A New Deal Has Entered The Chat

Here's how you should evaluate it as a leader.

We’ve all been there: the happy ears rep, the rep that doesn’t know what questions to ask, the rep that trusts everything the buyer says and forecasts on it, on and on.

As leaders, a core to our success is to ask those tough questions that reps may not know to ask or have the courage to ask.?

Here are just a few of my favorite ones to ask when I see a new deal pop in.

We know what they want, do we know WHY they want it??

• What’s creating the urgency?
• Who is this impacting in the organization?
• What’s the monetization of not solving the issue?

Who do we know at the account?

• Have our previous customers moved here? (Really good play if you are selling into a sector that keeps its employees in the same sector, like pharma and professional services.)
• Do our executives know anyone at the company??
• Check out our Prospecting Playbook for some SERIOUS hacks here!

Have we had opportunities here before?

• Are those contacts still there and part of this?
• Have we closed those opps and then they churned?
• Why didn’t we win before? (Was it our product and has it changed? Was there a core request in the RFP or in security/integrations that they needed and we still don’t do?)

If you, the leader, hear the word “they” a lot, do we know who the they’s are?

Who else are they evaluating?

Who are you multi-threaded to so far?

What’s your plan to keep multi-threading?

Is the deal big enough that it makes sense to start multithreading them to executives on our team or to expose them to CS/AMs?

How will you nurture and add value to them?

Are there any upcoming events or conferences we’re hosting that we can invite them to attend?

Is there anything we can do to move the timeline forward on the close date?

For deals that show the promise of a quick close, do we:

• Know the signature process?
• Know if the deal needs to be on their paper?
• Have confirmation that they (or the signer) can sign for spend thresholds of this size?
• Have a line in to infosec, procurement, and legal?

Finally, simply ask, “Why won’t the deal get done?” and start to look for all the pitfalls we can avoid now.

There are dozens more but this should give you a starting point and even allow you to create a deal checklist if you don’t have a checklist or a methodology already in your CRM.

New to #samsales? Here's how we can help:

Free: Monthly webinars, podcasts, articles, women's leadership group with 1,000+ community members here!

Not-So-Free: Join 4,000+ people who have purchased our playbooks and video subscriptions here!

Bring Your Corporate Budget: We focus on two things - Top of the funnel sales training/social selling + curating a LinkedIn strategy for C-Suite execs and celebrities.