Overview

The deal sheet is your central information for your opportunity.

You will find sales stages, qualifiers and milestones tiles that will allow you to manage the most important steps in your sales cycle and crosscheck if you’ve missed anything along the way.

These can be modified from within the deal sheet or meeting minutes linked to the deal. This information will be shared with anyone that you choose in the ‘Followers’ tile.

There are some default checklists within each tile that will give you some guidance, but you can change them and add your own items as well.

If you create a task from within a tile, you will be able to see it your timeline (pull-in slider from the right) under the ‘Tasks’ tab. Here you’ll see your deal-related tasks in ordered by time and topic. This is critical in order to create a detailed close plan.

By default, iSEEit uses MEDDIC qualifiers and milestones (learn more about MEDDIC here), but your administrator can customize this to match your team’s sales process and methodology within the settings page.

Sales Stages:

Every deal should be broken down into separate stages that will allow you to navigate your way to closing as effectively as possible.

By default, iSEEit comes with six stages:

• Discovery
• Scope
• Go/No Go
• Proof of Concept (POC)
• Business Value Assessment BVA
• Negotiate & Close

(Your Administrator can configure the sales stages according to your sales cycle or sales methodology.)

Discovery

This is the initial sales stage. Any lead you convert to a deal will start at this stage.

In the Discovery stage, you usually have multiple calls with different stakeholders within the account to confirm the Pain and find a potential Champion. These two qualifiers will drive the project from the customer perspective.

Both Pain and Champion are flagged as mandatory qualifiers, which means you will be notified if you have not been able to identify and qualify them before entering the next stage.

In the Discovery Stage, you will find the following qualifiers by default:

I – Identify Pain

This qualifier is a gate, meaning you should not move into the next sales stage without completing this first. For more information, see MEDDIC qualifiers

C – Champion

This qualifier is a gate, meaning you should not move into the next sales stage without completing this first. For more information, see MEDDIC qualifiers.

General Info

Here you can enter the description of the opportunity and any useful general information.

Lead Info

If your deal has been converted from a lead, you will find all of the information collected from the lead here.

Scope

The Scope stage is where you will collect the Metrics and Decision Criteria. These will help you understand the business impact of the project.

Together with your Champion, you should meet with some of the key stakeholders and discuss their pain points, possible use cases, items or workflow they want or could improve with your solution.

It is important to collect Metrics that will allow you to measure the:

1. Negative consequences in case your customer cannot improve
2. Positive business outcome if they can change or improve things.

By collecting this information at every single meeting, you will know if your case is strong enough. This is also the time to discuss potential budgets and steps to allocate them.

Ideally, you’ll have collected enough information to build a preliminary business case, which you can present to the Economic Buyer.

At this stage, you need to be able to plan with your Champion clear next steps.

If your Champion is not able to bring you in front of the Economic Buyer, then you need to discover more pain, better metrics or find another champion.

In the Scope Stage, you will find the following qualifiers and milestones by default:

M – Metrics

See the MEDDIC Qualifers section for more information

Dc – Decision criteria

See the MEDDIC Qualifers section for more information

Demo

See the Milestones section for more information

GO/NO GO

If your Metrics are strong and the Pain and implication is big enough, your Champion will be more willing to bring you in front of the Economic Buyer, the ultimate decision maker.

There might be a lot of initial objections or even pushbacks from the EB, as these guys are pretty busy and usually don’t want to waste any time.

There are plenty of objections than you might come across, like

• “The EB does not meet with vendors,” or
• “The EB is not interested in details and will be involved in a later stage.”

This is when you can test if you have a real Champion. He or she will understand that buy-in from the EB is essential for a successful project. If you picked the right Champion well, they will be able to arrange this meeting.

The goal of this GO/NO GO meeting with the EB is to present your preliminary business case that includes the pain points, metrics of the consequences if nothing is done and a potential ROI. Ask for sponsorship and finally define what the next steps could be.

Question to ask the EB

1. Do you sponsor the project?
2. How does success look like for you?
3. What are the next steps, if we fulfill the success criteria?

If you get answers to these questions and the ‘GO’ from the EB, then you are possibly 66% percent through the process.

