Important Milestones

There are cornerstones in every buying process. You can manage them by aligning them to your “best practice” events, such as a Demo, a Proof of Concept or a 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 are not as successful as customer-tailored demos.

POC

See the sales stage Proof of Concept.

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 no budget allocated for your particular offering, can you map the requirements to an already approved project or program?

There are several approval processes for 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 project starts. It will still have to be finally approved by the management team with a proper ROI plan.

There are several budget runs in 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 customer’s business does not perform well, the cash board has a vital role in prioritizing the criticality of new projects.

Legal

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

Legal resources are usually scarce 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-sized to large enterprise client, you need to reserve a minimum of 3–6 weeks to get your deal onto paper. We have heard of worst cases where large contracts were negotiated for 12+ months.

To secure your deal, check the following.

Do you have a frame contract in place?

Yes: That’s good. You can expect 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’s frame contract template and check with your legal department whether 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 series of negotiation steps with defined time slots, allocated by both your legal department and the customer’s legal department. Depending on the complexity, it could be 2–3 people over the course of a couple of weeks. It’s better to reserve more meetings than fewer. 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 about terms of the contract that are not actually legal but more business-risk related.
• Make sure the EB, Champion or sourcing person supports you in evaluating the business risk and takes responsibility for covering it.

Will you 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.