Lesson 40 - Map the Buying Process

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Understanding your prospect’s buying process is crucial for guiding the sale. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to map out the buying process and identify potential roadblocks. Your assignment will involve creating a visual map of the buying process for one of your deals.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to map out the buying process for one of your target opportunities. Now the buying process is really broken down into two areas of med pick, you have the decision process and the paper process. Let's start with the decision process. When you think about what's going what it's going to take for your deal to close, you need to start visually mapping out all of the different steps that this deal is going to take. For each of those steps, you need to be mapping out all of the evaluators, all of the key stakeholders that are going to be a part of that step, and any potential friction or roadblocks that you foresee coming up during that step, you also want to write down what you would consider to be the exit criteria for each step. This is all going to make sense as we dive into it in a little more detail. So let's jump in. There are a couple of different milestones in the typical decision process. The first is the initial evaluation phase. Normally, this is going to involve, you know, for our example, let's say that this involves an end user, like a technical lead, and maybe the person in charge of the project, so a project manager. Normally, when you think about initial evaluation, that's when you're just now starting to catch their interest. So this is going to be your initial discovery call. You're going to be gathering requirements, what they would need to see from a solution, and then ultimately, the initial evaluation would probably end with a solution demonstration, or at least a high level demo, then you would move into something like a technical review, where they're actually going to compare the technical requirements they have against the technical offerings of your solution. So this might involve an IT director, it might involve a solutions architect, but ultimately you're going to be doing a technical assessment. You'll be doing a proof of concept sometimes, or a pilot. You might be doing a security review or compliance review. And this is also where you would normally have, like a deep dive, technical demonstration of your solution. Then you would probably go into like the business case, the value gather the value demonstration, or the ROI demonstration phase. So here you would be presenting your business case. You would be aligning on the ROI calculations, the metrics that make sense for your customer. You would potentially do a competitive analysis. So after you've won that technical win, that's when you're getting ahead, and normally this is when you're in front of either a steering committee or an economic buyer of some sort. Then from there, you go into kind of final approval phases, where you have your procurement manager, your legal counsel, your finance director, and they're doing contract negotiations, risk assessments, budget approvals, and then from there, you go into kind of the final review approval and red lines and contact contract signatures, and that's normally going to be with, you know, the economic buyer, the CFO and the legal team. So is that how every single solution is going to work? No, your deals might be faster, slower, more complex, less complex, but ultimately you're you're probably going to see those phases come up again and again. Now for each of those decision points, as I mentioned, you need to be documenting the key stakeholders involved, and what the milestones or the exit criteria are for you to exit that stage and move forward to the next stage. And the reason that you're doing this is you really want to start building a timeline for when you think this deal is going to close that's going to help you with your forecasting. So you need to start to understand, well, how intense or robust is this specific step going to be, and who are the stakeholders, so that I can make sure I get everybody in the room so that we can align on how to move forward. Make sure that you're confirming this decision process with your champion. You don't just want to guess. In fact, you really can't know the decision process without your champion, so you need to bring them in and have them align with you on what that roadmap looks like. Once you understand the decision process, then you're going to dive into the paper process. And the paper process is another crucial area of med pick. It's the P in med pick, and it's an outline of the contractual or document requirements that need to be completed in order to finalize a sale or to move forward with a sale. So there usually there are several types of documents involved in a sale. Let's talk about some of the big ones early on in the sale, they might require you to. Sign an NDA, a non disclosure agreement, a legal contract that ensures both parties can openly communicate about their needs while keeping certain information confidential. Typically, it's signed pretty early. Then you have your pilot agreement, if you're running a proof of concept or a pilot also known as a POC, sometimes that's an agreement that outlines the terms and conditions for the trial or pilot phase. This will usually specify the duration, the scope, the success criteria for evaluating your solution. So essentially, with this document, you want to map out what does a successful pilot look like, what does an unsuccessful pilot look like. Then you have your statement of work. This is often used for upfront kind of implementation, onboarding services, professional services, work, custom work, and normally it defines the scope of work that's going to be performed, the deliverables that the prospect is going to get, the timelines and the pricing. Then you have your MSA, your master service agreement, which is kind of a broader agreement that sets the terms and conditions for all future transactions between the two parties. Normally it will include details like liability, warranties, dispute resolution, etc. And then for your opportunity, you will most likely have your order form or your quote. This is the document that contains the pricing, the quantities, the terms, whether it's a single year agreement, multi year, etc, any other key detail that the customer is going to sign in order to initiate the purchase. And then you may have something called an e, u, l, a, or an end user licensing agreement, which is a contract between the software provider and the end user that defines how the software can be used. So the documents that you encounter in your sale are going to vary, but ultimately, you need to understand, what are the documents that are needed? When do they need to be signed? The timing and sequences is crucial because it can often cause delays. So you don't want to get to the very end of a quarter and think that this deal is coming in and then realize that there are two or three documents that you forgot to sign, or that now need to be signed, that are going to need to go through both teams, legal teams, etc, make sure your champion or your point of contact has aligned with you on the required paper process. And then finally, you should be navigating any potential pitfalls or objections that you think are going to come up as part of the decision or paper process. So some of the common objections that can kill a deal are it concerns? So you want to think about security risks, things that the customer would consider an objection, security risks, integration challenges, lack of technical fit, lack of compliance fit. Maybe you don't hit a certain compliance regulation. You want to think about procurement delays, pricing concerns, vendor evaluation process concerns, RFP requirements, um and and really, in order to to overcome these things for it, you should be bringing in a technical expert early. You should be bringing in a technical minded Solutions Engineer to talk through these objections for procurement, you should be clearly articulating the ROI the business case. You should align with the procurement team early to understand their concerns. Provide all the necessary compliance documents up front. You could also run into legal roadblocks, unfavorable contract terms, concerns over liability, data protection issues. So make sure that you're understanding their contract terms early, that you are offering flexibility where you can, and that you're bringing your legal team in as soon as it makes sense to facilitate red lines and negotiations. And then finance holds right. Finance budget limitations, unclear, ROI financial risk. Make sure, again, through that business case, that the economic buyer understands the cost benefit analysis, that you're leveraging, compelling ROI calculations, that you're providing, compelling case studies. And then the last one is just missing stakeholders. You get all the way to the end of a sale, and then you realize that there was someone you were supposed to bring in that you never brought in. So making sure that you are involving all the necessary decision makers from the beginning that you're using your champion to align on who those decision makers are and what they care about. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. You're going to map out the decision making process and paper process for a current opportunity. If you don't have a current opportunity, focus on one that just recently sold. But ultimately, you need to map out all of the different key decision inflection points, the key stakeholders involved in those inflection points, and what the exit criteria or. Milestones need to be hit in order to move on to the next part of the decision process. Even better, if you can do this visually, you also want to be writing down all of the different paper documents that would need to be signed and bringing in the necessary stakeholders early so and then finally, list the potential roadblocks or challenges and think about how you plan to overcome them, make sure that you're aligning with your champion, make sure that you're aligning internally with your mentor, mentor manager or new hire buddy, and your study guide will provide you a template to help you get started. That is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time, bye. You.