By discussing ROI and business outcome, you might have built a potential segue to the executive management. The EB should provide clear steps of what needs to happen to lead to a decision and who needs to be involved.

Now you can outline your next steps, such as a Proof of Value, Process Audit or any other Validation Event that will allow the customer to make a decision

 NOTE:Please make sure you define a follow up meeting (Echo Back) with the EB to make sure you have and anchor point along the process where you have the right to come back.

In the Go/No Go Stage, you will find the following qualifiers and milestones by default:

Dp – Decision Process

EB – Economic Buyer

POC – Proof of Concept

The Proof of Concept is when the customer would like to have an on-premise proof of the proposed solution to make sure it works as they expect.

It can be a quite intensive and expensive exercise, so you want to make sure you take full advantage of this step.

If you’re planning a POC, there are many traps that you might fall into. These are some of the major ones.

1. • POC is confused with a Demo
   • The proof of concept is just that, you are proving that your concept works on premise with the client. In early stages the “concept” or the desired outcome is not defined yet enough to prove it working. Many clients still ask to “play around” with your solution. Try to avoid this, as especially with complex solutions they client might be overwhelmed and confused after the “playing period”
   • If the client needs to learn more about your offering you can offer Demos, Webinars and discussions about use cases and needs.
2. • The Economic Buyer is not aware of the project
   • Especially in larger companies, make sure you meet the EB to get his sponsorship to run the POC. After all it is a huge investment from your company and you want to make sure there is a chance to close a deal in the end.
3. • Not all parties are invited to the POC
   • The POC is designed to be last ultimate proof point of the “technical” concept. Not all departments needed are involved. You might end up making multiple POCs or even worse, let competition run their own POC with other departments. Make sure you understand who needs to be invited. The EB and Champion might help.
4. • Poor preparation before the POC
   • The client did not setup the environment and you spend days wasting valuable POC days to setup. Not all attendees have time to take part, or they move in and out during the POC, making it possible that they miss important parts.
   • Make sure you have a complete list of attendees and ensure they have the time.
   • Sometimes it is better to make a two-day POC with all attendees than a four-week with only some of them.
5. • Uses cases are not documented before the POC
   • A POC should have clearly documented use cases to be shown and checked positive in the list, so you can talk about a successful POC.
   • – Make sure you and your technical counterpart spend time with the POC attendees to define what success looks like with documented use cases. LESS use cases with more depth is better then the other way around!
   • – Try to influence the use cases in way that your solution or offering shines!
6. • Sales people do not participate
   • Many POCs are run without the sales people showing up. This is not good for many reasons: First you cannot get the feel for the acceptance of the customer’s players, you cannot bridge with them and build them as champions. And last but for not least, you are missing an opportunity to understand the “real” hard facts of what is going on. People lower in the chain intend to be more honest!
7. • No echo back meeting on POC findings to management is organized
   • This is a great opportunity to see your customer in action. The POC attendees are presenting back to their management on what they learned on the POC. This will allow you to learn spot your technical champions and their counterparts in management, which you as sales person can then engage with, if you haven’t already.

In the POC Stage, you will find the following qualifiers and milestones by default:

C – Who are you competing against? What are your competitiors strengths and weaknesses? What is your strategy to beat them?

Why Do Anything?

See The 3 Why’s section for more information

POC

See above explanation

BVA – Business Value Assessment

Every company will do a kind of Business Value Assessment to see if the investment the project team is planning is worthwhile.

If you don’t proactively support the client in this stage, the ROI calculations will be done on the usual internal measurements (e.g. cost cutting), without a chance to enrich them with how their business could be supported.

However, if you have a strong relationship with the stakeholders you will be able to influence the metrics that are being used in the calculation. Good sales people are actively engaged doing process audits collecting the metrics and convincing stake holders to buy in in one or the other saving by showing the how the picture could look like.

During such a process audit or value assessment you get to know a lot of people and learn a lot about problems, politics and other issues of your prospect so that in the end you probably know more of what needs to be done than the employees themselves.

