“Can you share your screen?”, I said. Not that I really wanted to see how this interview candidate built the workflow – but to see what all apps has he bookmarked. It gives me intel onto the app integrations this candidate has worked on and build my next set of conversations around it.

“Bookmarks” – that’s the clever hack you are here for and to understand how it is important in selling and how do you actually use the knowledge of it to build conversations.

Back at Whatfix (where I last built SalesOps) the product was about digital adoption. Presume you have an app – let us say Salesforce – and you know your team has issues adopting it – Whatfix was a contender and potential answer to your problem.

So if you were a witty sales rep you would ask the prospect to share their screen for some reason and check the bookmarks. If someone had bookmarks: “Users”, “Setup”, “Opps”….or in fact a bookmark folder “SFDC” – you knew you have hit the jackpot. Coz the bookmarks are all navigating steps to a right part of Salesforce and an app like Whatfix could make your life easy. As a sales rep you now had a great pitch.

“Jessica, what are these bookmarks? Why do you have them?” And they would explain how painful it is to easily navigate Salesforce and bingo!

“Well Jessica, you may not need the bookmarks anymore. Let me show you Whatfix” and boom! Your narrative is set for the entire conversation.

This model of observing bookmarks is pretty intelligent for GTM folks or any customer facing rep for that matter but it is nifty for everyone really.

Ex: You are talking to a vendor to vet their app for internal use and you see them having bookmarked multiple pages of their own app. Now you know to ask an important Q on implementation and training. The last thing you want is your team bookmarking pages to navigate. At scale that is hundreds of hours of company time lost.

Ex: You are a rep at Gong, Avoma, Wingman – what you wanna look out for is any bookmark on call sharing, notes sharing.

Ex: You are a sales rep at Outreach, SalesLoft, Outplay – what you wanna lookout for is bookmarks on cadences, docs on SDR Processes, SDR<>AE handshakes.

Ex: You are a sales rep at Hubilo, you wanna look out for any bookmark relating to events.

So on and so forth.

For sales folks, the next time you are on a call with a prospect, here are three things you should do:

• Ask them to share the screen. If you don’t have a reason, make up one!

• Ensure you have them navigate you on a browser tab. And most likely you will see them having bookmarked a few pages.

• Note the bookmarks and group them into three categories: apps they use (gives you intel on other tech stack they use), docs they bookmark (could be internal projects), everything else (if they bookmarked Facebook, you know you wanna be their friend, if they bookmarked LinkedIn – you know you wanna connect them there).

• Build your narrative with the bookmark intel and then converse. Like the example of Jessica mentioned above.

Try this nifty hack (observation really) in your sales pitches. While I have been using this for nearly eight Qtrs, tell me what difference it made to your selling when it does, by dropping a comment below or writing to me on LinkedIn.

Happy Selling!