Hyvara.ai Presales Agent Introduction - Kevin Kunz

Data Sources:

• Platform complexity (5–7 specialists): SaaS sales team structure trends. https://www.benchmarkit.ai/post/2024-saas-performance-metrics
• Sales motion failures (no intro/agenda, poor discovery, AE punt): Enterprise sales best practice gaps. https://www.kalungi.com/blog/saas-churn-rate
• Qualification failures (BMANTR/MEDDPIC): SaaS discovery inefficiencies. https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/b2b-saas-churn-rate-benchmarks/
• Operational/HR challenges (onboarding, burnout): SaaS workforce metrics. https://zylo.com/blog/111-saas-statistics/
• $1,200–$1,500 per deal, $240,000 rework, 15–25% win rate ($1.5–$2.5 million), 20–30% churn ($2–$3 million ARR): SaaS benchmarks. https://www.vitally.io/post/churn-rate-benchmarks-b2b-saas-2025
• 30% deal loss: Industry estimate for enterprise software sales misalignment, based on SaaS pipeline analyses. https://www.benchmarkit.ai/post/2024-saas-performance-metrics
• 20–30% churn, $2–3 million ARR loss: SaaS industry benchmarks for high-value B2B contracts. https://www.gong.io/blog/saas-churn-rate/
• $250,000 pilots, $500,000–$1 million implementations, $2–4 million annual loss: Approximations from SaaS pilot and implementation cost trends. https://www.scalexp.com/post/saas-benchmarks-2023-part-4-revenue-retention
• $40,000–$60,000 RFPs, $400,000–$600,000 quarterly: Estimated from enterprise RFP response costs, 200+ hours at $150–$200/hour. https://chaotic-flow.com/saas-benchmarks-acquisition-cost-and-churn-challenges/
• $37,500 onboarding, $360,000 productivity waste: Calculated from $150,000 SE salary (90 days) and 30% task inefficiency at $150/hour. https://zylo.com/blog/111-saas-statistics/
• Retailer example: Derived from common enterprise sales coordination failures. https://www.kalungi.com/blog/saas-churn-rate

