Milestones
There are cornerstones in every buying process. You can manage them by aligning them to your “best practice” events like making a Demo, Proof of Concept or Budget Planning Meeting.
Demo
The Demo is a very important event that shows how your offering can make a difference in the customer’s way of doing things. Frontal demos do not have as much success as customer-tailored Demos.
Tip: Collect the pain points from the different attendees prior to the Demo. Tailor your presentation to the specific needs and refer back to the learnings from the discovery call you had with the attendees.
POC
Budget
Many opportunities stall because there is no Budget available.
Try as early as possible in the sales cycle to understand if there is a route to money!
Do you know who the budget owner is (Business, IT, local, Headquarters…)?
Do you know who decides on this? Have you checked with your Champion?
Approval levels: Depending on the size of the deal you could have different approvers.
If there is now budget allocated for your particular offering, can you map the requirements to an already approved project or program?
There are several approval processes on budgets, and they usually come together regularly on fixed dates. Do you know when the next 2-3 budget board meetings are?
Project Budget Board:
Usually the Budget is applied for before the projects start. It will still have to be finally approved by the management team with a proper ROI plan.
There are several Budget runs the last quarter before customers go into their next Fiscal Year.
Cash Board:
Especially in large companies there are cash boards that make sure the company is safe on cash flow. Many times it is just a rubber stamp exercise. However, when your customers business does not perform well, the cash board has a vital role of prioritising the criticality of new projects.
Legal
The legal process can be very time and resource consuming, especially in large enterprises.
Usually legal resources are rare and especially at the end of the quarter overloaded with huge contracts they need to negotiate.
So if you want to close a deal with a new medium to large enterprise client, you need to reserve 3-6 weeks minimum to get your deal onto paper. We have heard worst cases of large contracts being negotiated for 12+ months.
In order to secure your deal check the following:
Do you have a frame contract in place?
YES – That’s good. You can consider easy paperwork, as the frame contract clarifies all the big points and the “order form” only has deal related special terms and conditions.
NO – This could be time consuming.
- Check if you can use a business partner who has a frame contract
- Request the Customer Frame Contract template and check with your legal if you can accept the terms.
- Get back to the EB and Champion to allocate the right resources to arrange the contract ASAP.
Did the customer allocate a legal resource?
- Make sure you get a qualified, business-centric legal person with enough experience in your business area
- Define a row of negotiation steps with defined timeslots, which are allocated both by your legal department, and the customers legal department. Depending on the complexity, it could be 2-3 people over the course of a couple of weeks. Better to reserve more meetings then less. You can always cancel meetings if you don’t need them
Do you have the EB and Champion to support you?
- Legal people can be very picky and strict on terms of the contract, which are not actually legal but more business-risk related.
- Make sure the EB or Champion or sourcing person supports you to evaluate the business risk and takes responsibility to cover this.
Will we be ready for the signature run?
- Make a reverse engineered closing plan with the steps needed to get a signature ready contract in front of the signing authorities.
- Make sure the EB controls the process and sets priorities for legal and purchasing to make this happen.