This is the second lesson in the Enterprise Software Sales Process Class. Austin Barr walks through the steps from a potential customer to a signed customer. He gives insight into the perspective on your side and your customers side, as well as providing tips and tricks to increase customer satisfaction and retention rate.
Austin Barr is the Regional Director at Abnormal Security with a focus on the South Central area and has previous experience in the cybersecurity industry working at Darktrace and Symatec. He graduated from Stanford University in 2016 with a bachelors in Science, Technology, and Society.
Austin Barr: Welcome to this lesson on from prospect to customer as a part of our enterprise software sales process class that we're doing. My name's Austin, Austin Barr. I'm one of our regional directors here at Abnormal Security.
Today we'll be talking about moving a prospect from the first meeting all the way through to signing a contract with you and becoming a customer.
So we're gonna talk about the first impression, the first meeting, how to really nail the pitch and demo and how to secure the right follow up. We're gonna talk about running through a proof of concept, which is pretty typical of an enterprise sales process.
Getting the technical win, getting the customer to sign off. We're gonna talk about handling objections and, you know, other competition, other solutions that may, be a part of the process.
We wanna talk about how to negotiate price and, and get to an actual closed contract. This is a continuation of the last lesson where Dom talked to you about maybe the hardest part, right? The tip of the spear, getting an actual meeting with all these busy decision makers, busy people that you're trying to sell to where you're trying to qualify a prospect, who we should be talking to and ultimately securing the meeting.
Let's start with the first meeting. We have to treat it like gold. We really have to take, a first meeting seriously because it's the first impression that we're gonna make on a prospect.
And, there's, there's a few kind of key themes that I want to hit on when it comes to first meeting excellence, that really can, I think, improve the quality of your first meetings. The first thing that we wanna touch on is pre-meeting research.
There's a few things that you can do to really improve the quality of the conversation that you're about to have with that prospect. And most of it comes down to doing your research.
So a couple easy things you can do right. First and foremost, if you have a, a BDR or somebody who set this meeting for you, they should have some notes on what they've learned about the customer and why they're taking the meeting in the first place.
You could go on this person's LinkedIn, where have they worked? If they have a bio, what do they say about themselves? What is their, what are their roles and responsibilities in their current job? Do they know anybody that you know, that you might be able to reference or ask about them ahead of the meeting and even just Googling the person, maybe they've given a speech or they've written a blog post that you can reference. You could even go beyond the person themselves and even go into learning more about their business. So a lot of companies that you sell to in enterprise, software sales will be public.
And so they'll have filings with the SEC, their, their 10 Ks, their earnings calls, right. And you can actually go and command F on their 10 K or go listen to an earnings call and maybe they reference the problem that you solve.
So when we talk about qualification, there's a million different frameworks you could use to qualify a prospect. But really, I think that most basics come down to three things. Why would this person buy anything? Do they have a pain? Why now? Why would they do something now versus next year? And then also why us?
Now, beyond that, the next piece is discovery and, discovery is, is extremely important to get down to what is the actual pain that this person has or what is the desired outcome that they're looking for that brought them to the meeting, right?
there's a million frameworks out there that use all kinds of acronyms and different things, to try to build out this qualification or discovery, framework.
But I think the easiest one we call BANT and BANT is four things. It's budget, authority need and timeline. In order for us to have a real deal at first meeting, that's gonna translate into some deal. We need to start to understand each of these things for this prospect.
So very quickly budget. If, if this person wants to spend a hundred dollars and your solution costs a hundred thousand dollars. We're probably not, not using our time very well. Authority. Does this person actually have the authority to buy your product or service or do they work for the person who does or have influence on the person that does?
Are we talking to the right person here that can actually influence change within that organization? Next is need, is this something they actually have a pain around if it's not a big deal, it's not urgent for the business. Again, maybe this isn't a good opportunity for us. And then finally timeline again.
We talked about it. Why now? Right? Why would they do something now versus later?
We don't wanna ask all these questions and gather all this insight and do all this pre-meeting research. We want to take what we've learned and really show the prospect that we're listening.
