“If you don’t have a mutual action plan template, built out. Make sure you build one and it should be a co-creation between you and your customer.” – David Weiss in today’s Tip 646
How about you? What is your best way to figure out the decision process?
Join the conversation below and feel free to share your thoughts!
639: MEDDPICC Series Kickoff – David Weiss
641: MEDDPICC Series (Metrics) – David Weiss
643: MEDDPICC Series (Economic Buyer) – David Weiss
David Weiss on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Outreach’s David Weiss is back to continue his 9 part series on MEDDPICC that he started back in tip #639. Here he is:
David Weiss: Good morning everyone out there in the Sales Success Community. This is David Weiss coming at you with another part of my MEDDPICC Series and this is Decision Process. So Decision Process is the customer’s buying journey and your job is to understand their journey and help them implement and go live on with your solution in a set time.
So one of the best ways to figure out the decision process, and here’s a tip for you is to ask them one simple question. And this is often asked after the demo, but sometimes can be asked in the first meeting if it is a more transactional sale or especially if they came inbound. And this question is “If you were to move forward with our solution, when would you like to be live?” And once you get the answer to that question, then it’s like, “Okay, cool. Can we build a plan together to help you accomplish that? And I’m not asking for your commitment, but I want us to be on the same page with the steps that it’s going to take to potentially hit that date.”
And no one will say no to that. And then here’s you then work backward and it’s pretty simple. “Okay. You want to be live on this date? How long normally does it take to go through contracting?” “Oh, well it normally takes, uh, our legal process takes, you know, three to four weeks.” “Okay, cool. And then, just to share our implementation takes about three to four weeks. So we’ve lost, you know, two months, if you were to make a decision today. We also need to build a business case together. We also need to make sure that any stakeholder, that needs to see this, sees it. We likely need to do a couple more potentially a couple more demos. We also need to put together the right solution as it relates to the exact use case. We also need to put together a proposal and pricing and agree upon those things.”
So those are the things I typically see. Customer, what are your internal decision process? How’s that gonna work for you? Cause that’s more an outsider looking in. All those things sound good. We’re also gonna need to do a security review. We’re also gonna need to do this, this, and this. Cool. So let’s look at these, uh, we’ve just defined all the things that need to do. Let’s put together the order of operations and let’s look at who needs to be involved. Okay. Sounds good.
So that’s, when you start, co-creating a document writing down all the steps, writing down who needs to be involved in those steps. And then you go through the fun part of how do we get this all done in a set amount of time.
And what you’ll often find is there’s not enough time. So, okay. I guess we need to instead meet every other week or once a week. We actually need to meet twice a week between now and then.
So now you’ve created urgency. Now you’ve created an accountability plan on both sides and now you can drive your deal to a specific time of close. So that’s the big tip on a decision process. If you don’t have a mutual action plan template built out. Make sure you build one and it should be a co-creation between you and your customer. I hope that’s helpful. If I can help with anything, let me know. Thanks, guys!
Scott Ingram: For more about David Weiss, just click over to DailySales.Tips/646.
Be sure you’re subscribed to the podcast so you don’t miss the rest of the series that will continue on Wednesday and Friday this week, and come on back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!