Hyvara.ai - Episode 6 – Opening the Funnel: Research, Qualification & Discovery

Blind calls. Wasted hours. Missed questions. In this episode, we explore how Hyvara.ai changes the game at the very start of the sales cycle. From smart research that preps every AE, to sharper qualification that cuts dead deals fast, to discovery that uncovers what really matters — this is where momentum begins.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey folks, welcome back to the SE Work Life Podcast. I'm your host. Today we're going to go through episode six, opening the funnel, research, qualification, and discovery. If you've been following along the first five episodes, you've seen the front-end chaos in the sales cycle, the blind outreach, the rushed prep, the inconsistent qualification, and the overstuffed discovery calls that, you know, burn through time and goodwill. We've painted the picture of how it works today and why it costs company millions. Now it's time to talk about the art of the possible. In this episode, we're going to walk through the vision for the first three Hivera hives: the research hive, the qualification hive, and the discovery hive. These are hives that decide whether you're on the right path to win or headed straight for a long, expensive dead end. Let's start with the research hive. So the problem. They just jump in cold. Now you might say, well, that's a lazy rep. No, no, that's not the case. I used to be a rep myself. And it's time, right? Remember back to the other conversation, time is the dreaded enemy. Reps just don't have time. Maybe they have great tools available to them today, but they just don't take the time. Now, we're trying to build an automated agent here that's going to do a lot of that work for them and free up a lot of that time, but make sure they walk into a situation that they understand the full scope of what that brand's issues are and what their competition looks like. So what this agent really does is it monitors earning reports, job posting, news articles, and funding rounds. It analyzes past opportunities, win-loss data and CRM notes. It'll surface competitor references and digital buying signals. It'll auto-build account dossiers with business strategy and snapshots, generate custom challenger style outreach scripts, identify key buyer by role, budget authority, and past engagement, predicts likely use case fit by vertical and tech stack. It'll tag urgency signals tied to financial calendars and procurement behavior, and it'll suggest top objections, counters based on similar deals, saving probably about 10 to 12 hours per opportunity in prep. I mean, heck, I used to be able to go through enablement and train a lot of pre-sales engineers on the fundamentals, which is why don't you go get their 10K or annual report and rip through it? This agent will do that for you, and you'll be best prepared. Now, the business benefit. By replacing obviously 10 hours to 12 hours of manual prep with automation, you know, verify insights, the research hive increases AE productivity by 50 to 7% on outbound cycles and eliminating the need to pull subject matter experts in for basic discovery. Because remember, with each subject matter expert costing about 400 grand annually, that's FTE cost. Even saving a hundred of unnecessary subject matter expert calls delivers six figures annual savings. Let's cover off the second qualification hive. The problem here, AEs waste time chasing poorly qualified deals. Discovery is inconsistent, subjective, and siloed. So this is where the SDR sends over their notes. And thanks to Otter and some newer AI tools out there, reps are getting good data, but they're not getting a summary based on their qualification and researching combined. They have to sort of do that themselves. I mean, Otter is really great for summarizing a particular sales call that an SDR had. But if you combine that with the power of research, now you get a full picture of the what the opportunity that you're presented with at this customer. So what this agent does is orchestrates joint prep between AE, SE, and agent pre-discovery. It'll map the B manter or whatever sales environment, whether it's medpic, I'm a B manter guy, which is budget, method, authority, need, time, and risk, live during calls and in real-time prompts. It'll surface buying signals for budget, need, risk, and timing. Tracks sentiment and engagement level of each stakeholder, prompts better questions based on buyer industry and objections. It'll align teams on CBIs, which are critical business issues, and CTIs, which are critical technical issues. Suggests sales stage progress based on scoring, and flags ghosting, stalling, or missing decision makers. This goes back to the stakeholder mapping we're going to talk about later. And it creates a one-click qualification summary, reducing time to qualify in or qualify out by 40 to 60%. And we all understand what the downstream value of qualifying out is, ensuring that we don't waste time and