Took about a month and a half to close. Some key takeaways for me personally:
- Reiterated for me the importance of team selling. Definitely could not have done this without my direct manager and our sales engineers/architects. Also leveraged partner orgs for more support around onboarding & implementation - gave the prospect a lot more peace of mind seeing the "net" of people they'd have to catch them.
- There's champions, then there's CHAMPIONS. It's not always possible, but push to find deals with champions that will get shit done. They will run through walls and internal red tape to get things done because they see the value. Once you find that person, you'll see how much less friction there is to get the deal done (or least I did).
- Find previous users of your product. A huge reason the above champion was strong was because they had used us before. Really wish we had UserGems (another post for another time) but have alerts set up in LinkedIn or other tools that tell you when a previous user/champion changes companies.
- After building rapport and trust with the buying team, circling back up regularly on urgency and timeline wasn't as awkward as I thought it would be. I needed it for proper forecasting and to make sure I wasn't setting a timeline that was more self-centered vs. prospect oriented. Reps often times just put a timeline on things and it isn't based on objective reality. You put it to EOM because that's when you want it to. Have they aligned with that?
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