We understand, and we care about their business, their problems, and we wanna map our product or service to that problem.
Number one is you want to have a very clear value proposition. And I put one here at the bottom of the slide. Again, it's pretty general, but you need to have kind of the one sentence version for your company, which is we help this target group of customers. So maybe it's financial services, you know, customers, healthcare, customers, whatever it is solve for X.
And most of those things are either a, a pain that you can help solve or a gain, right. Increase in revenue, right. Specific business outcome, um, by doing X. One example of that, McDonald's right. We help hungry people solve for their hunger by making fast tasty food, right. That that'd be like a, a super easy like value proposition. You should have that kind one sentence punchy, you know, thing that you can say where if somebody just say, what do you guys.
I think one really important thing is what is the aha moment, right? That person who has a vested stake in that pain, that outcome, that thing that, that they're talking to you because they wanna solve.
Now, maybe that's something in your product. Maybe it's something technical. Maybe it's some, some data. That shows the impact that you've made. Maybe it's other customers in their industry that you can talk about a case study, really things that, again, weave that into what makes most sense for that customer.
It's important to be, as, as specific as you can. And beyond that, you know, the last couple bullets here at the bottom, what are the big differentiators, right? It's, it's likely you're not the only person in your space, so why you, why not the competition or what, what do you do uniquely the best? And beyond that, how does the product work at a high level?
They wanna understand, you know, how does it integrate with my environment, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then lastly, I think, you know, really important is in that first meeting, you really looking to establish some level of trust. And so what can you weave into that pitch that establishes credibility, maybe it's customer reviews, maybe it's again, case studies or logos of your other customers.
Maybe it's, a referral from, from somebody that they know, right. It's one of your, your common LinkedIn connections, all important to weave into that, that, that first meeting. You really wanna make sure that you save some time at the end of the meeting to establish next steps.
Leave three minutes, five minutes at the end of the meeting to get feedback.
But also get a date on the calendar for a next step.
Well, maybe the next step is, Hey, I'm so excited that you're excited about it. Who, who at the organization really owns this problem? Would you be willing to make an introduction to them for us? Because it seems, sounds like that's who we're, we're looking to talk to. Boom, there's your next step. Maybe you're talking to the person who can influence change and maybe you wanna set up a, a trial, right?
Which we'll talk about next. maybe it's asking them directly, right. Are you ready to, to go through a trial implementation of, of our, of our product or service? And if you can't establish that next step on the call, if they're not willing to commit again, the last bullet point here, you want to maintain professional, persistent contact, right?
So you get through the first meeting. Everybody's excited about you, you establish the next steps.
You've convinced a company that it's worth spending some time to evaluate whether or not your solution can solve their business problem. And they are ready for the proof of concept or proof of value. Some companies call it very common in enterprise sales.
. And we call this getting the technical win, and there's a few key components.
But there's some really, important things that, that you need to do as you go into one of these technical evaluations to make sure that you nail it. You have to establish success criteria. You wanna make sure you understand the requirements, the boxes that you need to check in order for that customer to say, yes, this is the solution that we want to buy.
This could be as simple as an Excel sheet, right. I try to give an example here and I I've done this, you know, myself in the past for, for different companies, right?
It's what are the requirements? How are we going to test that? When do we want to have that delivered by and who's owning it us or the customer and mutually agree on this, right. Show this to the customer and say, Hey, these are the typical requirements our other customers have brought to us. Do you have the same requirements?
Are they different? And again, there's gonna be both technical requirements. So things the product needs to do in order to prove out that it, that it is, effective and maybe also business requirements, right? Maybe it's, it's gotta be a certain price that's to show a certain ROI that to impact our revenue, a certain percentage, all things that are extremely important to agree on before the trial.
So you're setting yourself up for success. Now the next thing you need to do once you have that criteria. Take that success criteria and build a mutual action plan.
And why this is important is again, let's go back to BANT, right? The budget, the authority, the need, the timeline. The timeline is massively important for us to understand.
And so the mutual action plan, we say, okay, based on your success criteria here is how we're going to deliver what we're going to deliver. And here's how we're gonna do it, uh, based on certain dates and to hit certain timelines.