Best practices tips to setup a Value Assessment/Process Audit

• Get the sponsorship of the economic buyer
• Let Champion or EB send the stakeholders an email to support this assessment
• Schedule 45min to 1 hour meetings with the respective stakeholders where you show what your offering is capable of and discover the metrics.
• Do the meetings with one stakeholder at the time. They or more likely to be open when their peers are not around.
• After collecting all the metrics, separate the hard facts (tangible values) from the soft facts (intangible values) – The ROI calculation needs to be based on the hard facts enriched with the soft facts on top.
• Crosscheck findings with your Champion and “polish” them to be bullet proof.
• Crosscheck with stakeholders to get their buy-in on findings. If the EB turns back on them to support the numbers they should be convinced to do so!

The result should be a bullet proof ROI study justifying the investment into your offering that you can present to back to the EB in an Echo Back meeting.

In the BVA, you will find the following milestones by default:

Why Do Anything?

See The 3 Why’s section for more information

Budget

See the milestones section for more explanation

Negotiate & Close

In the negotiation phase, you will learn if you’ve done a proper job running the sales cycle.

Do you know the 3 why’s? Why do anything? Why you? And Why now?

Have you collected bullet proof use cases and returns Do you know who are you are competing against? Have you built a strong power base?

If you’ve done your job well, then it’s likely that you are in a strong position to negotiate. If not, then probably the purchasing manager will have greater control of the price than you.

Here’s a short checklist of things you need to be in the strongest position possible going into negotiations:

• You have multiple strong Champions on all levels
• You know the answers to the 3 WHY’s
• You have a documented close plan of what needs to be done and when
• You have met the EB who supports you
• You know the budget and have an idea of the competitive offerings
• You reserved some percentages for the purchasing guy
• You have a couple of negotiables that the customer values that you can trade in and won’t cost you too much.

In the Negotiate & Close, you will find the following qualifiers and milestones by default:

Why Now

See The 3 Why’s section for more information

Legal

See the milestones section for more explanation

MEDDIC Qualifiers

Metrics

Metrics are quantifiable and measurable results that a customer perceives as valid for his project or initiative, and can be divided in 2 major groups:

Below the Line
For example, cost savings and efficiency gains. Many times paired with reductions on FTEs (Full Time Equivalent)

Above the Line
These are more business-centric like increase in revenue or profit, quicker time to market, higher quality and customer satisfaction. These metrics are used to build decisions and are used to build the Business Case or ROI

Strong Metrics: We are 15 FTE(Full time equivalent) with 95% utilisation. We are expanding our infrastructure 15% a year and we expect another acquisition this year, which will double. We will not get a budget to increase FTEs.

Questions to ask:

• How would you measure success of your project?
• Which metrics around cost, efficiency or business do you need to achieve?
• How would this success be measured by business?

Economic Buyer

The EB is a Person with the discretionary approval to spend. The person gives the ultimate “yes” or “no” to a project. Usually the person has a clear sight on the business benefits, decision criteria and the process to close a deal.

Meeting the real EB, checking for his sponsorship, criteria and next steps usually sheds a lot of light on the complex decision criteria and processes. Preparing the EB meeting is key to success, however you need to do your homework on the value proposition and earn the right to ask for this meeting.

Qualifying if you talk to the real EB is key. A good qualifying question could be: ”If you & I come to an agreement, is there anybody else formally or informally that would need to be involved or approve?”

Question to ask the EB:

• Do you sponsor the project?
• What does success look like for you?
• What are the next steps, if we fulfill the success criteria?

If the EB confirms the project and outlines a possible close date, your deal has good chance to close. If you do not meet the EB or get his approval, your chance of closing a deal in time drops below 50%.

Decision Criteria (Dc)

Every project has formally or informally defined decision criteria. These are often categorised further as Technical, Commercial and Legal Decision Criteria.

Technical decision criteria (TDC)

Here we talk about criteria to understand the feasibility. Are the use cases covered by the potential solution? Does it comply with the existing infrastructure and, if so, how does integrate?

How easy is to work with and does it fulfill the standards of the Enterprise Architecture?

Typically this TDC will be validated in a Proof of Concept or some sort of Technical Decision Making Process.

