“It keeps everybody in the loop, progressing towards the same end goal. And it will also speed up if you run into roadblocks, that executive sponsor getting involved and kind of pushing on procurement to get us back on track.” – David Weiss in today’s Tip 1360
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David Weiss LinkedIn Post
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. This weekend David Weiss is here to help us think about how best to close out our Q4 deals in a 2 part series. Here’s part 1:
David Weiss: Hello, everyone. This is David Weiss, and I’m coming at you with a sales tip of the day.
So there are five to six selling weeks left in the year, and there are some key things that you need to be doing in this time. So I’m going to break this down into a two-parter.
First is with your hopeful future client. There are six things that would be greatly helpful to you to do.
One. Contracts. Get them in the hands of procurement this week. They will take, especially during this time of year, potentially extra time to review. So if your normal contracting times a month, realistically speaking, it could take two, so you’re already behind the eight ball there.
Meet with your champion and executive sponsor and get aligned with them on the business case for change. You want to get them to a point where say you’re generating $250,000 annually for them. There’s 250 working days in a year. So every day they don’t make a change, it’s costing them a thousand bucks, get to that point that’s going to really help you create levels of urgency.
Next, they need to communicate this business case and timeline to procurement. So we’re all on the same page. Like, guys, we got to get this done by the end of the year. And it’s for every day that we don’t make a change. It’s costing us this much money. So we need to go and meet our commitments.
Next is you then need to work with procurement to understand the legal and business sides of the contracting process. Essentially creating milestones that give you cushion to hit this end of the year date. So that looks like, hey, help me understand inside, outside council, what are some requests that you guys are always asking for? How long does it typically take for you to finalize an agreement like this? How many agreements are you working? What’s the process? What tools and systems do you use? Who’s ultimately signing it? Are they aware of it? Are they around or going on vacation anytime that we need to be aware of. It’s really just digging deep on this to find out, are we on track for the end of the year? What could get in our way? What milestones and do we need to have? How many meetings or whatnot do we need to put on the calendar so we have regular cadence back and forth. It’s that conversation.
Then you want to just create like a really top-line goal, like, hey, do you think it’s reasonable for us to get first pass red lines back in the next week? The reason why you want to start anchoring on a goal like that is that’s creating almost the hardest part of what I’ve seen in the procurement process is just creating urgency to have legal teams start working on it and start that back-and-forth communication. That’s often the most time-consuming thing and that can take weeks or I’ve seen up to a month before they even get a chance to review the damn document and write up their feedback. Like try and create urgency there because then that’s high priority in their cue to start going back and forth around.
And then lastly, just create weekly touch points both with your champion, if you can get the executive sponsor involved and procurement involved, great, but the very least with your champion and create the expectation that prior to that meeting, they’re going to check with procurement to see where we stand. And after that meeting, they are going to update the executive sponsor on if we’re tracking.
What that does is that creates a constant feedback loop of where do we stand, what’s getting on our way, where do we need to go, what help do we need to potentially ask for? And it keeps everybody in the loop, progressing towards the same end goal. And it will also speed up if you run into roadblocks, that executive sponsor getting involved and kind of pushing on procurement to get us back on track.
So that’s what you need to do with your hopeful future client to get this thing in a place where it can get signed by the end of the year. The next, I’m going to give you some advice around what to do inside your company to help speed up the deal cycle as well.
Talk to you soon.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with David and for a link to his original LinkedIn post that inspired this two-part series. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/1360. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for part 2. Thanks for listening!