Mega Deal Secrets: How to Find and Close the Biggest Deal of Your Career by Jamal Reimer
Introduction The Impossible Deal
- Executive Whispering — the craft of choreographing interactions between senior executives and experts from your company and your customers.
- Land and Expand strategy is a terrible crutch that will keep sellers poor and chasing a dream that rarely comes true.
- Mega Dealers get their executives involved early,
- Mega Dealers focus on engaging the customer’s top brass: SVPs, EVPs, and even CEOs.
- Rather than the Land and Expand approach favored by countless sellers, Mega Dealers go directly for deals of size right off the bat.
- Mega Dealer develops relationships with key customer stakeholders before her deal ends up in procurement.
Chapter 1 The Mega Deal Premise
- By definition, if you are used to closing small deals, your existing process is a small deal process.
- In my experience, the more senior the player you engage, the less they hesitate to share internal pains or block your access to other key players.
- I prioritize existing customers when looking for Mega Deal candidate accounts
- Mega Dealers are perpetual networkers.
- Mega Dealers approach partner organizations by going straight to the top whenever possible.
- The Mega Deal Premise has three main parts:
- Core Imperative: One of your customer’s most important goals. Core Imperatives are like vital organs. They are the highest priority goals and initiatives your customer’s C-suite executives are focused on this fiscal year. Don’t try to build your Mega Deal Premise around a goal the company isn’t already pursuing.
- C-Level Insight: A new piece of information that reveals how or why your customer is experiencing pain and having trouble achieving their goal. A C-Level Insight is a new discovery or way of thinking about what stands between the customer’s current state and the achievement of one of their Core Imperatives.
- Distinctive Value Proposition: A clear story demonstrating that only your offering can help the customer reduce the pain and achieve their goal
- The role of the modern seller is to bring business insights that are timely, relevant, valuable, actionable, and new.
- The most valuable type of insight will reveal a transformational way of solving one of their biggest problems,
- Start at the bottom, but keep your eyes on the summit. Spend too long at the bottom of the mountain and you’ll become associated with that level of the organization.
Chapter 2 The First Executive Meeting
- If you can find a consulting firm that has worked with both your company and your Mega Deal target, that can be a perfect way to gain an introduction directly to an executive.
- Any time you can do something for an executive or partner that enhances their status, you’ll win points.
- If your job title includes “sales,” change it to something more helpful and knowledgeable, like Account Manager. Get rid of the S word if you want to network with executives and senior-level partners.
- Three key microcommitments to secure during the first executive meeting:
- First, get agreement to run a small assessment of your solution.
- Second, get the customer executive to agree they will attend, along with your executive, a meeting at the end of the assessment to review the results.
- Third, agree you will be given access to their current and past data specific to the use case to be used in the assessment.
- There is nothing that will strip your credibility faster than positioning a large deal before value is proven. In the first meeting, don’t mention any dollar figures. Don’t talk about contracts or terms. It’s too soon. Instead, paint a compelling vision of the future. But don’t go into detail about deal specifics just yet.
Chapter 3 The Proof of Concept Study
- The main benefit of the PoC for the Mega Dealer is it quantifies the value of your solution.
- “If you can’t measure it, you can’t price it.”
- A PoC study has five main phases, and it should take no more than three months from start to finish.
- Kickoff
- Setup
- Execution
- Analysis
- Conclusion
- Whether you sell technology or services, the customer stakeholders will at least need an orientation if not some level of formal training to know how to play their part in the PoC.
Chapter 4 The Second Executive Meeting
- The Second Executive Meeting is when you’ll share the results of your PoC, and it’s important to make this a conversation, not a pitch.
- Avoid PowerPoint slides wherever possible because they are static props created ahead of time.
- Being prescriptive is a rare skill among individual contributor sellers and a vital part of influencing senior executives. Leaders respond to people who have strong views and who can back them up with facts, expertise, and experience
- Most sellers are afraid to be prescriptive
Chapter 5 Building Stakeholder Buy-In
- Establish a positive perception of your solution for the prospect independent of procurement by getting buy-in from the key decision makers ahead of time so the negotiation team won’t squeeze you on pricing.
- When your deal reaches procurement, they will often restrict your communication with everyone else at the company until the deal has been finalized to take away your visibility into their decision-making process. Thus, the buy-in phase of a Mega Deal can end abruptly when the procurement phase begins.
- The six best things you can do to flush out the most elusive stakeholders:
- Be on-site when conditions permit.
- Learn their language.
- Meet one-on-one.
- Organize group meetings.
- Put on a roadshow.
- Create a Preferred Customer Program (PCP): A PCP is a program sponsored by your company for a select subset of strategic accounts that gives them greater access to your best people and resources and gets them involved in your top-priority projects. To start a PCP, simply invite your best customers to a meeting and ask for their feedback about the product. Then take their suggestions seriously and implement them.
- When a deal is big enough and a customer executive agrees to visit our headquarters, we pull out all the stops.
- Once you have all the players in one view, assign a five-star rating system to signify their level of buy-in:
- Four or five stars for supporters
- Three stars for neutrals or undecideds
- One or two stars for blockers.
Chapter 6 The Final Showdown with Procurement
- “Is that the only point you have?” I asked. “If we can find a way to work that out, are you ready to move forward today?”
- The Infinite Units Dilemma is just one example of a weak point that procurement will exploit to drive down the price of your contract.
- Another strategy procurement uses is commoditization. They will tell you they found multiple other solutions in the market that have the same or similar features as yours and thus position your solution as a commodity.
- Deconstruction is a tactic where procurement will try to break your proposal into component parts to compare those components with others in the market. This focuses on the cost of each part, not the value delivered by the whole solution.
- Isolation is a fourth tool procurement likes to use against dealmakers. They will tell everyone at their company to stop communicating with you until the deal is closed.
- it’s nearly impossible for procurement to stop an ongoing dialogue between two Senior Vice Presidents.
- Neediness and desperation do nothing but give procurement leverage against you.
- The major reason to walk away from a deal is a lack of serious engagement