Business/Commercial Decision Criteria (BDC)

The most common BDC is Alignment to Budget, but nowadays corporations are very much driven by Return on Investment – sometimes in less than 12 months to justify the investment.

Further, there are different types of budgets like capital expense (CAPEX) or operation expense (OPEX). Some clients have huge OPEX reduction campaigns or have certain cash-flow requirements that drive the decision criteria.

Thoroughly understanding and aligning yourself to the clients needs will show great flexibility and influence the decision towards your offering.

Question to ask:

• What are the technical criteria to make a decision?
• How do you calculate the ROI for this project to justify the investment?

Decision Process (Dp)

While the decision criteria are all about what the decision is based upon, the Decision Process is about the route it.

We primarily separate this process into the route to a technical decision (Technical Decision Making), the route to money (Business Decision Making) and the route to paper (Paper Process).

Technical Decision Making (TDM)

Based on the TDC, companies setup formal or informal processes that lead to a technical decision. It is important to understand what these steps are and who is involved in it.

As the decision criteria, this process should also be documented and confirmed by the client.

Business Decision Making (BDM)

Who needs to approve? Are there any formal boards? Is there a formal process in a project approval workflow or paper forms? How long does this usually take?

Paper Process (PP)

Rigorous regulatory or business compliance needs often lead into time intensive negotiations. These can take weeks or even months, but are necessary to have a legal agreement.

This process is reason No. 1 why contracts get postponed and deals slip out of a quarter. Make sure you have executive sponsorship to give negotiations with Purchasing and Legal the right focus, the right time and the right resources. Be paranoid about the details!

Questions to ask:

• Which people are involved and what are the steps to reach the decision?
• How is this put in a sequential order and on which timeline is it based?
• How does the approval process look like for $100K, $500K or $1 million?
• Paper: How is the legal construct set up? Are there frame agreements in place? What are the critical mandatory terms and conditions? Which contractual paperwork is the basis of negotiation?

Identify Pain

Together with the Champion, the Pain is one of the 2 major qualifiers in the discovery phase that are required in order to understand if you have an opportunity.

As strong pain can be a technical or business shortage that the client would like to overcome, stop or change.

It must impact the customer in terms of time, cost, risk or revenue if not solved within a certain time frame.

We call it “the consequence of doing nothing when the compelling event takes place.”

Important: A weak pain or not unclear consequences will usually cause delays or reduced budgets due to the lack of priority for the executive management!

Example of a strong pain:

• ABC Soft needs to deliver a solution by the end of the year. They have major delays caused by serious bugs, which may prevent an on-time delivery. (Pain)
• There is a penalty clause of $100K per week if the software is not up and running on January 1st. (Implication/Consequence: Cost->strong, Reputation-medium)

Example of a weak pain: 

ABC Soft needs to have a regression testing due to buggy software.

What info is missing here?

Questions to ask:

• Pain: What causes the delays?
• Implication: What does this mean to you and the company?
• Is it really compelling: What is the consequence of doing nothing? Does it impact your business?

Champion

Pain is an important driver and implication drives urgency.

However there is always an owner with a personal interest to get this pain solved. This personal interest drives the person to collaborate with peers, consultants and vendors to attack the pain as soon as possible.

The goal should be to identify these individuals. Even if they don’t carry the official management head, they can be spotted as they are well accepted by their peers, are very influential and usually have a good track-record of successful projects that make them visible in the chain-of-command.

If you once recognised your potential Champions goals, you will be able to develop the relationship by enabling him how to address the pain, i.e. to link them to the subject matter experts of your company, invite him/her to the right seminars or link them together with your references so they can learn from their experience handling projects like his.

Once you’ve built up a real Champion, he will recognise your support and understand that you will be able to help him solving the pain moving forward. It will become a joint effort and your Champion a true defender of the cause, selling on your behalf whenever you’re not around.

Questions to ask?

• Why is this person a champion?
• Has the person influence?
• What is his/her personal interest?
• Will he/her stand up for you and sell for you when you are not there?

The 3 WHY Qualifiers

The “3 WHY” qualifiers are powerful qualification and messaging tools.

If you collect the answers to them over the course of the sales engagement, you can build a solid case for yourself and have answers to the questions the board will ask before approving the project and budget!

