How To Sign Your First Big Deal

James Ker-ReidDirector

Growing London tech businesses each day

www.salesforstartups.co.uk

/jameskerreid

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Contents

1) Having no sales strategy! 3

2) No clearly defined roles 4

3) Not building a sales and marketing engine 5

4) Inconsistent Marketing Campaigns 6

5) Holding onto old processes that are not scalable 7

6) Underestimating the value of partnerships 8

7) Having the wrong people in place 9

Conclusion 10

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1) Define Your Ideal Client

Ok, so you know you want to make progress, you want to impress the boss, the founders, your industry that you can compete at the highest level. You want to be in the finals at the Olympics not just competing at the qualifiers. You know that the difference between the gold, silver and bronze medal is absolutely huge.

The same goes for Sales. The difference between a gold and silver medal in Sales is millions of pounds, dollars or euros. If you want to win gold medals, you have to train and think like a gold medallist but more importantly you have to know how the gold medallists act and what makes them gold medallists.

If you don’t know who your ideal client is and why they are your ideal client, you are never going to sign them. And if you get lucky enough to hit the jackpot just by sheer chance, you will almost do anything and everything to sabotage the success or run away from the responsibility.

When coaching startups, we found that defining and knowing your ideal client, their profile and nature was a fundamental key missing when wanting to expand. The spray and pray approach was very painful and limited in its effect.

If you are a startup and you are trying to sign your first big deal, normally £100,000+ then you need to know who and why you are doing it. It takes much MORE effort to win a large client as a startup than a corporate business. You simply don’t have the team, the resources and the experience to consistently attract and win these key clients.

Having said that, once you win a large client, who says you can’t win another?

The process is quite simple. Ask yourself the following questions:

+ What is my ideal size of customer or company?

+ How many users or departments would need my service or product?

+ Who is my target customer or person within that company?

+ What problem will our solution solve for them? What’s it worth to them?

+ What is our expected return for this type of client?

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2) Where does your client go for information?

For some, this question is completely bedazzling. They think...why would I need to know where my client goes for information? Well, I don’t want to surprise you but in order to be credible in the client’s eyes they need to be familiar with your brand and company.

How challenging is it to buy from someone you don’t know? Do you opt for the known or the unknown when you are under pressure or busy?

This common human behaviour is an phenomena that you need to consider when going out to find, select, persuade and close your first big deal. We also wrote a previous ebook on this particular challenge, titled 7 Mistakes When Building Your Sales Revenue that describes how sometimes we think of Sales and Marketing as two separate entities, when actually they should be one and completely interdependent.

To give you an insight, the common areas that they will go to absorb information on your service area will be the top social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), industry websites, rating or review websites, trade associations or events and taking advice from similar professionals in their network.

You have the opportunity to influence your decision makers when marketing and selling to them by the information that you distribute daily.

+ Are you communicating to your audience regularly?

+ If I asked someone in your target market, would they know who you were?

+ How are informed are you on recent issues for clients, what are the top issues in the last 6 months?

When you take full responsibility in educating yourself about your buyer and being aware of what is on their mind currently, you will have a much deeper understanding of their issues and make it a lot easier to define your value proposition to them.

We will now go onto discuss the value proposition in more detail now and to help you really create a synergy with your first big client and first big deal.

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3) Define Your Value Proposition

There are two schools of thought when it comes to how and when you need to define your value proposition. For example, Jill Konrath claims that you need to define your value proposition each time, whereas Jeb Blount states that you can create a common value proposition to help you achieve your goal of engaging the prospect.

In our opinion, we believe that you need to do both. For the sole reason is that you first have to perform prospecting to multiple ideal clients before you often get the chance to really show your bespoke and unique value proposition. It would be counter-productive to spending so much time on a defining your individual customer value proposition before you’ve had a proper conversation with them.

Once you are engaged with your ideal client, you can certainly craft a unique value proposition to that customer.

Key parts of your value proposition include:

+ What are they doing currently? What is the status quo?

+ What is it costing them (time, people or money)?

+ What part of our product or service is extremely valuable to them?

+ What challenges may we have when selling our product/service?

+ What improvements would they see by using our product/service?

+ What is it about our product/service that would be unique or telling for them?

We teach our clients that really having an understanding at first of the industry common value proposition is important and then secondly crafting a unique proposition in line with their challenges will result in huge results for your company.

This is not an easy exercise and will take hard work to complete these questions and really to understand why your answers and solution have an impact on your customer.

People often act from a position of self-interest and what is in line with their values. If you know what their core interests are and what values must be upheld, you are well on your way to winning your first big client.

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4) Contacting your first big client

I’m not going to write in an exhaustive explanation of how you can and need to be contacting your client. I will give you some pointers to help you on content and tactics when contacting them.

Firstly, don’t be one dimensional. In 2017, we contact and speak with our network and friends in multiple ways. Have you ever contacted a friend by text, call, whatsapp and email before? Do you believe that you might contact someone by different means? It is incredibly harmful to your success to believe that we should just email and call a client and they should immediately respond. Salespeople only use one contact method 80% of the time.

Think about that for a second, 80% of the time, people are using one method to contact a client. What happens if that is a bad method? What happens if that individual doesn’t have access to their email?

One can relate this to your personal life, by asking the question, what is the quality of your relationships that only use one method of contact 100% of the time?

Secondly, why would your client give up their time? In your own life, how easily do you give up your time to someone you don’t know? A sense of realism and understanding about how hard this task is for you is the first step to progress in real making in-roads into signing your first client. How easy are you making it for your prospect to contact you?

If you received your email, text, voicemail, social media post, direct message, letter, in-person visit – would you respond? Sometimes we have to change the perspective in order to gain clarity and purpose in our efforts. And commit to action that will move us forward. If you are not sold on your message, how sold do you think your client will be in giving up their time?