As long as there's buy-in from the customer, and they're willing to agree on a timeline, this mutual action plan again, extremely important in running tight proof of concept. The next thing that is really important to do is to create executive alignment.
If you're just selling to the people who operate the tool, the administrators, the people who don't hold the budget, the, the folks that are hands on keyboard. That's great. It's really important to get those folks on your side. Cause it's hard to get anybody to buy anything. If the team is gonna use it every day, doesn't actually want to use it.
And the executive that you really need alignment with on the customer side. So for example, you might have, your CEO send, an email to the executive that you're looking to get in touch with. Maybe it's the CFO, right? You sell financial software. I CFO, I'm the CEO. I I'd really love to speak with you at some point.
It's really important that you have a good experience with us. You know, I I'm aware of you. Right. And what you're really looking to do is just one make that executive feel known, feel important. Two, make sure they are aware of the project and three, when you need to get to that person to close the deal when the time is right. You've created that connection already, where you can bring in kind of the executive call and, and make sure that, you know, the connections are made here.
Get that executive alignment. It's hard to get anything done. If you don't have the budget holder, the executive, you know, the economic buyer, in your camp. But beyond that, you know, somebody else that's really important to build during this process is also your champion. Your champion may or may not be that executive, the economic buyer, but really you need somebody who's selling for you when you're not in the room.
Maybe it's around what, what certain people are thinking, or if there's competition, you know, involved in the deal, we want this person to be in our corner, give us the insider info that we otherwise wouldn't have. If we don't have somebody inside the customer, driving the project forward, when we're not in the room, it's gonna elongate our sales cycles.
It's gonna create risk in the deal. It may not get done. And it leaves the door open, uh, for somebody else to come in and, and do a better job at solving that problem.
And, you know, we have certain information and then we don't and, there no two are alike, but we've got to, you know, keep dusting until we get to the final picture. And one of the common things that, that, that comes up pretty much in every sales cycle, there's going to be objections, things that people, maybe they.
They don't agree with or they're skeptical of, or they have a question on, and there's going to be Competition. And maybe, you know, somebody gets wind of a project or maybe the customer contacts, multiple vendors in the same space. And we gotta UN we gotta know how to deal with that when it comes up. And so the first thing that you know, that we wanna be able to do is when objections come up, we wanna make sure we know how to handle them in an elegant way.
Again, lots of ways to go about this. I tried to, I tried to, again, Take this, this, this basic framework when it comes to objections. But when you think about any objection, first and foremost, you should know the top 10 to 15 questions that get asked about your product or service inside and out.
You should know those answers almost by heart, almost like they're scripted, right? Because you know, they're gonna get asked. And so you need to, you need to have great answers prepared for those question. But whatever that question is, there's really four things you want to do when you get that objection or that question.
Acknowledge the objection. Hey, I hear you. I totally get why that would be a concern for you. Right? Clarify, make sure you know exactly what they meant right. Based on their wording. They could have meant one thing or another. So that could be, Hey, I hear you totally get that. Did you mean this or did you mean this right?
And clarify maybe the, the intent behind their objection, then address it. Right? Have your answer, have your reason why. The product, your product or service, you can overcome that, or, what that might look like and then confirm, is that is that satisfactory answer?
So we want to be ready for these objections and we don't just, we don't wanna be combative. We don't want to, do anything that that would, cause friction within the cycle. We wanna be empathetic, acknowledging what somebody's saying. but also being able to address it in a very elegant way that, that, that, that flips that on.
It's also important that we're ready for competition. Pretty much every, every product or service is gonna have, the, one to five call it competitors that are in the same space claiming to solve the same problem.
And again, this is gonna look different based on what you're selling and to what industry, but there's a few key things. I think we wanna remember when we're dealing with competition. Number one is we always wanna stay professional.
When they're dealing with a sales team that's bad mouthing or bashing. The other competitors in their space, right? Those are other, those are other companies that are, are looking to solve the same problem they are that are maybe doing it a different way or, take, take a different spin on it.