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey folks, my name is Kevin Kunz. I'm with the SE Work Life team. For those that know me, I've been in the business over 35 years. I retired a few years ago. Very fortunate, thanks to Elasticsearch and Snowflake. And I've kind of been bored. So I'm launching a startup. Uh, and this startup is going to solve some major solution engineering and essentially the workflows associated with salesmotion. So this is going to be a series of podcasts. We've got about 10 that we're going to go through. Uh, the first one here is the launchinghivera.ai podcast, episode one: The Broken Hive, Chaos in the Enterprise Presales. So, as with any good story, there's a beginning, a middle, an end, a villain, and a hero. And in this podcast, we're going to talk a little bit about the villain. And I'm sure there's a lot more villain discussion we can have. And if you're listening to this and want to participate in another call to talk to me about some of the challenges you have in your workflows, I welcome it because it'll add to the design team and add to our ability to automate this, essentially building an automated pre-sales solution engineer agent, subject matter experience agent, RFP agent, discovery agent to help sales reps follow best practices to help mitigate the risk associated bringing in seven different subject matter experts to a deal, all talking about different things and all motivated by different things. So here we go. Join me. We're going to first start talking about the chaos. Obviously, if you know me, I like to have visuals to help dive into conversations. So let's start here. Picture a beehive where every worker bee speaks a different language and there's no queen to coordinate. That's enterprise presales today. Selling platforms like Salesforce or Adobe isn't simple anymore. Years ago, one sales engineer could team up with a couple of account managers and deliver a clear pitch. Now, a single deal needs five or seven specialists. Analytics, integration, compliance, everything. County executives are running around trying to line everybody. Sales engineers are stretched thin, juggling deals, burnout. I saw a meeting with a major retailer where seven reps showed up for subject matter experts, right? And they all showed up with different slides, some of them dressed differently, they all talked over each other, they all had different agendas. The customer was so confused they nearly walked away. It's a mess, destroying credibility. I know this firsthand as I was responsible for the customer experience architect teams at Oracle, helping pull together five different teams with five different quotas, five different mandates and agendas. We used to call it the Oracle bus, an attempt at single unified voice. It was like herding cats and trying to unify their personalities. For all those cat lovers, you understand how impossible that is. But that was the job. And if you're the customer, you're going, wait a minute, does this even work as a product together? Because clearly you as an organization cannot. The chaos isn't just frustrating, it's a deal killer. You lose 30% of your deals, one out of three because of misaligned messaging or weak qualifications. That's hundreds of hours wasted, not because your platform's weak, but because you can't deliver a unified story. Churn's worse. When expectations are misaligned, customers leave with 20 to 30% churn in complex deals, wiping out $2 to $3 million in annual recurring revenue on a $10 million pipeline. Those customers should be your advocates, pushing renewals and referrals, but they become detractors, shrinking your future pipeline. What's the root cause of this? Skipping tough questions. Frameworks like B-Manter, MedPick require asking, who's the economic buyer? Or what's happening if this isn't fixed in three months? What account executives are under pressure? Skip those critical questions and end up pitching generic solutions. Or worse yet, they just throw it over the wall to the sales engineer to run the meeting. Any pre-sales people on this call know exactly how that is. You walk into an unqualified meeting, sales rep goes, hey, here's John. John, take it away. Show that demo we showed last week. That's not how you run a business. So I saw an accounting executive actually give a pitch to a financial services client without actually checking budget or urgency. Weeks of demos later, no funding, deal dead, and it costs us $250,000 in potential revenue. But the worst part, the sales engineers wasted hours of redoing discovery. They didn't have that time. And we all know time kills all deals. So what we're trying to accomplish here is to look at these challenges and see what the value of fixing this is, right? Here's the thing skipping structured process makes it even worse. Without discipline, unqualified deals, limp to pilots, $250,000 minimum on cost. I've seen healthcare pilots fail because technical fit wasn't validated early. Professional services got stuck cleaning up and asking who sold this? About 20 to 25% of implementations fail, costing $500,000 to a million dollars each in rework and lost revenue. So this is not just about the beginning of a sales funnel. It's the entire life cycle, both the buying side and the ownership side. We're no longer selling massive solutions and then running away and saying good luck to you. We actually have to care about the customer and make sure that the product that we're selling is something we can implement. And the customer success management team knows early on what was discussed so they know what kind of critical business issues and KPIs were necessary to achieve. So, you know, when you think about the numbers, about 20 to 25% of implementations fail, right? That's two to four million dollars a year for a mid-sized team. Customers churn and advocates who could have driven renewals are gone. I referenced in my first book, How to Become a Sales Engineer, a deal I worked on with Adobe with Equifax. We spent about $150,000 invested in proof offering time only to sell the deal for about $100,000. It would have been cheaper to give it to them for free and save all that lost opportunity cost and being somewhere else in order to drive real revenue. Now, a quick pivot to RFPs. For those that know me, I hate RFPs, unless I write them. There is not one RFP I didn't win when I didn't write it. So here's the challenge with RFPs, right? RFPs consume $40,000 to $60,000 each when you think about the number of hours, 200 plus hours of accounting executive and sales engineering time. You do 10 a quarter, that's $400,000 to $600,000 lost, often on bids rigged for the competitor. Onboarding new sales engineers is another thing. It takes 90 days, which costs $37,500 on a $150,000 salary. And that's not an FTE cost, that's just base salary. Sales engineers spend 30% of their time, 12 hours a week, on manual tasks like taking notes, searching CRM. You know, at $150 an hour, that's $7,200 a quarter per engineer. $360,000 a year for a 50-person team. It's like paying for inefficiency. The broken hives. Yep. With that analogy, more to come. So the broken hives costing you millions, two to three millions in churn, $600,000 in RFPs, $200 to $4 million in failed implementations. County executives are scrambling for resources, beg, borrowing, and stealing. They're not following proper procedure. They're burned out. I mean, yeah, I'm painting a really ugly picture here. But here's the thing: the villain is really clear. On over, engineered, undercoordinated pre-sales process. But there's hope. I'm building out a team here with Andre Middleton, my co-founder. Product we're launching here is called Hivera.ai, and it's going to bring order to this chaos. I'll dive into that in the next episode. So, this was the first introduction to the chaos in the business. And I'm sure there's a lot more you all can provide to me. And I'm happy to have a podcast session with each and every one of you just to explain how big this problem really is. Go ahead and visit seworklife.com to find the link uh to the Hivera site, or you can go right to hyvera.ai today. We just launched our landing page, so forgive us. It's August 13th, and uh we've been in development work for the last couple of months, and our landing page is out there. We're still uh interviewing a lot of uh design partners and happy to continue with that uh as uh we go through this episode's uh here are the 10 episodes that are coming up. So, last thing I'll leave you with join me next time to uncover the cost of this chaos. Keep pushing to sell smarter, even in that storm.