?? 4 keys to quick & painless CFO approvals

Michael Shields has the best content you're not following on LinkedIn. Who's he?

VP and Head of Procurement for Tropic. And he spills ALL THE TEA on our friends in procurement.

Stay with me here.

Even if you rarely deal with a Procurement department, someone is looking at your deal before it gets signed.

And the checklists they're using - terms, length of agreement, automatic renewal language - that's what he covers.

Michael did 3 quick videos with a CFO this week. They were like a roadmap to President's Club. Deals that have these 4 things get "quick, painless approval" from CFO's.

1. Tied to hitting company priorities
2. Drives revenue growth or improve cost efficiencies
3. It’s been vetted and we have found funding somewhere
4. Negotiated & approved by both procurement and risk management

That's the short list. So how do we help prepare our Champions so they can hit every criteria?

Here's an in-depth list of what CFOs will ask our Champions from the OnlyCFO newsletter :

1/ Why do we need [X product] now? We were fine before.

2/ What bucket does this fall into, and can you quantify it?

• Improves efficiencies
• Increases revenue
• Mission critical (e.g. cybersecurity)
• “Candy” - nice-to-have tool that doesn’t really fit into the above groups

3/ Is the spend in the budget? If not, how will you make up the difference?

4/ How does this tool tie into our company objectives for this year?

5/ What tools do we already have that does something similar? And if similar tools exist, why can’t we use those?

6/ What are the people time requirements?

7/ Implementation costs? Will we need to upgrade plans soon to enterprise or some other made up tier? (← lol)

8/ Pricing:

• If usage-based pricing: I want a detailed analysis on how pricing works and modeling for what our planned usage will look like.
• If seat-based pricing: I don’t want to buy a bunch of extra seats for planned growth. That got a lot of people in trouble when headcount growth halted and layoffs happened.

We need a meeting with our Champion to prep them for their convos with Decision Makers. Asking for that meeting can sound like --> “We have a couple of internal resources to help you put together the business case. Most folks find these helpful because it means they don’t have to start from scratch. We want to help you look good in front of your leadership, and make sure you feel prepared. The first pass at this should take 15-20 minutes. How is 9 AM on Thursday?”

Prepping Champions is what we do when a deal is healthy and moving fast. What about those deals that seem to be slowly dying....and we can't figure out why? To help you get those Q3 deals from STUCK to SIGNED, I'm doing a free workshop in September.

On Wednesday, September at 11am CST, we’ll be talking about The Top 3 Silent Deal Killers (and how to avoid them).

Attendance will be capped at 500, and we almost ran out of room in the last workshop. You can save your spot HERE .

"But Krysten, my Q3 sucked. So I don't have any late stage deals. I'm worried about the amount of pipeline I have. AND I'm scared I don't have enough time left in the year to close the deals I need to hit quota." If that's you, I've definitely been there. AND I have good news.

There are 3 types of deals that Double your win rate

AND bring in a 54% bigger deal size

AND shorten the sales cycle by 12%

These "unicorn" deals involve people who have already used your product, bought your product, or at some point, evaluated your product. You want to reach out to these folks ASAP!

They can impact your pipeline today. To get you started, here are 14 different Playbooks .

You can use these sequences right now. Simple as hitting copy/paste. (And costs you $0.)

Whether you have a late stage deal causing you heartburn or are going through pipeline anxiety (or both), I hope you found something that's helpful!

Next LinkedIn newsletter comes out in 2 weeks.

If you want insights like this every week, join 5,993 other sellers & sign up here !

Here's where to find me this month:

Upcoming Events: LIVE workshop! The Top 3 Silent Deal Killers (and how to avoid them) September at 11am CST Attendance is capped at 500, and we almost ran out of room in the last workshop. Save your seat now!

Let's Meet IRL:

Videos: Interview with Sales Players on "Closing More Complex Deals "

Whether it’s a deal that's stuck in "Procurement Purgatory", an Opp that's dying a slow death or something else, I’ll try to help you any way I can.

You can email me directly ([email protected]). I respond personally to every email. (Yes, me. Not AI. :)

Rooting for you-

Krysten