Tip 17 is an excerpt from Jamal Reimer’s Episode 61 at Sales Success Stories podcast that I also host. He mentioned there that “If you can make it at Oracle, you can almost make it anywhere.”
What’s the biggest deal you’ve ever done and what was the key to winning it?
Join the discussion below and find out Jamal’s interesting offers!
Jamal’s LinkedIn
Jamal’s LinkedIn video
Mega Deal Secrets
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips Podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. I am also the host of the Sales Success Stories Podcast where I have some really deep dive conversations exclusively with top 1% level individual contributors, and today’s tip is an excerpt from Episode 61 that released today on that show featuring Jamal Reimer who works for Oracle in Sweden and has managed to close 3 different SAAS deals, each worth over $50 Million Dollars.
Here you go:
Scott Ingram: And then what is the formula? The most important thing about this is you didn’t, and I talk about this a lot, right? You didn’t hit the sales lottery do this one time and you’ve never been able to do it again, but you have been able to repeat this again and again. What’s the formula?
Jamal Reimer: What I learned is that it’s not a formula. It’s a mountain. It’s a mountain with multiple facets and depending on what kind of climber you are, you can go on the east face or the west face and you can still get to the top of the mountain. And how I’ve learned about that is, there are things that I do that worked for me to get these big deals done, but I’ve gone back and I’ve talked to Marcy or I’ve talked to other, you know, whale hunter reps and they do it differently and sometimes they say, “yeah, my management’s come to me and trying to replicate it. And they just haven’t been able to do that through any kind of sales enablement program”. So even though it’s not a formula, there are absolutely some commonalities that I see not only with the stuff that I do but with these other people who I’ve had a chance to talk with and to learn from.
One thing is absolutely the ability and the desire to work with executives. And the truth of the matter is, at least in my experience working with big deals at some point, it’s almost like running for public office, right? Cause there are so many stakeholders. Typically, there is a large stakeholder base of users of this solution or you know, a corporate consumer of the service. And then there’s the next layer up and they’re like mid-level management and their project leaders or department heads what have you, and then you know, as you climb that mountain, the population gets super small and then it’s either a steering committee or a single person or maybe three people who are really making the decisions. So, in my experience, the whole name of the game is you can really cut to the chase, like accelerate by in and closure if you focus on the few that have the greatest proportion of influence and or decision making capability.
So that’s number one is a desire and an ability to work with executives. The other is to, this is one that’s just straight from my experience when I go back to it, is the use of data to come up with very rock-solid arguments. So at least in the software, at some point as the deal size gets bigger, it’s value becomes a little more abstract and customers tend to use that to their advantage to try to keep prices low. So, there’s this whole effort. I guess I could put this as a third component along with data is just the ability to start very early and kind of setting the goalposts about what the expected value would be and then working toward proving it or shoring up your argument that that value is actually going to be there. So, a combination of having some kind of a model that you get buy-in with the customer to agree to that.
You know, if you could make things different in our shop in the following ways, it cuts so much time or we could redirect our resources and our people to do other more high-value tasks or whatever. And as you can get them to buy into a model, then you can in a nice way, hold their feet to the fire and say, “look, this value has always been here”. And you need that to be able to defend your numbers when it comes to the end of the process. Because then you move away from just working with the business or IT or whoever’s doing the analysis and you tend to wind up with procurement or sourcing and they don’t know very much about that value process. And so, if you’re not able to quickly tune in your stakeholders to say, you got to tell procurement about this value or else they’re going to try to, you know, reduce the size of the deal by so much all the work you’ve done over months or even sometimes years to build up the momentum for the big deal, it goes to waste because the deal never materializes on paper.
So, there’s working with executives, there’s the use of data and there are building credible value models that you can maintain by in throughout all the stakeholders that you have throughout a sales cycle. And there’s more but those are kind of the real, the common areas that I find when it comes to doing these really large deals.
Scott Ingram: That is just a small taste of what Jamal had to share. The full interview is over 90 minutes long and full of greatness! I hope you’ll check it out. Links to everything including a lot more about Jamal and a very interesting offer he’s making are all at DailySales.Tips/17
That’s also where you can answer today’s question which is: What’s the biggest deal you’ve ever done and what was the key to winning it?
Then come back tomorrow for a tip from my friend Donald C. Kelly about seeing around corners.