by Tom Fedro
Today is always the most productive day of your week. – Mark Hunter
If the outright question doesn’t fit the scenario, there are some conversational gambits you can use to feel out the prospective client’s budget without being so direct. You’re in the business to solve problems and eliminate the pain for the client, so you need to spend your resources frugally. If they don’t have the money to invest, you must move on to the next prospect. Don’t burn any bridges. You can deliver value with information provided to a prospect, and be welcomed back when the money becomes available. You have to understand where things stand to make the right business decision for a given potential sale.
At our company, we more or less tend to go straight for the prize. We ask if there is any money currently budgeted or earmarked for their project. If it’s a “No”, we say that we understand and we talk a little bit about why we’re so successful elsewhere. We show what a company just like theirs has done and how we were able to save them money, demonstrating why they invested in us and have been a customer of ours for multiple years.
You have to be open so that the prospect can understand why other people are spending money on pain like theirs. Ask why they don’t have it budgeted. Try to get a crack in the case where they’ll offer to take another look; they probably do need what you’re selling or you wouldn’t be there in the first place. If not, you’ve done the job. No PAM; it’s time to move on.
You got in there. You met people. You showed them how other people are using your product and how you eliminated and mitigated their pain, providing measurable savings and a quantifiable return on investment. You made sure they know that when the time is right and when the money is available, you’ll return and show them exactly how you can help their business — and then you can go to your CFO or CXO and figure out terms that work for all parties involved.
Nothing is impossible; the word itself says ‘I’m possible!’ – Audrey Hepburn
Building relationships is the key to the sale, and what wins most deals is that people buy from people they like. When you have unique technology and features, or some things are different about your solution but you’ve got competitors who do what you do, it comes down to what the salesperson brings to the table. It comes down to how you’re able to present and differentiate yourself and your company’s solution. It comes down to getting the prospect to see you as a trusted advisor so they know that when they sign up, you’ll be there for them. You’re going to take care of them, and it’s going to be okay. They trust you. Million-dollar deals go one way or the other because of that salesperson.
Being blunt can be okay, but it must be qualified by your understanding of the customer’s pain. You must be confident your value is high enough that price is not going to matter. Your solution may not be the cheapest alternative; in fact, you may be the top-priced alternative. The prospect can get something more affordable, but now that you understand the pain, you can bring your value points to bear directly on that pain in such a way that the competition can’t touch.
Whether your advantage is product feature, support, or future roadmap, your research into the pain will set you apart from the competition. It will demonstrate your sincere and genuine concern for the prospect, and it will place the salesperson following this process at a much more intimate level than the person coming in the door right after you.
Nobody likes to be sold to, but everybody likes to buy. – Earl Taylor
Get in front of these people and confirm the pain, confirm the authority, and confirm the budget. If PAM’s flashing you the green light, you can move forward to close the deal. Between the ICP and the buyer personas, you have an excellent dossier on your prospects. Once you have the map, it’s simply a matter of making it happen.
Some big clients want to be wined and dined before discussing details. You run into some of those people (especially at the management level) who haven’t been at it that long and want to see a basketball game or hit the golf course. Sometimes, that’s part of the million-dollar deal process and a part of being a sales professional.
In some cases, that entertainment piece makes good business sense. To get out on a golf course with an influencer or a decision maker is a fantastic opportunity. You get four or five hours with a prospect, and there’s not a much better use of your time when you’re talking about seven-figure deals. Just make sure you can discern what would be a waste of time with a particular person so that you can gracefully bow out and find other ways to keep them engaged.
What you lack in talent can be made up with desire, hustle, and giving 110 percent all the time.
– Don Zimmer
Should you proceed with a deal if you realize it’ll compromise the client company’s overall financial situation?
You can’t fully know a company’s financial situation unless you have access to their bank statements. Your job on the sales side is to know that your deal’s either going to save or make the prospect more money; in either case, you’re not going to be compromising their financial situation. Each transaction is different. The salesperson is a trusted advisor, but it’s ultimately up to the client to make the decision. Lay it out for them, and show how they’re going to save a significant amount or make a significant amount with your product and get a reasonable investment return. Encourage them to wrap it up so they can start reaping the benefits.
If the deal doesn’t move forward, do some forensic research and figure out why it didn’t happen. That might take some lunchtime or other off-the-record discussions with the principles to understand what went south. Sometimes, it could be something you couldn’t know, such as they thought they had the cash, but then there was a crisis in Malaysia and the budget was reallocated. They’re still interested, but they need to shelve it until the next year.
