2022 wasn’t the easiest of times for tech companies. Tesla Stocks plummeting, Facebook retrenchments, FTX crash — all this has culminated in a terrible time for tech companies, and this has further been exacerbated by record high I/r, further fueling a funding and tech winter. Whether you work in a Fortune 599, SME, or startup, we still have to run our businesses and close deals.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel around the globe to seal deals with a myriad of companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies and across locations in the US, Europe and even Greater China.
It’s fascinating how different everyone’s objectives are. Some looks at achieving higher MAU growth, and some looks at reducing the cost of acquisition, some looks at acquiring new markets and revenue streams.
As different as it is, it all boils down to certain key principles — can we support the company to solve a pain point and achieve its goals? And if our answer is yes, we can still do some good business.
Here are some learnings along the bumpy road of sales that I would like to share.
Understanding your prospects
With the pressure of month/quarter-end targets coming in, more often than not, we are often overly zealous to sell to our prospects without considering whether they have an actual need for our product.
We are often too eager to sell on features with it being the best and fastest software without knowing whether the speed of a software is a pain point for them. Did we enquire more to understand whether there’s a legacy system they would need to change? Or have they just bought new software already, and we are too late?
Conversely, if we get to understand deeper, could we actually gather from them that there’s a management mandate for them to look for such a new system? Could we even understand a ballpark figure of their budget — such that we don’t price ourselves out of the bid? What is the more important requirement for the team?
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And if we understand this deeply, we could translate how our product can truly solve their pain points and deliver measurable gains for them. An important thing to note, too, is that clients would feel that we care to know about their situation and when they reveal their side of the story between both parties, there would be this “magical” bond that is created.
Once this happens, there would inadvertently lead to an interest to know more about your product, as you have heard their side of the story, and now it is fair that they would want to know more from you.
This is where you can do your amazing presentation on how your product can indeed be a value match for them. If all goes well — bam! You should have the deal in no time at all (bearing in mind the legal, procurement, and finance loops that you would need to overcome along the way).
Finding the right person to speak to
At times this can seem to be deceivingly straightforward. Certain schools of thought would be — let’s target the CEO, the Founder, and we would close this 100k deal! Does it often happen? Or we identify a job title like Marketing Manager/Sales Director/VP, and we close this 10k per month recurring SAAS deal? Is it as straightforward as it seems?
Sometimes if we are lucky, it happens, but more often than not, it doesn’t happen.
No hard and fast rule on this, but my take is for us to truly understand what the roles and responsibilities of this individual are. Is a Marketing Manager fully in charge of all marketing spent, or would this be actually decided by the VP of the company? Would a CEO/Founder really decide on a new CRM/productivity tool, or would they delegate the decision to the VP of Sales?
In a nutshell, we need to understand their goals and whether they are the key decision-makers for this initiative. All we need to do is just spend five minutes understanding your prospect’s key responsibilities respectfully.
Recalling one experience where I spent hours and more than 10 calls speaking to one of my supposed targeted job titles and not spending time to understand their goals and whether they hold the budget. My thoughts were that this individual would talk to me so much because he/she would like to give this contract to me. In the end, it just turned out that the prospects enjoyed having a good conversation! Needless to say, I didn’t hit the target for the month.
As we all know, time is money. How can we then avoid such a situation and hedge against it?
Engaging multiple individuals within a company
For most companies, unless it’s buying a cup of cappuccino for themselves, most deals involve multiple individuals making a purchase. Regardless of the size of the company and even in mundane situations, just to decide the type of corporate gifts, the colour of the banner or even the website tagline — there would be at least two individuals that would need to come to a consensus. Why not, then, start this process early on?
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More often than not, if we have just an individual sitting in a meeting, the chance of conversion reduces significantly — as there’s a high chance the prospect may not be the decision maker, and he may be attending the meeting because he/she has a KPI for the number of meetings.
On the other hand, they may be genuinely keen on what you have to offer, but they are flooded with too many tasks, and your proposal is probably at the bottom two on their priority ladder.
Adding on, there’s basically no one internally to keep them accountable for what you have suggested! Before you know it, their boss, the real decision maker, has allocated the budget to another company! And down the drain goes all your hours of hard work in preparing the proposal, call and follow-up.
Now, here’s my proposition on why we should involve at least two representatives on a call. Firstly, just imagine what goes on behind the scenes when two people would like to meet you. Do they say there’s nothing better to do this afternoon, let’s meet up with a vendor? No.
Most of the time, it’s a case of, this product could potentially be beneficial for us, shall we sit in to listen together?
Secondly, if one of the job titles forgot to follow up with you, there would be another to remind him/her during a follow-up from yourself. There would be accountability internally from the team and to you and your organisation.
Thirdly, you just save yourself about two hours if you would have to travel to the place to pitch to the other job title, which you can then allocate to another new sales prospect. Woohoo, time was saved, and the pipeline doubled!
Does a “yes, I’m keen” translate to a signed contract?
Some of us often get excited when we hear that the prospect mentioned that he/she is keen to make a purchase with us. We forecast this as a deal at our month-end, indicate it as a part of our pipeline, send a contract and wait for the surreal and beautiful signature to return.
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One week went by, and the mailbox was still the same. Multiple follow-up emails are met with radio silence. One month went by, and still no contract. What went wrong here? I would like to imagine this situation as one with crows cawing at the back and us just waiting for a beautiful dove to deliver this signed contract across the globe.
We need to understand that, more often than not, people would love to give you the answer you would love to hear, and their way of conveying this would differ from geography to geography.
I used to pitch a product to a company, and they told me they were keen. I told them that the most basic model would start from a few thousand, and they said yes. I told them the best and most expensive would be close to six figures, and they also indicated a yes.
This makes me slightly doubtful about their actual intention. How is it possible that they would buy anything and everything? This is a situation where we need to understand whether there is a true buying intention or if they are sugarcoating not to hurt our feelings.
Possible ways for us to understand their full intention and the thorough process would be to drop a follow-up email for them to indicate that you would send a contract to them and ask them when they could return the contract in terms of response timing and written interest. Then, attempt to schedule a follow-up call within the next couple of days to run through the deliverables.
If this is met with interest and positive responses, you may actually be onto something. If this is somehow met by radio silence, we could probably just mark this deal as a loss and probably reconnect at a better time again.
To sum up, I know some of these may seem pretty straightforward, but I hope for others, this would provide some fundamental sales tips early on for you to close more deals in 2023.
I understand that it’s going to be a challenging season for many, but if my articulating my two cents could help you close just another deal for 2023, it would indeed be very heartening.
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