Some of the reps make 3 slides together with their champions to support the project during the internal decision-making and budget approval processes.

1. Why Do Anything?

Why should the client act? Is there a consequence if he doesn’t act?

The pain points use cases and metrics around the negative consequence and positive business impact must be agreed and confirmed by the client.

Don’t assume anything. Work together with your Champion on this.

It should answer the EB’s question: “Do we really need this? What if we don’t act?”

2. Why Us?

What differentiators can you, your solution or your company add that makes your offering unique?

Check all decision criteria no matter if it’s technical, business or corporate and line them out here.

Also, your Champion and other supporters should agree on these differentiation points as unique points, especially if your competition cuts you on price.

This will answer the question: “Why should we take this Vendor over Vendor X, who might be cheaper”

Why now?

The close date of a deal is dependent on many things like the decision process, cash flow or budget implications or priorities. In decision meetings, the question will come up, “Do we have to do this now? What happens if we do it next quarter or next year?”

Together with your champion you need to have a good compelling reason and deadline why this project should not be delayed.

Milestones

There are cornerstones in every buying process. You can manage them by aligning them to your “best practice” events like making a Demo, Proof of Concept or Budget Planning Meeting.

Demo

The Demo is a very important event that shows how your offering can make a difference in the customer’s way of doing things. Frontal demos do not have as much success as customer-tailored Demos.

Tip: Collect the pain points from the different attendees prior to the Demo. Tailor your presentation to the specific needs and refer back to the learnings from the discovery call you had with the attendees.

POC

See sales stage POC

Budget

Many opportunities stall because there is no Budget available.

Try as early as possible in the sales cycle to understand if there is a route to money!

Do you know who the budget owner is (Business, IT, local, Headquarters…)?

Do you know who decides on this? Have you checked with your Champion?

Approval levels: Depending on the size of the deal you could have different approvers.

If there is now budget allocated for your particular offering, can you map the requirements to an already approved project or program?

There are several approval processes on budgets, and they usually come together regularly on fixed dates. Do you know when the next 2-3 budget board meetings are?

Project Budget Board:

Usually the Budget is applied for before the projects start. It will still have to be finally approved by the management team with a proper ROI plan.

There are several Budget runs the last quarter before customers go into their next Fiscal Year.

Cash Board:

Especially in large companies there are cash boards that make sure the company is safe on cash flow. Many times it is just a rubber stamp exercise. However, when your customers business does not perform well, the cash board has a vital role of prioritising the criticality of new projects.

Legal

The legal process can be very time and resource consuming, especially in large enterprises.

Usually legal resources are rare and especially at the end of the quarter overloaded with huge contracts they need to negotiate.

So if you want to close a deal with a new medium to large enterprise client, you need to reserve 3-6 weeks minimum to get your deal onto paper. We have heard worst cases of large contracts being negotiated for 12+ months.

In order to secure your deal check the following:

Do you have a frame contract in place?

YES – That’s good. You can consider easy paperwork, as the frame contract clarifies all the big points and the “order form” only has deal related special terms and conditions.

NO – This could be time consuming.

• Check if you can use a business partner who has a frame contract
• Request the Customer Frame Contract template and check with your legal if you can accept the terms.
• Get back to the EB and Champion to allocate the right resources to arrange the contract ASAP.

Did the customer allocate a legal resource?

• Make sure you get a qualified, business-centric legal person with enough experience in your business area
• Define a row of negotiation steps with defined timeslots, which are allocated both by your legal department, and the customers legal department. Depending on the complexity, it could be 2-3 people over the course of a couple of weeks. Better to reserve more meetings then less. You can always cancel meetings if you don’t need them

Do you have the EB and Champion to support you?

• Legal people can be very picky and strict on terms of the contract, which are not actually legal but more business-risk related.
• Make sure the EB or Champion or sourcing person supports you to evaluate the business risk and takes responsibility to cover this.

Will we be ready for the signature run?

• Make a reverse engineered closing plan with the steps needed to get a signature ready contract in front of the signing authorities.
• Make sure the EB controls the process and sets priorities for legal and purchasing to make this happen.