But it's really important to maintain professionalism and not not, not be overly negative, right. About the, the competition, but more so focus on the positives. What's different about your product? Why is it better? Do you have data to support that? Another thing that's, that's really good to do.
Going back to that success criteria. Let's, let's try to set the requirements in our favor. If we know that we're going into an evaluation and they're gonna be looking at a competitor of ours. One we should know about that competitor and we should know what they're good at and what they're not good at.
And when we write up that success criteria and that mutual action plan, we should try to build that out so that, the, the requirements favor us. Maybe we're really good at one thing. And our competitor is not well, we should, we should keep that thing front and center. We should make sure that is the thing that drives the decision and the evaluat.
And what you'll probably see is you'll probably see the same competitors, the same testing, the same questions, keep coming up over and over when it comes to competition. And one thing that I think is, is, is, a best practice is to develop a battle card. And what I mean by this is we can. We can identify these competitors and we can start to do some research on them.
Right? We can ask our champion internally what they think of that product. We can ask, maybe partners or, uh, other people in our network, if they've used that product and what their impression of it is and see what customers online are saying. And we can start to develop a framework to identify weaknesses that we can exploit.
And also trap questions. So trap questions is another best practice. The, the last thing I'll say on competition, which is if we know our customer is weak or, or miss not our customer, our, our competition is weak in a certain area. We can develop questions. That forced the prospect to ask, uncomfortable things, right.
To the competition and, and set the table in our favor. So we should keep that in mind. What, what questions, what, what can we seed in the prospect's mind that, that will favor our product rather than the competition? Now the last thing I'll say about, you know, the, the long and windy road that is an enterprise sales process is it's really important as you go through this to maintain momentum.
That's why the mutual action plan is so important. That's why the success criteria is so important/ time kills deals. This is actually a poster that you can buy online, a frame poster, right sales 1 0 1. so it's, , This is maintaining momentum is, is critical because if we let something stall out, if we, if we just, don't follow up, if we don't deliver on a timely manner, things drag on and on and on in our process.
Time introduces risk into the process. Our champion may leave, right? He may switch jobs, go to a different company. That's massive risk. the problem may end up getting solved by a competitor, right? Who's who's doing a better job and can come in into it differently. The business may change.
Earnings may change the budget may go away, right? So we need to maintain momentum. We need to, move with urgency and really make sure that we're, we're going through this process, with momentum extremely important. All right. So you've got to the end, you've done the first meeting you've gone through the technical evaluation and you have the technical win you're at the point where you have a team that's going to use your product or service saying yes, this solves the problem for our business.
We've proved it and we want to buy it now. What is the next obvious hurdle? There's a technical in. There's also a business win, right? And the business win is the one where, uh, things can start to get a little, a little uncomfortable, right? A lot of people don't like going to a car dealership and negotiating right.
For, what the price is gonna be on their new car. And so things can get a little, there could be friction, there could be comfortability. But what you have to know when you get to this point is you're halfway there. You've got the technical win. Now you're moving on to negotiating the price and closing the.
And so when we talk about negotiating price, it, there, there is certainly an art to it, but there's some best practices regardless of what you're selling and at. And at what price point, I would say the first thing that you can do similar to the first meeting that we talked about is gather as much information as possible.
When you go to talk price with the customer, See if you know anybody else who sold software to them and kind of the pricing and the budgets that they have associated to it, ask the prospect directly. Some will share with you, right? Some are not so secretive. Somebody even just tell you, Hey, I have X number of dollars allocated to this project, and this is what I can spend, um, understand the business parameters.
Do they have different approval thresholds? Like if they spend over X amount of money, They had to go through the board. And so you wanna avoid that or does the person you're talking to have like a limit that they can go to and there's even tools out there. Like if you're selling to a government entity, I pulled this up there's tools out there that can actually tell you what, what certain companies are spending on certain technologies.
So gather as much information, arm yourself with as much data as you can before you go in and negotiate on price. And when you present price, I find the best practice is to present a range of prices, right? Because it allows the customer to kind of pick and choose what makes the most sense for them.
