“It is so much easier to finish the sale cycle by getting the buy-in of other stakeholders, by going through this procurement process, by finishing negotiations and maintaining your price, and closing out the deal.” – Jamal Reimer in today’s Tip 1025
How do you close a mega-deal?
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Jamal Reimer on LinkedIn
Mega Deal Secrets Book
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Jamal Reimer. Jamal is a 20-year enterprise seller. He cracked the code to selling exceptionally large enterprise deals, having closed $160,000,000 in SaaS revenue as an individual contributor for small vendors and top global software providers. Here he is:
Jamal Reimer: So this is not so much a tip as it is an abbreviated version of the strategy that I’ve used to close really large deals. I’ve done multiple deals over 50 million in my career. And this is the winner. I call it the Two Mountain Model and there’s three parts to it.
So if you can imagine if I was doing this on a whiteboard two mountains. One on the right, one on the left. And between them, there’s a valley in the middle.
The first mountain is the beginning of the sales cycle. The valley is the middle of the sales cycle, and the second mountain on the right is the end of the sale cycle in an oversimplified way.
So let’s go through it.
So the sales cycle starts and the whole goal of the symbolism of the first mountain is getting to power fast and getting to power fast is super important because if you want to do a really large deal, you’re going to need senior people’s buy-in and approval because the bigger the deal, the higher up the executive buy-in that you need. And one of the biggest tricks that I’ve used that I’m still using to get to power fast is in many sales cycles, I don’t do my own prospecting. I partner with a senior person, either a Senior Executive within my own company or somebody on our Board of Advisers or somebody on our Board of Directors or the Managing Director of one of the really large SIS that we partner with. I leverage someone else’s peer status with the senior person who I’m trying to get to within an account.
In so doing, it’s almost like I’ve used this analogy before the helicopter right? Why climb the mountain on your own when you can just leverage a helicopter to get to the top?
So that’s the whole goal.
So get to power fast and basically the whole goal of the first meeting with somebody who is very senior in the organization is to convey business outcomes, something huge that your product or your service has helped another company achieve, especially if they’re in the same industry or if they’re a big competitor to who you want to work with, in this case.
The goal of that meeting is to get a proof of value exercise. And once you get a buy-in for a proof of value exercise, there are three things that you want to get buy-in from that senior person.
Number one, that you agree that this proof of value exercise will be relatively short. What you want to do is I’ve seen proof of concept where it’s almost like doing a complete install lasts for months, so many months that I didn’t have time to get the deal done within the fiscal year. So you want agreement that the proof of value exercise will be short.
The second thing is that you want commitment that that executive will show up for the read-out session at the end of the proof of value exercise so that they can hear from you the value that you’d be able to deliver if this solution was taken into production.
And thirdly, you want a commitment to get their current metrics for the business process that your solution or your service is going to improve, because if you don’t get those metrics, how many people does it take to do the process today, or how long or how much effort or how much money does it take to do the process today? If you don’t get that you’ll never know how much better your solution would make their lives. And without understanding the magnitude of value that you’re bringing, you won’t have the ammunition that you need to do value pricing, which is all about how you get to a mega-deal by value pricing.
So after the proof of concept that’s the middle, you move into the end of the sale cycle, which is returning to the mountain top, going back to that Executive or that Buying Committee of Executives and bringing back those proof points that were laid out during the proof of value exercise. Once you get that level of buy-in and understanding from the senior buyers. I don’t want to say it’s a walk in the park. But it is so much easier to finish the sale cycle by getting the buy-in of other stakeholders, by going through this procurement process, by finishing negotiations and maintaining your price, and closing out the deal.
So that in a nutshell is the two mountain model. Use it to your success and I look forward to seeing you at the top.
Scott Ingram: Jamal’s book – Mega Deal Secrets – How to find and close the biggest deal of your career just released today. Do yourself a favor and click over to DailySales.Tips/1025 where we’ll have links for you to connect with Jamal and to get your hands on Mega Deal Secrets.
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!