Thirdly, don’t ask for everything at once. Ask incrementally as you build the relationship and the trust with your client. There will nearly always be another opportunity for another conversation or question, don’t try and cram them into one conversation or opportunity with your prospect.

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5) Nurture your relationship with your prospect

We’ve talked in the previous section about contacting your client, using multiple methods of contact, understanding why they would give up their time and not making too many asks at once.

In order to sign large contracts, you have to nurture relationship by constantly giving more value and information to your customer. The more informed they become as a buyer about their problems, your solution, your team and company, the more likely they are to choose your for their next big contract.

Your next big customer is assessing your business and people on one key area, how easy is it to do business with this company? Then after that first impression, it is about keeping your integrity, your promises and delivering a standard level that even surpasses what you initially expected.

Although sometimes your prospect can appear frosty or deliberately cold, they are often just trying to get the best for their company and for the senior management. Often people are looking for a win-lose agreement as they are asked for specific items or terms by senior management and hence spend most of their effort and communication trying to achieve that goal.

You can convert this initial blinded hunger into your advantage if you really understand what the client is looking for in the first place. If you do achieve this goal, it’s incredibly disarming for the buyer, as you know what they want and hence you can create a solution and structure that achieves both their goal and yours as well. You have now created a win-win scenario.

Another area that can strengthen your relationship with your sponsor or buying team is taking your contact out of their own building or a meeting room. Have you ever felt that people are more open when not in a meeting room or their company building?

Ultimately you are looking to come to an agreement between two sets of people. For example, have you ever heard good things from your friend group about another individual you don’t know? Then you’ve met that person and connected with them and then they too have become a friend and a trusted individual. This is no different from the working world too.

You want people to compliment and praise you behind closed doors. The only way you will achieve that aim is by nurturing your relationship with your prospect.

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6) Step up and become a leader

A large part of winning a big deal is that you have to lead from front. You need to lead yourself, your team and even their team to create a real partnership.

This means as you progress through the stages of the buying cycle, you bring your team with you. This is so important in the world that we live in today. In the Information Age, the majority of our workforce are knowledge workers.

Knowledge Worker – a person whose job involves handling or using information.

We are constantly managing information in our conversations with clients, our bid team, our development or fulfillment team. This means that your ability to manage lots of information during a buying cycle is so important to the mutual success of both parties. You can certainly make this memory process a lot easier by using tools like CRM and collaborative systems like shared documents, spreadsheets and slides to help you. You are not expected to remember everything!

A large part of this framework is based on being accountable for a particular client or deal. This is where you have to step up and become a leader of people. In a Sales process, information only becomes of value when it is presented and explained in a way that matches your intended interpretation of the information.

This is a continual process within a buying cycle as there’s a lot of information coming from a multitude of different sources. There is normally one or two people responsible for absorbing and translating this information to multiple individuals and groups. And you have trust and direct this person to bring the right people into the deal.

When bidding for a large contract or tender, ask yourself the question:

Who is our leader for this opportunity?

Often you’ll find that people want to dip in and out of taking responsibility when it suits them. This is dangerous way of managing a deal, as a lot gets lost in translation.

Are you ready to step up and be a leader?

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7) Hold steady and celebrate your win!

It baffles me when people have done all the hard work, they don’t even celebrate. You’ve expended so much energy to get here, been through the contractual mill, reviewed umpteen legal clauses and had to bring out all the stops at the negotiating table. And after all that...you’ve finally got the signature on your contract.

I know that when you win there is a great sense of relief too but don’t forget to enjoy the win!

Common statements often mentioned include:

+ “Ah, we got there in the end…”

+ “Wow, that’s a relief.”

+ “We did it, eventually.”

+ “I’m not sure I can do another one of those anytime soon.”

+ “I think I’m going to take a week off now that’s done.”

+ “Why are you celebrating? There’s a long way to go now, the real work begins.”

By saying these kinds of statements you are literally killing yourself. This does not build momentum and positive reinforcement of the right behaviours. For example, you have just achieved something that you have never done before. That’s a feat, why don’t you treat it so?

Often, we are concerned about the reaction, our target, what people may think of us if we celebrate. This is madness!

This can be a challenge for remote buying teams. It’s not to stop you celebrating, we’ve experienced remote teams and suppliers celebrating over a video call in separate locations. Anything is possible, really.

I remember, when I first started in a selling role, I would be celebrating after each interview was scheduled for my candidates. My colleagues thought I was mad at the time. Although looking back at it, this practice of continual celebration certainly paid off when the quarterly sales reviews came round…

Additionally when celebrating, you also need to celebrate with your clients. This can be quite unnerving and uncertain, as it often this depends on the quality of your relationship as to whether this is openly received and even the timing and complexity of the deal that has been agreed.

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Summary

We very much hope you enjoyed reading this guide and if you’re interested, we would urge you to sign up to our strategy of the month for further insights.

The seven key tenants of How To Sign Your First Big Deal are not the only areas that startups and salespeople fail to consider when trying to build revenue.

At Sales for Startups, we help startups define their commercial strategy, help them implement it and then ensure that they take action to deliver results immediately.

When working with Sales leaders, company Founders and Investors/Accelerators, our clients are able to achieve their annual revenue target in a space of 6 months when working with Sales for Startups.

If you would like to find out more please fill out the contact form on the website or email info@salesforstartups.co.uk

We would love to hear your comments on this eBook and if we believed we have missed anything then we are always open to constructive feedback and making things better for our clients and loyal followers.

Happy Selling!

James Ker-Reid

Founder, Sales for Startups

www.salesforstartups.co.uk