Salesloft MCP Demo Server

# Interview: Amanda Foster - HR Tech VP Sales ## Metadata - **Date:** December 12, 2024 - **Duration:** 30 minutes - **Interviewer:** Michael Chen, Enterprise Solutions Director, Salesloft - **Interviewee:** Amanda Foster, VP Sales, Beacon HR (HR Tech, $120M ARR) - **Location:** Virtual (Zoom) - **Recording:** Yes, with permission --- ## Interview Transcript [SALESLOFT REP] Amanda, thanks so much for making time today. I know December is absolutely insane for sales leaders, especially in HR tech. How's the quarter wrapping up for you? [AMANDA] Michael, to be honest, it's chaotic. We're in the middle of our Q4 budget flush, and our pipeline looks healthy on paper—we've got about $18M in active opportunities—but the buying committees have exploded. I've got deals where I'm tracking 8, 9, sometimes 10 stakeholders per opportunity. It's making everything slower. [SALESLOFT REP] That's a significant challenge. When you say the buying committees have gotten bigger, is that something you're seeing across most of your deals, or is it more concentrated in your enterprise segment? [AMANDA] It's pervasive. Even mid-market deals that used to have 3-4 stakeholders now have 5-6. And enterprise? Those are a full org chart exercise. I've got one deal right now with our Fortune 500 prospect where we're managing contacts across HR, Finance, IT, Legal, and Procurement. Each one has veto power, each one has different priorities. HR wants ease of deployment, Finance wants ROI and total cost of ownership, IT cares about security and integrations, and Procurement is laser-focused on pricing and terms. [SALESLOFT REP] That's exactly the multi-threading nightmare I hear about. How is your team currently handling the org chart mapping and keeping everyone aligned? [AMANDA] Honestly? We're doing it manually. My Sales Dev team builds out org charts in Salesforce, notes relationship types, and we try to track who reports to whom. But it's incredibly time-consuming, and we're probably missing relationships. What we really need is a way to map these committees faster and actually understand the communication flow between stakeholders. Right now, we're sending messages to the wrong people at the wrong time because we don't have visibility into the actual decision-making structure. [SALESLOFT REP] And the ripple effect of that is probably deals staying stuck in the pipeline longer? [AMANDA] Exactly. We have three deals stuck in negotiation right now—they've been there for 45 days—because we're not synchronized with the right people. My AE will get agreement from the HR director, think we're moving forward, and then Procurement comes back with a completely different set of requirements that HR didn't communicate. The deal doesn't die, but it stalls. That's eating our sales cycle. Used to be 120 days average, now it's pushing toward 145-150 days. [SALESLOFT REP] That's a 20-25% extension. And with Q4 goals, that's probably making it hard to close these out before year-end? [AMANDA] Impossible, honestly. We've got about 35% of our $18M pipeline that we know won't close by December 31st. That rolls into Q1, which immediately puts us behind. And the weird thing about Q4 is the urgency is real—companies are using up their budget, so these are legitimate opportunities—but they're also on holiday schedules. My main contact at one prospect is out for two weeks in mid-December. That kills momentum. [SALESLOFT REP] So the lead time for decision-making is stretched even when there's budget pressure? [AMANDA] Yeah. The budget urgency is real—they have to spend the money—but the decision timeline doesn't compress. They still need sign-offs from Legal, still need Procurement's blessing, still need IT to do their security review. So we're in this weird dynamic where they want to move fast, but their internal process doesn't allow it. What we've been experimenting with is ahead-of-time nurture. We're sending personalized content to the finance person three weeks before we even think they'll be in the deal. We prepare them, build a relationship, so by the time they're officially brought in, they've already seen our ROI models and use cases specific to their company size. [SALESLOFT REP] That's sophisticated. How has that been working? [AMANDA] It's helping, but it's not systematic. It's being done by my best AEs, and they're doing it manually. They're researching the Finance VP, finding their email on LinkedIn, crafting a personalized message about HR tech and financial metrics. It works maybe 60% of the time, but it's not scalable. And we can't do it for every stakeholder on every deal. [SALESLOFT REP] What would change if you could systematize that? If you had templates for different stakeholder types but could actually personalize them quickly? [AMANDA] That would be a game-changer. Especially in Q4. Our nurture programs are basically generic email campaigns right now—"Five Ways HR Tech Improves Compliance" or "How to Optimize Your People