Lesson 46 - Take Control of the Sale

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Successful salespeople guide their deals proactively. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to set agendas, manage timelines, and take ownership of the sales process to keep deals moving forward. Your assignment will involve creating a step-by-step action plan for an ongoing deal, including key milestones and deadlines.

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 learn how to take control of your sale and keep the momentum going all the way to a closed one deal. Now early on, a sale can seem like a clear cut process. You get your meetings with your initial stakeholders. You do basic discovery to learn their needs, you talk a little bit and build excitement around your product, and you do a demonstration to show how your product meets the needs that they've discussed. But once the demo is over, what do you do next? A lot of salespeople struggle with this evaluation process, so let's start by answering that question. Now, obviously the things that you're able to offer are going depend on you're going to depend on your organization, your product, what resources are available to you, et cetera. But let's talk about some of the most common ones. Number one, you can present a business case if you typically deal with faster sales cycles, where you know, doing discovery, doing a demo, presenting a business case. Maybe it's that simple. If it is, you want to make sure that every single stakeholder, everyone that needs to sign off on the purchase, is on that business case call. So after the demo, align with your champion, make sure your economic buyer is there. If there's an executive sponsor, it legal, finance, procurement, end users, team leaders, anyone that you would need to sign off and then schedule your business case. Once you're there, be prepared to present the value that you're driving, the high level company initiatives that you're solving for, the ROI statement, anything that you would need to kind of make that sale. So business case could be one example. Another one that you could do is a deep dive, technical review or security review. So if you have if it is very strong within your prospective organization, or if they have security concerns, trust concerns, maybe it's financial services, organization, medical, pharmaceutical, something with more sensitive data. It could be valuable to schedule a follow up deep dive, security and technical review. This could also be valuable if you're making sure that your product aligns with their tech stack. Basically, it could just be valuable to understand more of a technical, deep dive on how your product aligns with their needs. If you're feeling out of your depth on that, make sure that you reach out to your solutions, engineer, architect, product team you know anyone within your org that can help you out. And then a third potential next step could be to set up a pilot or a proof of concept make sure that you're not offering this unless your organization says it's okay to do so. But a pilot or a proof of concept can be a ridiculously impactful way to create momentum in a deal and get it across the finish line, basically. So when you think about a proof of concept, there are a couple of things you need to remember. First, make sure that you're not offering a proof of concept unless the customer is aligned on how long the pilot's going to be. So is this a three week pilot? A three month pilot? What does it look like? What are the success criteria for this pilot? Specifically, what are the metrics? What are we looking for? Qualitative, quantitative. And then finally, and this is very important, do you have their commitment that if the proof of concept meets those criteria, they are going to move forward with the sale? Because setting up a pilot, running a pilot, evaluating a pilot, that takes a lot of bandwidth from your from you and your team, so make sure that you have that commitment before you commit to doing a pilot. But a pilot is a very common next step, so business case, deep dive, technical review, pilot or proof of concept, those are three very common next steps that you can offer, but there are a lot of others. You could hold a product roadmap discussion with their team. You could bring in an executive for a higher level conversation. You could connect them with a current customer for a live testimonial demonstration or discussion. You could bring them into your office for an off site workshop, a Strategy Workshop that can be very powerful for executive alignment. The list goes on and on, but all of these things help you to create momentum in a deal. Now, another way to keep deal momentum is through the use of what are called micro commitments. You may have heard of this if you've studied the Challenger sale. A micro commitment is a small, manageable task for your prospect that keeps the conversation going. So this could be a small meeting. It could be a follow up call. It could be a task that you're asking them for. Some examples of this might be asking for an introduction to an additional decision maker, requesting feedback on materials that you've sent over, scheduling a product. To walk through for team members, performing workflows, or use case discovery, holding brainstorming sessions with them, competitive differentiation, reviews. These are all things that allow you to keep control and keep