Opine

Only correct way to introduce an SE: "This is [First Name, Last Name] who has led many successful customer implementations and is here to help." All of these other well-intentioned SE introductions have lower win rates: 1. "This is MY Sales Engineer..." 2. "They are the techie/smart one." 3. "They can answer any question you have." Even the most thoughtful reps accidentally relegate SEs to the back seat, brought in only for demos or technical questions. But this ends up costing them valuable deals and insight. ❌ Reducing SEs to “demo side-kicks” boxes them out of discussing business value. ❌ Calling SEs out as "infallible technical wizards" makes the SE↔️Customer relationship transactional and performative. (No one can know everything that might pop up with a customer's environment.) ✅ SEs can deliver detailed, value-based stories, not just answer technical specs. (There's AI for that now) ✅ SEs can offer unique insights into customer pain points to build empathetic champions, while collecting strategic product feedback. When SEs are set up correctly, with an implication that they will collaborate and consult, teams win more. (And so do the customers)

🔑 Introducing OpenAI Prompt Caching OpenAI now automatically caches prompts, reducing API request latency by up to 80% and cutting costs by 50% for long prompts! The best part? It works without any code changes required. Here’s how it works: - Prompts longer than 1024 tokens can trigger cache hits for repeated requests. - Cache lookup finds matching prefixes, speeding up response time. - Static content at the beginning of your prompt? Even better—higher chance for cache hits! Supported models: - gpt-4o - gpt-4o-mini - o1   💡 Why this matters: - Faster responses: Users expect real-time results. With caching, you meet that expectation. - Lower costs: Prompt caching slashes your expenses, making AI deployments more affordable. No additional fees, no complex setup. Just faster, cheaper results, all while maintaining privacy and compliance with Zero Data Retention policies. #AI #OpenAI #SoftwareEngineering #CostOptimization

Opine now supports the ability to filter the deal board page and trend pages by custom fields in your CRM with a silky smooth experience! This change allows our users to answer questions like "𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗣𝗢𝗩𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆?" or "𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗣𝗢𝗩𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗯𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗫?" Shout-out Charlie Duong for the incredibly quick turnaround on these awesome improvements per customer request! 🧙♂️ 🏃♂️ Follow along for more updates! #sales #presales #ux #startups

Solutions Engineers, ever find yourself deep in a POV, trying to juggle multiple prospect requests while ensuring nothing slips through the cracks? It’s not easy being the voice of the customer and making sure their needs are heard. 🚨 Opine's built-in ticket management system is designed to make your life easier. Whether it’s a bug report or a feature request, you can capture and manage everything during the POV phase. Here’s why it matters: - Effortless Ticket Management: Creating and editing tickets is as straightforward as it should be—quick, clean, and intuitive. - Meaningful Prioritization: Select from “Nice to have,” “Important,” or “Blocker” to make sure your internal teams know exactly what’s at stake. - Visibility Across Deals: Opine gives you a clear view of how each ticket impacts multiple deals, making it easier to champion your customer’s needs to product managers. - Direct Integration with Jira: Automatically create issues in Jira, complete with labels for your deals, so nothing gets lost in translation. - Insights for Leadership: Finally, leadership can see the true impact of these tickets, helping prioritize what really matters. Your job is to drive deals forward, and with Opine, you’ve got the tools to ensure your customers’ voices are heard loud and clear. Check out this quick video to see just how simple and smooth editing a ticket can be! #SolutionsEngineering #SalesEngineering #SaaS #POV #POC #CustomerSuccess

The CRM is designed for its primary users - Account Executives and sales leadership. Pre-sales/Solutions Engineering teams end up working in an environment that is cluttered with information that isn’t relevant to them. Sure, you can create custom objects, but this administrative burden is tedious and often requires elevated permissions so process changes happen ad hoc, as little as once per year. Opine is designed for pre-sales teams and every detail of our product is optimized for the workflows that these teams should care about while integrating everything back to the CRM for the rest of the team. The default Opine deal page includes only information that every pre-sales team member should care about during their daily workflow, and is flexible, allowing for drilling deeply into the details of your opportunity or POV. We automatically surface metrics such as the deal’s win probability, POV win confidence, the requests (bugs, feature requests) tied to your deal, important buyer POV activity, and so much more. #sales #presales  #b2bsales #startups #salesforce #hubspot

One of the most important parts of a running a Proof-of-Value (POV) is aligning on decision/success criteria (the first D in MEDDPICC) with your buyer, but there is a huge risk to just managing these in a spreadsheet. The feedback across POV plans in aggregate is extremely valuable to the broader organization at a vendor’s company—Product and Marketing teams for example—and even more important to improve the tech-win rate for Solutions Engineering teams. Consider the following use cases that our customers find compelling: 1. Which decision/success criteria is resonating the most with our customers by industry? 2. Which decision/success criteria are associated with losing deals? 3. Which decision/success criteria are not influencing the outcome of the POV? (Cut these!) How are teams tracking these types of granular decision/success criteria level metrics? In our experience, with little real data. Opine’s POV Plans enable vendors to easily tailor a plan to shepherd an opportunity as efficiently as possible while analyzing data in aggregate. POV plans are flexible and can be built from reusable playbooks, built completely custom for a buyer, or a combination of both! Additionally, Opine evaluation plans may be shared directly with the buyer, and allow buyers or vendors to rate the criteria in a consistent way. #MEDDPICC #MEDDIC #sales #presales #presales #b2bsales #startups

At Opine, we believe that pre-sales teams are underserved in tooling. CRMs are extremely flexible, but they require significant investment to develop tailored views for teams. The POV process is not just a single stage! It’s a series of important milestones that indicate whether a deal is on track to close or not. Opine’s deals dashboard comes out-of-the-box with sub-stages, so pre-sales teams can quickly see the status of their deals without all of the noise. Yes, these sub-stages are configurable to fit your exact workflow! 🚀 How are your teams tracking the status of POVs? We'll be continuing to share product updates, so follow Opine to stay tuned! #sales #presales #presales #b2bsales #startups

If you're selling a technical product, every qualified lead is valuable, and every trial is precious. We need conversion rates as high as possible, and can't risk subpar buying experiences. Akash Ganapathi Austin Kelleher Charlie Duong and Adam Williams are working hard to help you deliver an amazing POC/buying experience while monitoring for bottlenecks/barriers to conversion in your technical sales process.

So excited to announce Adam Williams (right) is joining the Opine family. Austin Kelleher, Charlie Duong and Akash Ganapathi have known Adam for over 5 years as a diligent software mind and early/founding engineer at startups like Spreedly and JupiterOne. We are thrilled to have his experience, candor, writing skill, customer empathy, and software engineering skill on our side as we scale our product development. We believe companions make a company, and Adam is someone you can call on during good times and bad alike. We are blessed to be working together again!

Charlie Duong, Austin Kelleher, and our new hire, another JupiterOne alum, (announcement soon) are making proofs-of-concept delightful, not daunting. As Akash Ganapathi notes, POCs are an opportunity to differentiate from competitors and win deals by a mile.