wasting money at the same time. So, you know, the business benefit here is simple. High various qualification hive means fewer subject matter experts wasted on deals that won't close, faster progression for deals that will, and a higher win rate due to better early stage clarity. Cutting just 50 wasted SME hours per quarter equates to roughly $50,000 to $60,000 in savings, while freeing AEs to focus on on the highest probability deals. Next, let's talk about Discovery Hive. Problem here, most companies overstaff discovery calls. This is a conversation we had early in the first series of the episodes that we put out in this podcast. You have five or six subject matter experts on the call just in case, right? It's expensive, confusing for the buyer, and often unnecessary. I remember there were times when I would receive panic calls from the RVP or the sales rep looking for a resource. I must have a resource on this call tomorrow. It's going to be a million-dollar opportunity. Of course, I ask a few questions and I come to realize that there's a lot of happy years going on here and hopeful. But I get it. Sales reps do not want to miss the opportunity to really strike a conversation and land a deal. What they don't realize is that it's okay to have another call. In fact, if you call in a subject matter expert for that first call, it shows that that subject matter expert might not be that much of an expert. You're sort of telegraphing the customer that, hey, wow, this resource was mightily available. Is that because they're not really good at their job? So having the sense of scarcity as part of the process allows the rep to do a give and get, right? Hey, if you bring five or six people on the call, or maybe you can bring another champion on the call, I might be able to change my subject matter expert's uh availability and pull him off another deal because he's so busy. This becomes a consistent problem when we start to look at resources. Resources are just brought in and we forget about the optics of what that resource looks like to the individual on the other side, i.e., the customer. So what this agent does is simple: it joins as a silent attendee and logs call data, tracks key topics, stakeholders, and talk time ratios, prompts SE and AE in real time to address skipped CTIs or CBIs, ensures agenda coverage and account-specific value messaging, alerts when buyer concerns are unresolved, it'll capture verbatim and stakeholder sentiment, recaps each call with an AI-generated summary and action plan. It'll identify trends across all calls in an opportunity. And it also suggests what's the right subject matter expert to be involved when it's critical, and not just bringing in a smart brain on the stick. It'll reduce sales meetings by 40 to 50% while improving buyer clarity. So the business benefit is pretty obvious. By reducing the number of people per call and capturing the same level of insights without their presence, Discovery Hive delivers one of the fastest ROIs in the Hive era suite. It avoids subject matter experts' calls on saving two to three hours of prep and meeting time. A single avoided subject matter expert present per week can save $40,000 to $50,000 annually, while making the buying experience cleaner and more compelling. Next, let's kind of go through what this all wraps up, right? So this is the beginning sales cycle. This is the most critical stages in a sales process. This is going to be able to get to know quickly, which saves us money down the road. It's okay to walk away. In fact, sometimes walking away from a deal is better. It forces the customer to go, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Uh, I really do need you. Well, fine, answer these questions. It'll also ensure that we're not just throwing resources at a deal, unnecessarily to sit there and babysit a particular sales cycle. Not to mention, not getting anything for it, going back to that give get. If I'm going to give you access to a very valuable resource, I want something in return. So research, qualification, and discovery, three hives, one mission to protect your time, focus your resources, and set every deal up for success before you've even sent a proposal. So in the next episode, we're going to move deeper into the funnel inside the room with the sales call hive, the technical win hive, and the value assessment hive. That's where we turn interest into conviction. Until then, you guys have a great day. Again, going back to the end of each of these conversations, if you like what you hear on this call, uh go ahead and click on the design partnership aspects on the landing page, or just reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to have you on one of these podcasts and, you know, tell me about your experiences and how you would like to fix it. Uh, with the fillage that we have available to us, we're going to be able to get to a really amazing solution and we're going to start closing a lot more business. Until then, have a great day.