Hello everyone,
First, a quick update on my previous deal review (here's the link to it if you want to take a peek: https://bravado.co/war-room/posts/deal-review-update): thanks to the feedback I got from some of you, I went and talked to my champion and we agreed on a path forward for projects that are a bit or a lot out of his scope. He was ok with my approach, and actually, let me know there's another opportunity I should be looking at. He has no influence there but introduced me to the the DM, so I'm now working what could potentially be a large deal within the same account. Too soon to tell though.
That being said, I thought I'd share another deal I'm working on and do a "pre-mortem" deal review. For those who never did one of these, the whole idea is to map out / imagine all the reasons why this deal might not close, or why I might lose it. Here's the specs:
Company type: Fortune 500 SaaS Company. Employee count is around 20k.
What I'm selling: Sales coaching / enablement program for new hires.
Champion: Sr. Sales Director (former colleague of mine) .High influence and the guy likes what I do.
DM : Sales VP (boss of my champion). This guy signs the check. He doesn't know me but has been looking at my LI profile.
Influencer - neutral: Sales enablement manager. High influence, we know each other but we don't have a strong relationship yet.
Detractor: HR BP. We worked together, she was my HRBP 2 jobs ago and had a fallout. Never talked to her again but I saw her copied in an email, and her reply when my champion asked about services such as what I provide was "we need to look at existing vendors before engaging with new". Ouch.
Timeframe: this will be a late Q4 deal for me and if I win it, I'll implement in Q1 (starting mid February).
Brief: I've already met with my champion a few times, we've been working on this since May. He texted me for my birthday and we started talking about what he needs. He basically has a mid-sized sales organization (focused on mid market) that includes BDRs, Inside Sales reps and field reps. Roughly 50 people report to his managers under him. They have no "flightschool" program to train new hires and the ramp-up is too slow. He's been asking for it but sales enablement is not able to produce it, they are short of hands and focused mostly on supporting Enterprise reps. His team has hit FY quota already and he's forecasted a 180% attainment by EOY. Based on this, his 2022 plan includes approx 10 new hires, a 20% headcount growth that will of course bring more quota.
He is pitching that he needs to train new hires specifically as such and if sales enablement can't help, then he should be able to get someone from the outside to do so and that was my queue. I spent a few months doing discovery, talking to people and preparing a pilot. He's required to do a POC before the company decides to invest. I said I won't do a POC until he gets approval on the new headcounts, which he just did, so now it's my turn. I'm working on a pilot we'll run, for free, in Q4 with 4 new hires + potential backfills (he has 2 guys in PIPs right now). The POC requires only that I sign a NDA (which I haven't yet) + a SOW. Already working on the latter.
Unfortunately, I'm not done yet. I still need to meet with the people that will evaluate the results of the POC, basically almost everyone I described above including the HR BP. Out of that meeting what I'm supposed to get is the guidelines for the SOW, and I also expect to get a clearer idea on who's with me really and who's not, and if possible, identify direct competitors which I haven't been able to yet.
There's more but this post is too long already, apologies for that.
Question for everyone that wants to participate. What can go wrong here? What's missing, or what would you do to secure the deal?
Everything helps people, and I'm more than thankful for all your ideas!
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