Met up with these guys at a conference in the spring. They were looking for one of the solutions my company provides. Closing something like this in my industry in under a year is difficult to do. And the entire sales process with them was about 6 months.
It was interesting dealing with them. They basically told me we were in the room because they'd already done reference checks on us before we got there. Somewhat surprised me, yet it didn't surprise me too much because the industry I sell to is fairly close knit.
To kick it off, they sent us (along with a dozen others) a long form questionnaire/RFI. They used that to whittle it down to 4 companies. From there they did demos. One thing which helped greatly was that we travelled to them to do the demo - the others did it remotely.
From there they narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked for pricing. We came in VERY aggressive since we knew who the other company was and we'd lost a deal to them a few months back. We made it clear that we didn't want to lose on pricing, but that we wanted to focus on our immediate as well as long term value to them.
Finally, after some back and forth on additional questions and working my "champion" who I'd been developing over the months, they let us know today that we won. Happy day!
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