If you realize that the money isn’t there, make sure to end the interaction so that the prospect is inclined to come back to you when their business is back in growth mode. Always stick with the straight-to-the-point approach. Once you’ve identified their pain and showed them that your solution brings tremendous value, and they say they can’t afford it, move on. Do it in a way that they find you to be a helpful and useful resource for them going forward.
You want to leave as much value in industry knowledge and expertise that points to the fact that they’ll be much better off with your product or service solution in their shop than they are without it. Make sure they know you will be delighted to come back when the time is right, and when they’re in a position to invest in what you do. Walk out the door with everybody smiling and feeling that you are straight-shooting thought leaders and consultants ready to help them in the future when needed.
I suggest that you follow up with them every three or four months to see where they stand. Add value in those check-in calls and meetings with new industry-specific information or trends your prospect will find helpful. People rotate in and out, new CEOs come in, and new opportunities arise. Things can go from the dark of night to a bright, sunny morning in no time for a prospect and instantly you are back in the arena to create value for your client and your company. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. Keep your iron in the fire, but you must always leave with a smile and full respect. By doing this, you maintain those relationships and those connections to keep the lines of communication open.
6. Create a compelling proposal.
Let’s say PAM’s in the building and everybody is ready to move forward. Everyone agrees that your plan is going to be signed off on to indicate that the return on their investment is there. In most cases, if you have demonstrated that you understand, and are genuinely concerned, and have made it clear that you can solve their pain, the price is merely a quote on a piece of paper; the number is what it’s going to cost to get to the promised land. The pricing summary or quote doesn’t have to be that complex or complicated. It articulates what you’re delivering and the investment required to do so. Next comes the agreement, which is an entirely differen
t document that outlines all the terms and legal obligations in detail.
Then it goes over the wall to legal, and that’s a process in itself. The agreement could be 15, 20 or 30 pages of indemnifications and termination clauses and service-level agreements. It’s a standard part of doing business with major corporations. You’ve got a legal team, and they’ve got a legal team. Once the terms have been established around how much it’s going to cost, that goes in as an amendment to the 30-page document that both sides review and revise. At this stage, there may be compromises and redlines, so everybody sees what’s been changed. Once the document has been signed, you’re off to implementation!
Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.
– Thomas J. Watson Jr.
If you’ve done an excellent job, often the proposal will be a simple price quote with a natural close to a sign-off where everybody agrees. You’ve done a great job identifying the pain and how your product is going to eliminate it. The price is reasonable, so — bang! — it’s done.
Other times, especially if you’re dealing with a public entity or a government entity, you’ll have to deal with an extra step. Perhaps you’ll get a request for proposal (RFP). You might have been in there for months, working with them on your process and getting it to the point where everybody agrees that this is it, and we’re going to move forward. Then, by law, they have to get bids from others for the particular proposition. They issue an RFP (an instruction set or guide that tells whatever solution provider you are how to propose your offering for this specific customer). RFPs can be hundreds of pages long, especially if it’s for a federal entity.
If you haven’t been in there designing the RFP directly with the agency or with the public company so that it maps out nicely to your particular product offering, you have a low-to-zero percent chance of winning. If that’s the case, you have to be matter-of-fact, and decide whether to participate, even though it could be a multimillion-dollar opportunity. Some of those RFP responses can take months of work and tremendous resources to put together. You have to be able to recognize that although the payout is millions of dollars, you weren’t there to design the RFP, and somebody else probably has it wired. Sometimes the best decision is to walk away.
We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
– W. H. Auden
If you pursue the RFP, you’ve got to go hardcore to make it happen. Show your energy and expertise. Your proposal must shine with enthusiasm and passion. Demonstrate a deep understanding of the problem. Show commitment that reflects your organization’s genuine desire to win the business and demonstrate what you have done in the past that proves you’re worthy for consideration. Make sure it’s compliant with the structure they’re seeking so that your proposal evaluator can quickly identify each of the sections and how it corresponds to the RFP instructions. The content must be responsive by focusing on how your company will do the work, and not just describe the action. Present the vision of what you’re going to do for the prospect in a way that makes them feel they have no other choice for their award; you and your solution fit like hand in glove.
For a presentation for a private company that isn’t bothering with the process of a formal request for quotation (RFQ), the best situation is to deliver a price quote and ask for the business on the spot. If you’ve done your job right, when you get to the point of investment, you have already eliminated the competition. If they’re ready to do a deal based on a price quote, your energy, expertise and commitment have already shone through, and fancy proposals aren’t necessary.
When the situation requires a detailed response and proposal, it goes without saying that yours must be the most professional in the stack. Anybody who picks it up and doesn’t know you as a vendor should see immediately that you intimately understand the problem, and know how to deliver the solution, and that you’ve done it before, and have excellent references which speak highly of your solution. After five minutes, the uninitiated could conclude from your proposal that you understand their business and their pain, have articulated it accurately, and have shown a reasonable and achievable ROI proposition.