Operations Budget." They're not hitting the specific pain point of a CFO who's evaluating spend, or a CISO who's worried about data security. If I could send the CFO something about TCO and ROI calculations, and the CISO something about our compliance certifications and breach prevention, in the same deal, all coordinated? That would cut 20-25 days off our sales cycle. [SALESLOFT REP] You sound confident about that number. [AMANDA] Yeah. Right now, the stakeholder juggling is eating 20-25 days per deal. Personalized nurture that reaches the right person with the right message at the right time would shrink that significantly. And for Q4, we're looking at 15-20 deals we could potentially push through if we got that right. [SALESLOFT REP] That's $2-3M in potential acceleration. Amanda, let me ask you about something else I've been hearing from a lot of our HR tech customers—RFPs. Are you seeing more of those? [AMANDA] Way more. It used to be maybe 20% of enterprise deals came with an RFP. Now it's 60%. And they're getting more detailed. We're getting 50-page RFPs with 200+ requirements, three-month response windows, and they're evaluating us against five other vendors. Some of them are literally saying, "Give us the same response as the other vendors, but tell us why you're better." [SALESLOFT REP] What's your current process for responding to those? [AMANDA] We have a content library in Google Drive—templates for common questions, case studies, ROI models, compliance documentation. When an RFP comes in, my AE and I sit down, we pull the relevant docs, we customize them a bit, and we write a response. It probably takes 60-80 hours of work to respond to a big RFP. And I'm the bottleneck because I'm editing everything, making sure the messaging is consistent, checking facts. [SALESLOFT REP] 60-80 hours is substantial. What's the win rate on RFPs versus direct sales? [AMANDA] Ouch. Direct sales, we're closing at 35-40%. RFPs? Probably 25-30%. And I think a lot of that is just response quality. By hour 70 of writing an RFP response, you're not thinking clearly. You're copying and pasting. You're missing the opportunity to connect their specific use case to our specific solution. [SALESLOFT REP] So if you could automate the RFP response process, get better at personalization, what would that mean for your numbers? [AMANDA] If we could get RFP close rates up to 35-40%, we'd pick up 5-7 additional deals per quarter. And if we could cut the 60-80 hours down to 20-30 hours, I could have my team respond to 2-3x as many RFPs without hiring more people. The bottleneck is literally me right now. [SALESLOFT REP] What would it take to get you comfortable letting more of that flow through without your edit? [AMANDA] Honestly, templates that are way more intelligent. Like, if I could say, "This prospect is a $500M manufacturing company, 5,000 employees, they're asking about compliance," the system knows to pull our compliance case studies, our ROI model that speaks to that company size, testimonials from similar companies. And it drafts a response that's like 80% done, and I'm just doing the final 20%. [SALESLOFT REP] That would be a force multiplier for you. Let me pivot—I want to ask about your competitive landscape. Who are you seeing as your main competitors right now? [AMANDA] That's where things have gotten really complicated. Three years ago, we were competing against ADP, Workday, and maybe UKG. Now we're competing against BambooHR, Rippling, and a bunch of bundled solutions—Zendesk, HubSpot, even Salesforce are moving into people ops. And that's the trend I'm most worried about. When a company is already on Zendesk or HubSpot, and Zendesk says, "Hey, we have HR modules," it's much harder for us to win against that bundled pitch. [SALESLOFT REP] Because it's a rip-and-replace conversation? [AMANDA] Exactly. And from a buyer's perspective, I get it. One contract, one support team, one training investment. It's attractive. What we're struggling with is the differentiation argument. How do I convince someone that our best-of-breed HR solution is better than Zendesk's 80% HR solution that comes with a platform they already know? [SALESLOFT REP] How are you currently articulating that difference? [AMANDA] We're hitting on depth—"Zendesk HR isn't built by HR experts, it's built by a support platform company." We're showing our specialized workflows, our compliance library, our integration with payroll and benefits. We're doing case studies about total HR platforms replacing 4-5 best-of-breed tools. But I'll be honest, it's not resonating enough. Last quarter we lost a $400K deal to Rippling—they came in at 60% of our price, promised integration with payroll and benefits, and the CFO's response was basically, "Why pay 40% more for your specialized features when Rippling does 90% of what we need?" [SALESLOFT REP] How do you differentiate on economics when you're competing on that basis? [AMANDA] That's the conversation I'm hoping to have with