast accuracy from 75% to maybe 85%. **Mitchell Chen:** Those are significant upside opportunities. And they're probably worth solving for, even if they require new tools or process changes. **Jeffrey Moore:** They are. We'd definitely be interested in exploring that. **Sophia Rodriguez:** Especially if there's a way to integrate with our existing infrastructure. We're not interested in ripping and replacing our CRM. We just need better visibility and smarter recommendations. **Mitchell Chen:** Totally understood. Let me take all of this back to the team. I want to think about what a Salesloft + Clari solution would look like that actually addresses the telecom sales complexity. Not just the generic SaaS sales challenges, but the unique dynamics around procurement, stakeholder management, and deal structuring. **Jeffrey Moore:** We'd appreciate that. And look, I want to be clear—we're happy with our existing tools in some ways. But we're running a $125M business on processes that feel like they were designed for a $25M business. At some point, we need to scale the process. **Sophia Rodriguez:** And right now, the process is a bottleneck. Our team is working hard, but they're not set up for success. **Mitchell Chen:** I hear that. Okay, let me send you a follow-up email with some initial thoughts. Would you be open to a deeper working session where we map out specific playbooks for different customer types and deal structures? **Jeffrey Moore:** Yeah, absolutely. Let's do that. **Sophia Rodriguez:** That would be great. And if there's a way to get our solutions engineers involved, they might have insights on what's happening during technical evaluations that we're not capturing. **Mitchell Chen:** Smart. Let me include them in the next session. **Jeffrey Moore:** Perfect. Thanks for this conversation, Mitchell. This was actually really helpful—it's forcing us to think about some structural stuff we've been ignoring. **Mitchell Chen:** Happy to do it. Thanks for the transparency. This is exactly the kind of insight we need to build something that actually solves for telecom complexity. --- ## Key Takeaways & Action Items ### For Salesloft + Clari Product Team: 1. **Pipeline Visibility Gap** - Telecom deals move slowly; stakeholders aren't visible to vendors - Need a way to track multi-stakeholder engagement without requiring stakeholders to be in the system - POC execution is a strong leading indicator for deal progression - Currently, deals without engagement visibility are 3x riskier than deals with POCs 2. **5G Budget Competition** - Infrastructure investment is a macro trend that will suppress software spending for 2-3 years - Positioning against 5G is unproductive; positioning with 5G is possible but not yet proven - This is a market timing issue more than a sales execution issue - Expected impact: 15-20% slower deal velocity in 2025-2026 3. **Deal Complexity & Structuring** - Large deals are highly customized; no standardized playbook exists - Each deal requires finance/legal review; revenue recognition is inconsistent - Opportunity: build deal structure templates based on historical deals - Would likely improve deal velocity by reducing negotiation cycles 4. **Network/IT Misalignment** - Major organizational problem that sales team can't see or address - Discovery questions could surface this, but AEs lack telecom domain knowledge - Solution: discovery playbook that asks specifically about organizational structure and decision-making - Would need training/change management to implement 5. **MVNO Opportunity** - 15-20% of revenue but growing faster than carrier segment - Different buying process, different product needs, different pricing - Currently treated ad hoc; opportunity to build dedicated motion - Higher growth rate suggests this could be strategic future segment ### For TeleCom Nexus Sales Leadership: 1. **Immediate Actions** - Create deal structure templates for carrier vs. MVNO vs. different region types - Implement discovery protocol that maps organizational structure and stakeholder interests - Build playbook for dual engagement (run separate tracks with operations, network, IT) - Measure engagement velocity (POC starts, RFP responses, stakeholder activity) as leading indicator 2. **3-6 Month Initiatives** - Invest in sales ops team to systematize deal structure and reduce legal/finance review time - Train AEs on telecom organizational structures and politics - Create MVNO-specific offering (lighter product, different pricing model) - Implement forecast model that discounts early-stage deals but rewards engagement activities 3. **Strategic (6-12 Months)** - Evaluate whether network/IT engagement could be part of solutions engineer scope - Build case studies/references for 5G-adjacent use cases (doesn't work yet, but keep exploring) - Consider hiring dedicated sales leadership for MVNO segment ### Next Steps: - Deeper working session with solutions engineers and deal structure team - Playbook development for different carrier types and deal structures - Pilot of enhanced discovery process with 3-4 current opportunities --- **Interview Conducted by:** Mitchell Chen, VP Sales Solutions **Date Distributed:** January 16, 2025 **Confidentiality:** Internal Use Only