So here's a basic framework that you might use if you were presenting, budgetary pricing to a customer, you might, maybe your product has different levels that someone can choose from, right? Maybe they can choose the top tier. That has all your services and everything included, or maybe there's a more basic package that doesn't quite offer as much, but is at a lower price point.
And so you wanna, you wanna make sure that you give the prospect a range that allows you to negotiate, right? So maybe they, maybe they look at this and they say, You know what, I really want the, the complete bundle, the, the top of the line, but I only have money for the, you know, the basic right. The, the most, the most bottom bundle.
Well, there's different things you could do, right? There's, there's, there's some ways to negotiate, but this at least gives you a range, just starting point that doesn't pigeonhole you in with just one number. Here's what it costs. Cause if that number gets stuck in the, the person's mind and it's it's wrong.
Well now, you know, now maybe we get stuck and that person, stops responding. But if we can give a range. And give somebody a chance to, to talk it through with. That's only gonna benefit us, continue the dialogue, continue the conversation. And so once you get into that conversation, the most basic kind of negotiation principle at this stage is to never give without a get.
So what, what do I mean by that? Right. So say that prospect seizes that sheet and they go, ah, I only have the money for the basic package, but I want the full, I, I want the full thing. You can't just say, well, okay, well, we'll do that. Right. If I'm, if you're gonna give something to the prospect, you should get something back.
So you can almost map these here on the screen, you know, left to, right. So for example, if I'm giving somebody a higher discount, I maybe should ask them for a commitment on timeline, you know, very, very basic with, with sales and quarterly commitments and that sort of thing, right? I'll give you an extra 10% discount, but I need your commitment that you're gonna sign the contract by the end of the month.
Very simple, kind of a give get right. A very basic negotiation. Um, tactic, another one, right? Hey, I need, I, I need, these two things from you, right? I need this additional functionality. Um, but I don't, I don't wanna pay for it. Right. Okay, great. I'd be happy to offer that to you, but if you're gonna do that, I want you to do a case study with our marketing team, because we wanna, you know, use your brand and, and your leverage to reach more customers.
I need you to introduce, introduce me to two other buyers who, you know, in your network that you think we could sell to. And the last thing I'll say about this is try to tie the price that you're, that you're showing the person to value, give them a reason that it costs what it costs.
When you think about like a, a business value assessment or a, an ROI calculator, things like that. What is really important when that, you know, when that, um, stakeholder goes to finance? Finance may not care about that problem, but they do care about the, the bottom line, the budget sheet, the, you know, the, the things that they're looking at.
And so are you going to save this company money, right? Reduce total cost of ownership. Are you going to increase their performance in some area? Are you gonna be able to execute on something faster to save them time so they can go work on other things again, hard to be too specific because this has made different for everybody selling everything.
If you're showing them an ROI calculator saying your product is gonna stop a million dollars worth of risk from their business. And we're only charging you $200,000. You're showing them a 500, you know, a 500% ROI. That's a, a great justification for your price, right? And so you want to use as much data you want to use as much kind of business information like this as you, uh, as you possibly can.
And then finally, you've agreed on the technical win. You've agreed on the price. We're not out of the woods yet. There's a couple last things that we gotta go through in order to really close the deal.
First and foremost, is, is legal, right? Pretty much every, every enterprise, SaaS product that's out there, has some sort of an agreement, in terms of the use of the, the product, right? So it could be the terms and conditions, a master service agreement, you know, whatever that might look like.
So first thing to understand is what's important to both sides, right? Um, so maybe for the customer it's liability, right. Your product has the chance to impact their business. They want, they want you to be liable for it.
Maybe on your side, it's the speed. Right. I just wanna close, close the contract as soon as we can. Right. So again, going back to that, give, get concept. There's going to be negotiation in this legal contract, and there's going to be things that the customer's gonna ask for.
You always wanna make sure you're trying to get something in return. Um, the other thing is obviously. Who, who are the stakeholders in legal negotiations? Probably a lawyer, but also your champion could still be involved. So another great practice here is if you've got a champion, who's again been, been, you know, rallying for you the whole time.