you. Right now, we're not. We're trying to stick to ROI—"You'll save administrative time, you'll reduce HR tech spend because you're consolidating tools"—but it's abstract. We need proof points. We need to say, "Here's what companies are actually saving." Or we need to change the conversation to total cost of implementation, long-term switching costs, risk mitigation. But our sales team isn't trained in that argument, and we don't have the data behind us to back it up. [SALESLOFT REP] Let me ask about a different angle—how are you managing negotiations when you're at a price disadvantage? [AMANDA] Not well. Three of my five most experienced AEs are pushing for bigger discounts. My VP of Sales operations did an analysis and found that we're discounting 35% more than we were two years ago. Our standard ACV is $80K, and we're closing at maybe $56K on average because we're conceding on price. But if I can't win on features or differentiation, what's my leverage? [SALESLOFT REP] What if the leverage wasn't price? What if it was terms, scope, or implementation speed? [AMANDA] How? I mean, our implementation team can probably accelerate deployment, but they're not incentivized to, and frankly, they don't have the bandwidth. Our terms are pretty standard—12-month contracts, quarterly payments. We're not really flexible there because of Board visibility on bookings. [SALESLOFT REP] What if you could prove that faster deployment actually leads to faster ROI realization, which justifies your price premium? [AMANDA] We'd need to actually deliver on that. Right now, I'm saying it, but I don't have data. One deal I closed six months ago—60-day implementation, and they realized full ROI within four months because their admin team could stop doing manual data entry and work on strategic HR projects. But I'm not systematically tracking that. And I'm definitely not using it as a negotiation tool. [SALESLOFT REP] Let me shift gears completely. Your CAC has been increasing 45% year-over-year. That's significant. Walk me through what's driving that. [AMANDA] That's the conversation keeping me up at night. We're spending more to acquire the same revenue. Part of it is just the market getting noisier—we're spending more on ads, more on events, more on sponsorships to break through. But another part is that our conversion rates are down. Sales Dev is setting up more meetings, but AE conversion is softer. Used to be 35-40% conversion from opportunity to close. Now it's closer to 25-28%. [SALESLOFT REP] What's driving the lower conversion? [AMANDA] A few things. One, the sales cycle is longer, which means more time for deals to fall apart. Two, the buying committee issue—more stakeholders means more chances for someone to kill the deal. Three, and this is the one I'm most concerned about, I think we're losing deals to bundled solutions that we're not even detecting. A prospect says, "We're going with Rippling," and we mark it as lost to Rippling, but I think some of those are really us losing on price or not building enough relationships inside their org. [SALESLOFT REP] So it's a detection problem as much as a conversion problem? [AMANDA] Yeah. And I'm managing this with a team that's probably 15% understaffed for our growth. My Sales Dev team is at capacity. My AEs are juggling 18-20 active opportunities each, which is too many. And when AEs are overwhelmed, the quality of the work suffers. They're not doing the stakeholder mapping, not doing the personalized outreach, not prepping for calls as well as they should. [SALESLOFT REP] What would it take to fix the CAC problem? [AMANDA] Honestly? I need to improve conversion rates and reduce sales cycle length. If I could get conversion back to 32-35% and cut the sales cycle from 145 days to 120 days, my CAC would drop back to a reasonable number. I'd also love to understand our channel mix better. Right now, probably 50% of our business is inbound, 30% is direct outbound, and 20% is channel partnerships. But I don't have confidence in that breakdown, and I don't know which channel has the best CAC. If I could figure out that our partnership channel has 30% lower CAC, I'd double down on it. But instead, I'm flying blind. [SALESLOFT REP] Let me ask about ACV trends. Are you seeing compression there as well? [AMANDA] Not much compression, but not growth either. Our median ACV is probably $65-70K for new business. We're not moving upmarket effectively. We're trying to land in the enterprise, but it's taking so long that the CAC eats up the margin. I'd like to see our ACV grow to $85-90K, but that probably requires better competitive positioning and stronger negotiation skills on my team. [SALESLOFT REP] Back to your challenge with bundled competitors—how are you thinking about that? [AMANDA] I'm thinking we need to own an outcome, not just features. Like, every competitor claims to be an HR platform. But what if we owned "fastest time to value" or "lowest administrative burden" or "best employee experience"? And