A goal is a dream with a deadline. – Napoleon Hill
Proposal creation requires all hands on deck; everyone needs to contribute. The sales department ultimately must deliver the document, but all departments need to participate in its production. When you look at something like a significant million-dollar proposal, the marketing department must be at the forefront with beautiful artwork, charts, graphs, white papers, relevant analyst briefings, ROI calculators and impeccable proposal design.
The other departments, such as R&D, provide the roadmap. They offer the parts and processes that demonstrate how your solution will be of high value to that particular customer. They provide a view of what’s coming down the road and how they might be able to influence new features and delivery timelines once they sign up as one of your brand new customers. The finance department is going to want to know how financially secure you are so your CFO or other finance team member must cast your financial situation in the best light, ensuring prospects see you as a stable, reliable company.
Customer support will provide their hours of operation, service-level agreement conditions, after-hours plans and expectations. All the information from customer support needs to be codified and presented in a friendly, easy to understand format that can be dropped into the proposal. Ultimately, the salesperson is reviewing all the pieces and making sure everything maps to what she has promised to this company. Then she walks in and delivers it, presents it, and closes business. It’s a collaborative effort that pays off in spades.
For more formal situations, with an RFP or a competitive bid process, and even in private companies, you must be ready. Have your graphics, product descriptions, roadmaps, financial tools and formal value proposition reviews ready to go. Be light on your feet, move quickly, ask the right questions, and find the pain, authority and money. You want to have all those components of a more complicated presentation already included in your bag of tricks, ready to deploy as necessary
It’s much better to be able to pull out the price sheet or the quote and knock it down, but if you’re going to need to go deeper, farther and longer, it’s critical to have everything ready at a moment’s notice. No one size fits all in these cases. When it comes to proposals, that old axiom about life from Forrest Gump’s mama applies in many cases — you never do quite know what you’re going to get.
7. Implementation
Congratulations, you have won the order! Now comes the hard part; you must make sure your solution works. While you may pass it off to your technical team, implementation team or post-sales installers, the salesperson still has to stay in touch and make sure everything’s running as it should. You want to have a long-term relationship with your clients to get to the next step in our process and avoid a one-off sale.
There’s an adage you may have heard that says you should sell to your client three times. These three stages are crucial in a million-dollar deal, but these broad categories work for just about any significant sale.
You sell to them before they buy when you sell them on the promise.
You sell to them after they buy when you sell them on the implementation.
After they receive the value, you sell them on the understanding that it’s your solution that gave them the benefit.
It’s after the prospect becomes a customer and is using your solution that the rubber meets the road. That’s when a top sales professional ensures they remain on track. Is the customer enjoying the ROI you promised? Are there any areas where you have not delivered on the vision you provided to them when they were a prospect? Will your customer be willing to act as a reliable, ready reference for you going forward?
Your job as a salesperson is to remain the master of the shi
p throughout this eight-step process as the ultimate relationship touchpoint. If the customer gets nervous — perhaps the project hits a few bumps — you must be there to assure them that their concerns will be addressed. You must have the authority within your organization to go to the engineering team or the CFO or the CEO and tell them the customer needs support. Be prepared to act as a client advocate throughout the entire process.
8. Growth and renewal
The goal with every sale should be for your customer to buy again and feel comfortable referring you to others. You want to have a great relationship with every customer; the growth and renewal stage is where you get to harvest all the good work and good will you and your teammates have fostered throughout the sales journey. With every sale, you’re also planting the seeds for future deals within your existing accounts and with new customers who may be influenced by the positive reference your current customers provide for you.
The great… is a series of small things that are brought together. – Vincent van Gogh
Ideally, you’ll be involved with the client long after the initial sale for relationship maintenance, new product development and future client referrals and recommendations. Your client will need customer support, project implementation and project management at different times, but the salesperson should always act as the overall relationship manager. If your company doesn’t offer new revenue-producing add-ons, maintenance or other services, that’s not an ideal place to be, particularly if you desire to leverage your hard work in building a rewarding relationship into future earnings.
Maintaining good relations encourages customers to provide referrals and to take calls from your next prospect while discussing your offerings generously. In the best companies, the customer will have access to all the resources they need but if there’s an issue long after the sale, the sales rep should be able to push hard to get the customer support people out there right away. No matter what the problem is, it’s a team effort to assist the customer, but the salesperson should always lead the charge in the growth and renewal phase. The salesperson is the one who calls to ask, “I need a reference and would appreciate your help.” Naturally, you want the customer to have an excellent opinion about you and your company when you’re making that call.