This deal was the result of a licensing dispute that had been outstanding since January 2021, after 5 years of no licensing reviews. I picked up the account in May, leveraged my licensing compliance team and some on-site engineers to understand the problem and discrepancy in deployment in detail.
Leveraged my engineers for introductions to key managers running our product, built trust thru understanding their use-case and the issues they've had thru the pandemic, and got a meeting with the CISO.
Spent 6 weeks building trust with the CISO and building a joint plan for the future that resulted in resolving a potential $Multi-million lawsuit for the price you see above.
Part of this win was agreement to a broad brainstorming workshop to discuss long-term plans for their use of our product (and other products we offer), and gaining commitment to our platform being the platform of choice to continue building their privacy strategy. There are years of future deals open as their maturity improves, so it was easy to justify settling this discrepancy for pennies on the dollar.
The key was to minimize the compliance issue and instead pivot to the future-state goal. Instead of having the customer purchase 1000's of licenses they would not need to resolve a discrepancy in deployment, I had them buy just the correct scope with back maintenance for all of the years they've been overdeployed. I worked the discounts to make the price look exactly the same on paper.
Although this sounds like a worse deal, the key issue was actually the politics of funding approval. Although the price was exactly the same, Finance would not approve the purchase of licenses they did not need. So I partnered with the CISO to build a plan to capture the same revenue out of buckets he knew he could defend (and wanted to defend).
Now we have another workshop scheduled later this year to continue developing the next series of use-cases. So glad this didn't go to legal - I would have lost an A account!
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