we built a sales narrative around that. Then when Rippling says they do 90% of what we do, we say, "Yeah, but our HR customers go live in 45 days and are tracking productivity impacts in 60 days. Rippling takes 120 days for implementation because they're building out an entire platform integration stack." I just don't think we're there yet with a narrative that compelling. [SALESLOFT REP] And you'd need to back that up with data? [AMANDA] Completely. We'd need to document it. We'd need customer testimonials. We'd need to train the whole sales team to talk about it. And we'd need to make sure our product and implementation team could actually deliver on it. [SALESLOFT REP] That's a significant lift. But if you did it, how would it change your Q1 forecast? [AMANDA] Realistically? If we could close one or two deals that we'd otherwise lose to bundled solutions, that's $100-150K in bookings. But more importantly, if we could improve our overall conversion rate from 25-28% to 32-35%, that's maybe 8-10 additional deals per quarter, which is $500K-750K in incremental bookings. That would basically offset the CAC increase. [SALESLOFT REP] Let's go back to the Q4 dynamics for a second. You said you have 35% of your pipeline that won't close by year-end. What's the plan for pulling forward some of those deals? [AMANDA] We're doing a few things. One, we're being aggressive about deal acceleration—bundling implementation and enablement, offering faster onboarding, being flexible on start dates. Two, we're focusing on deals where the buying committee is smallest and we have the strongest relationship. Three, we're doing a lot of personal outreach from me and my leadership team in the last two weeks of December to rebuild momentum on deals that have stalled. [SALESLOFT REP] Is that working? [AMANDA] It's helping at the margins. Last year we pulled forward about $800K by being aggressive in December. This year I'm hoping for $1-1.2M. But the reality is, even with personal outreach, you can't rush committees that are on holiday or waiting for budget approval in January. What I wish we had is a playbook for nurturing a deal that's going to slip—how to keep momentum, what messages to send, when to re-engage. Right now, we're just calling constantly, which probably isn't even helping. [SALESLOFT REP] What would a nurture playbook look like for deals that are stalling? [AMANDA] I think it would be stakeholder-specific. Like, if the deal is stalled because we're waiting on Legal, we'd send the Legal person a legal-specific message about how our contract terms align with their requirements. If it's stalled because of Finance approval, we send Finance something about budget allocation and ROI. We're not doing that now. We're sending the same email to everyone saying, "Excited to move forward, what's the next step?" [SALESLOFT REP] And you think targeted nurture would unstall some of those deals? [AMANDA] I think it would increase our chances. Maybe we're talking 10-15% impact. So if we have 15 deals potentially slipping, we might salvage 1-2 of them with better nurture. That's $60-120K, which is meaningful in December. [SALESLOFT REP] Amanda, I want to wrap up, but I have a couple final questions. When you look at your sales process, what's the biggest gap you're trying to fill? [AMANDA] Visibility and coordination. I need better visibility into what's actually happening in each deal—which stakeholders are engaged, which ones are blockers, where we stand on competitive positioning. And I need a way to coordinate our entire team—Sales Dev, AEs, Sales Engineers, even my leadership team—so that we're all working toward the same outcome with each prospect. Right now, we're a little bit fragmented. Each AE is doing their own thing, and we're lucky if we're all saying the same story. [SALESLOFT REP] How would better coordination change things? [AMANDA] At a minimum, I think we'd reduce sales cycle by 15-20 days. We'd probably improve conversion rates by 3-5 percentage points. And we'd almost certainly improve deal quality—we'd catch problems earlier and course-correct faster. The compounding effect of those three improvements would cut our CAC problem in half. [SALESLOFT REP] That's meaningful. Final question—if you had to prioritize between solving the Q4 budget flush challenge, the buying committee complexity, the RFP response burden, and the competitive positioning against bundled solutions, where would you focus? [AMANDA] In order? First, I'd solve the buying committee and stakeholder management problem. That's the bottleneck. Everything else cascades from that. If I could navigate committees faster and with more sophistication, the Q4 budget flush is easier to capitalize on, we respond to RFPs more strategically because we have better intel, and we can differentiate better because we're in deeper with the right people. Second is RFP response optimization—that's quick ROI and immediate CAC improvement. Third is competitive positioning, which is