momentum. It basically what you don't want to allow the customer to do or the prospect to do, is to say, Okay, well, you know, we'll talk and we'll reach out to you in next steps, right? Because it's very easy for your deal to die that way. You want to maintain the ball, right? You want the ball to be in your court. You want to maintain that momentum. Get another meeting on the calendar, right? Don't leave a meeting without another meeting on the calendar. You want to follow up you want. You know, hey, just in case, I'm gonna put something on our calendar for two weeks from now, and if we don't need it, we can always cancel it, right? You let them know that you are putting a meeting on their calendar for a follow up. A couple of additional tips for keeping momentum, keeping control. Always come to your meetings with a clear agenda and a clear outcome. State that agenda up front align with them. We've talked about this in previous lessons. It helps you keep the conversation focused on impactful areas that are going to move the deal forward, rather than letting it turn into a support call, success call, etc. Second after each call, send a recap, and in that recap reinforce the value that you showed on the call. So for example, after a successful demo, you might send a recap email that outlines the key points discussed, what you showed, how it aligns to their decision criteria, the value your solution provides the agreed upon next steps, and that will keep everyone on the same page and reinforce why your solution continues to be the right choice for them. And then third, you should establish clear timelines with your with your prospect for every step of the decision process. So this could include deadlines for proposal review, expected dates for feedback, milestones for a proof of concept. And a lot of organizations will call this a mutual success plan, or a mutual action plan, where essentially you're sending them an email that looks something like this. You say, Hi Mark, it was great to catch up with you this morning. Thanks for taking the time to share updates, to recap our conversation based on the positive results from our pilot survey, BarkBox would like to move forward with purchasing Sprout Social. BarkBox will be starting with 30 licenses and growing as needed. Our goal is to have your account created by October to begin migrating content and training and onboarding your users. Based on that discussion, I'm sharing the remaining steps in the process and a timeline to have each of these steps completed to stay on track with our October 1 start date. Steps we've completed so far. Budget approval is complete. Security review is complete. Initial license count has been determined. Steps we've yet to complete. Legal review on September 20, with the BarkBox legal team, cio will sign the order form on September 25 support team will create your account on october 1, and our onboarding team will begin training and onboarding on October 15. We have our touch base call next week, but keep me posted if you hear any updates on the legal review in the meantime, thank you and enjoy your weekend. So that's an example of an email that I might send that clearly aligns on what we discussed, what our next steps are, what the timeline is for those next steps. Who's responsible for those next steps? All of that is incredibly important. And then finally, you should always be leveraging your champion to navigate internal politics, right? If you don't have a strong that's why you have a strong champion, right? It's one of the things we've talked about previously. So navigate internal politics, gather feedback on their calls, push the deal forward to the next stage. Those are things your champion should be working with you on. All right now it's your turn. Your assignment today, I want you to review three of your previous closed one deals, not current opportunities, opportunities that have already closed in the past. And I want you to draw the map between the demo and the closure, what are all the steps that happened and who was involved in those steps on our side and on the customer side. Then, you know, look for trends right then I want you to pick an opportunity for what you have an upcoming demo, and I want you to write down two options for next steps that you can recommend once that demo is complete. So after that demo is over, right afterward, what are you going to recommend? Is the next step? What is the meeting that you're going to attempt to get on their calendar that could include, you know, anything that could include business case, pilot, proof of concept, technical deep dive, product roadmap, discussion, anything that we discussed? And then finally, pick an opportunity for what you have a pretty good understanding of the decision process, including, you know, late stage like legal, IT, finance, procurement, reviews and draft an email to your champion at that account that contains a mutual action plan. So include your time. Lines for getting the deal done to hit your forecasted target. If it makes sense, you can go ahead and send that over to your prospect, but first make sure that you align with your mentor, manager, new hire buddy, every step of the way, and make sure that your prospect is aligned, your champion is aligned on the timelines that you're sending over. Your study guide will help walk you through all of this, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye.