Big Knocks and Large Deals

Chasing large scores in cricket needs rotating the sixes with singles, and the same goes for scoring big sales deals. The seeds of winning are sown early on in the game, and just as cricket isn't a game of chance, the game of winning large deals is not won by chance. There is lot that needs to be done early enough to get that big payout.?

Getting invited to a bid or RF, the most common buying process, is good basic approach, but not good enough for winning large deals. A common mistake that I see the presales & solutions teams making is to restrict their responses only to the criterion mentioned in this basic document. The best sales teams, instead, do not shy away from expanding the view of the users, and helping them with competitive-differentiation. Hence, they can potentially score bigger.?A Sales leader I spoke to, once told me that they stopped chasing the RFPs, instead they started to follow an approach where they can collaborate with clients and help them write one. As a result, their conversion went up significantly from 38% to 72%.?

Does this mean that they started refusing the RFPs where clients would reach out? No, instead they would politely ask them if they needed the quote, saving precious time the sales organisation would spend working on it.?

Here are a few things that I find common between winning large deals and scoring Big in a game of Cricket.?

Set the Chase?- Not long ago, a score between 180 and 225 was considered respectable. Then, the Lankans came and changed the game by creating massive scores. They set the New rules, and started leveraging them well.?Similarly, you get the Head Start when you start early and collaborate with the C Suite. You leverage this access to identify the problems and even uncover their emotional needs that surely don't find a way in the RFP document.??

Set the Ground?– It’s extremely important to understand the pitch and the ground, and have a good captain that would carefully do the placement of fielders and batsmen to drive maximum advantage. Similarly, you need to have a bird's eye view of the selling ground. Just getting the CEOs excited alone may not translate into business, until you work with each of the other stakeholders to Identify the value that it would bring to them individually.?

Charge Up the?Josh?-?Stakeholders onboarding is best done by showing the value that your solutions bring for them, just as teammates are driven by a deep individual sense of achievement that the game brings to them. One of the large deals that I pursued early in my career highlighted how this works. The value we brought in was building the consensus with as many as 23 Business Leaders. We used the opportunity to not only just understand what we could solve for them, but also leveraged each conversation as a sales conversation. This got us to establish relationships early enough, and acted as a deterrent for a competitive situation, too.?

Not Leaving it to a chance –It’s not just the players but also the available support that begets success. Having a Coach is essential, but figuring out the Domino early on can be a distinct advantage. Dominos can help you to drive the agenda internally, especially in pandemonium conditions. Like Big games require big knocks, big Play Strategy is essential. Study the chinks in the competitors' armor, expose them, and play the game to your strengths.

Keep winning!

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