longer-term and requires more coordination with product and marketing. And honestly, Q4 is tactical—it's nice to solve, but it's a short-term problem. [SALESLOFT REP] That's helpful perspective. Amanda, thank you so much. This has been really insightful. [AMANDA] Yeah, thanks for coming. Honestly, if you have a solution for the buying committee and stakeholder management piece, I'm very interested in talking more. That's the problem that's keeping me up at night. [SALESLOFT REP] I'll have my team put together some thoughts on that and circle back to you in Q1. Good luck with the December push. [AMANDA] Appreciate it. --- ## Key Takeaways ### 1. **Buying Committee Expansion is the Primary Bottleneck** - Deals now include 8-10 stakeholders on average (up from 3-4 previously) - Manual org chart mapping in Salesforce is consuming significant time - Stakeholder misalignment is causing deals to stall for 45+ days - Sales cycle has extended from 120 days to 145-150 days (+20-25%) - Identified pain: Each stakeholder has veto power but different priorities ### 2. **Personalized Nurture to Unknown Stakeholders is High-Leverage but Unsystematic** - Amanda's best AEs manually research and send personalized messages to future stakeholders - Current success rate: ~60%, but not scalable - Estimated impact: 20-25 days of sales cycle compression if systematized - Potential bookings impact: $2-3M if 15-20 deals are accelerated in Q4 - Key need: Stakeholder-type templates (CFO, CISO, etc.) that auto-populate with company data ### 3. **RFP Response Process is Bottlenecked and Underperforming** - 60-80 hours of labor per large RFP response - Amanda is the bottleneck (personally edits all responses) - RFP close rate: 25-30% vs. 35-40% for direct sales - Win rate improvement opportunity: If RFP closure reaches 35-40%, company could add 5-7 deals/quarter - Efficiency opportunity: Reduce per-RFP effort from 60-80 hours to 20-30 hours - Solution needed: Intelligent templates that draft 80% of response, requiring only 20% refinement ### 4. **Bundled Solutions (Rippling, HubSpot HR, etc.) are the Primary Competitive Threat** - Lost a $400K deal to Rippling last quarter due to 40% price premium - Bundled competitors offer 80-90% of features at 60% of price - Weak differentiation narrative: "We're specialized" isn't compelling - No clear proof points on why best-of-breed approach justifies premium pricing - Opportunity: Own outcome-based positioning (e.g., "fastest time to value," "lowest admin burden") ### 5. **CAC Increase (45% YoY) is Driven by Lower Conversion Rates and Longer Sales Cycles** - Conversion rate declined from 35-40% to 25-28% - Sales cycle lengthened from 120 to 145-150 days - Team is understaffed: AEs managing 18-20 active opportunities each (too high) - Sales Dev team at capacity - Channel mix unclear (50% inbound, 30% direct, 20% partnerships estimated, but unconfirmed) - Solution: Improve conversion to 32-35% and reduce cycle to 120 days to offset CAC increase - Potential impact: Recovery on both metrics would offset 45% CAC increase ### 6. **Q4 Budget Flush is Real Opportunity but Requires Sophistication** - $18M active pipeline in Q4 - 35% ($6.3M) will not close by year-end - Budget urgency is real, but decision timelines don't compress due to approval processes - Opportunity: Pre-nurture stakeholders 3 weeks before they enter deal - Current stretch goal: Pull forward $1-1.2M in December (up from $800K last year) - Key need: Stalled-deal nurture playbook (different messages by stakeholder type) ### 7. **ACV and Sales Execution Challenges** - Current median ACV: $65-70K (with heavy discounting averaging 35% off list) - Goal: Move to $85-90K without discounting - Negotiation leverage is currently weak (pricing concessions instead of value-based arguments) - Alternative levers exist (implementation speed, terms, scope) but not systematized - Missing data: Proof points on ROI realization timeline and total implementation cost savings ### 8. **Sales Process Fragmentation** - Each AE operates independently without team coordination - No systematic approach to competitive positioning - Limited visibility into deal health and stakeholder engagement - Need: Coordinated narratives across Sales Dev, AEs, Sales Engineers, and leadership ### 9. **Prioritization Framework** Amanda's stated priority order for investment: 1. **Buying committee/stakeholder management** (biggest impact on sales cycle and conversion) 2. **RFP response optimization** (quick ROI and immediate CAC improvement) 3. **Competitive positioning** (longer-term, requires cross-functional alignment) 4. **Q4 tactics** (short-term, nice-to-have if above are solved) ### 10. **Immediate Conversation Starter for Next Phase** Amanda explicitly stated interest in exploring solutions for buying committee and stakeholder management. Recommended follow-up: Propose a 15-minute technical demo focused on org chart mapping, multi-threaded nurture, and stakeholder-type personalization in Q1.