Arlo Mistake #3 - I Recorded Every Sales Call. I Never Listened to Them.

I have written two so far on product related lessons learned and I feel like it would be a good time to switch over to go to market lessons learned.

One of the benefits of a startup is that you can start fresh from a tooling perspective and we definitely took advantage of that with Arlo. New AI driven CRM (Attio), new lead gen software (Seamless, Ocean, Clay), new outreach software (Instantly, HeyReach), and many others. Our messaging was working ("Arlo is the world's first AI loan processor" was our winner). We booked ~15 demos per month.

Here's the reality though: 2-3 would no-show every month. So I'm actually delivering 12-13 demos. Of those, maybe 2 closed. That's a lot of rejection.

As founder, my responsibility was taking our customers from demo booked to closed won. Sounds so easy! Just a couple of funnel pitstops and boom - money in the bank. Each new cohort of customers felt easier to talk to. We better understood their problems. We had a better product. The demos went smoother. Yet... our closing rate didn't improve. Proposals still got ghosted at basically the same rate.

The really frustrating part? Not all demos are created equal. Some calls felt like we really connected - I'd draft an awesome proposal thinking this was the one. Crickets. Other demos felt DOA but I'd follow through just in case. Sometimes those closed! My gut instinct about which deals would close was completely broken.

So… where was the mistake?? Building on the last blog post, I was hopeful that the next feature we delivered would help us close the next customer. I took what I could from the feedback during the demo calls and modified the product in the hopes that would help me close the next cohort of customers.

But here's the kicker - we were smart enough to record all of our phone calls. We had HOURS of prospects telling us exactly why they would or wouldn't buy. Their pain points. Their objections. Their buying criteria. A library of why deals lived or died.

Did I analyze any of it? Nope. I never went back through those recordings. Never analyzed my notes. Never looked for patterns between the 2 that closed and the 13 that ghosted each month. I just kept chasing the next feature, trusting my (broken) gut about which deals would close, wondering why the rate stayed flat.

The mistake... I was sitting on a gold mine of data and never picked up a shovel. A simple analysis of those recordings could have shown us exactly where we were losing deals. Instead, I just moved on to the next demo, the next feature, the next cohort. Your failed deals are your most valuable data source - but only if you actually analyze them instead of just moving on to the next one.