Closed my largest deal to date selling robots into a global publicly traded $1.6B company. Took a huge leap of faith and left the Saas/Digital Advertising world after half a decade to see if I could transfer my skills to software & hardware by way of Robotics sales into a line of business I've never sold to. Hired in April 2021. Deal closed in Jan 2022. Average sales cycle, 14 months. First Discovery call, last week of September 2021. 60+ hours a week went into this big boy for the entirety of my sales cycle with them. Learned a TON and got to meet some amazing people along the way both internally and externally. Now onto the next!
Couple lessons learned:
- Leverage sales methodologies when it's helpful but not as a mandatory must have every step figured out to move it forward. (i.e. my boss insisted we send a MAP out earlier than I felt it was going to help and so I insisted we delay it. not something I'd advise in all situations but for this one I thought it would open too many questions too early knowing my buyer was overly detail oriented and it would slow us down. Identified buyer personas using DISC early on and leveraged that to customize MEDDPICC identification strategy and MAP creation timeline)
- Discovery call was set by BDR for me and external consultant for 30 min. I had BDR call back and say I'd like to offer them an hour of my time but in exchange please bring all relevant stakeholders in the room. I will cover our solution high level and we can develop a next step(s) plan with everyone involved OR use it to all agree to part ways. It worked. And I had initial excitement and buy in from every single stakeholder in the first hour.
- In discovery call I heard objections coming up that were clearly put into their ear by our biggest competitor. So I called it out. Asked why those were concerns. How did they come up with those concerns? How would that negatively impact their business? By the end of the call, we all agreed that the objections our competitor told them they'd have with our solution were not valid in this use case OR were actually not the red flags our competitor pointed them out to be. In fact, in most cases, the competitors solution was uncovered as having the problems. If my competitor hadn't gone on the offensive and shamed our solution before they spoke to us, I couldn't have used it against them so quickly.
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