Can you use them to get in information on what's important to your legal team? And you can start to cut down the, the time that it's gonna take to get to agreement on this contract by using person.
The other thing that's important. And I, I actually, pulled this out from a, a previous, a previous,, prospect that I was working with is you gotta understand who is all involved in the decision making process. Now you could have a champion, you could have, an executive buyer. You could have, you know, a team that's excited about your product, but in order for something to get purchased, there may be.
6 7, 8, 10 other people that have to be involved for this to actually happen, right? Maybe you're selling to the sales organization. You're selling to a chief revenue officer, but in order for them to buy anything, they have to involve their procurement team, their legal team, their finance team, their HR team.
So you need to understand once you get that technical win. Who else am I gonna need to get involved? What is it gonna take to get their buy in? What do they have to see? Do you have a process around some sort of a steering committee that, that approves the allocation of funds?
In this example, The organization here on the left, the, the chief security officer was the one that, um, that we were working with, what we didn't realize, or, or we started to realize was there was two other arms of the organization, the it organization that we needed buy-in from, in order to, to get the purchase approved ultimately by the CFO.
So really important to understand who are the stakeholders and how do we get to them and how do we show them what they need to see to approve this purchase that the, that the, the org we've been working with. And the last thing is deals do not happen by accident. This is a key principle to remember everything that you do in the late stages, right?
People are busy. Things happen. If you are not actively following up actively setting timelines, creating, uh, buy in from the stakeholders on doing X by X date. Um, if you lose that momentum or if you just, um, wish or want it to happen. It's not gonna happen. So just be extremely diligent on, on the follow up and what needs to happen to get a deal over the line.
Getting the technical win is awesome. And there's, there's a massive value in that, but it's still your job on the enterprise sales side to shepherd a deal from. Technical win all the way to the close through the negotiation, through the legal process, through procurement, all the steps that that customer has.
They likely have a pretty involved process to buy anything that's worth value, which is obviously a good thing, right? It's your job to help guide the customer through that process, hold them accountable.
The last thing. Once you sign that customer and you get them to send you the purchase order and they've, they've signed all the legal paperwork, you're super excited. Just know that maybe for you on the presales side. This is a huge win. It's a huge moment. You're ready to celebrate. You got the new customer.
It's it's a big day, right? But for the customer, this is only the beginning, right? The trial is just the start of their relationship with you as a company. And so just as important as the trial, being a great experience, their customer success, handoff needs to put a great taste in their mouth for how they're going to interact with you going forward.
So it's really important. Once you sign this customer, it's likely you'll be handing off their account to somebody else on your. So you wanna schedule a prep call with that person to tell them about what to expect.
You wanna do a handoff call that actually introduce you, the relationship that you've built with your champion and that team. You want to be on that call to introduce them to the new person they're gonna be working with so that they know they're in good hands. And you want to continue to maintain that relationship going forward, which is gonna benefit you as a seller in the future.
But it's also going to, you know, make sure that, if anything does come up and you do need to step in that you're still that trusted contact somebody that they can go to in the future. So let's recap. First meeting to close. You've got that, that, that gold meeting with the prospect that you really have been wanting to meet with you, do your research, you crush the first impression and you get that person to agree, to do a technical evaluation.
Things come up along the way you're gonna have objections. You're gonna have competition. Come in. There's gonna be questions. You have prepared answers and you have a game plan and you stay professional through all of it, navigating that long and windy road.
You get to the end of that technical evaluation, you've got a team that's really excited. They want to buy your product, but now they ask you the, the million dollar question, uh, as it were, what's it gonna cost you navigate your way through the pricing discussion to, to maximize the value of your deal. So you you're getting the most dollars out of that deal you possibly can, but you're also, uh, making it a win for the customer and fitting within their parameters.
And then once you've agreed on the price, You navigate the legal negotiation, the procurement process, all the people that are involved, you close the deal, you get the paperwork and you hand it off to customer success. And, In the next lesson, you'll learn about what it takes to maintain a happy customer and what that customer success process looks like.
So thank you so much for listening. I hope you learn something today. Again, my name's Austin Barr. Have a great rest of your day.
