Now that you’ve set up your schedule, you’ve kicked off and configured your POC and have begun sending drips throughout to make sure your product stays sticky, the pre-wrap up prep is so important to ensuring you and your champion are aligned in multiple key areas.
Storytelling is part of what it is to be human. And the best stories share our values and beliefs. Those stories are powerful. Those stories inspire.
Simon Sinek
Building your story with your champion helps them communicate effectively with their managers and or the economic buyer that they will eventually need budget approval and signature from. The champion will need to be ready to handle objections that may be thrown their way.
Drill Baby Drill
Within those challenges and questions your champion may face are questions potentially about their due diligence on other products. At this stage you should be asking your champion about who else they are evaluating, lay as many traps as possible, and push to continuously influence the decision criteria. For example if your prospect is also evaluating a competing solution that does not provide the same functionality yours does, and that data is identified during the POC, you need to be pushing the importance of that. After the wrap-up prep you’ll be sending additional drips and here you can focus on that differentiation to ensure you can influence decision criteria.
Tying Product Value to Business Value
A conversation here needs to continue to revolve around the business justification, the overall ROI. Asking questions such as “what does the ultimate decision maker (hopefully you know this and aren’t asking in such a dumb way) care about most with this project?” A difficult but highly effective tactic the best sales reps do is tie the project value and and financial costs to the specific risks and growth topics outlined in the companies annual report and 10k.
You Can Lead a Horse to Water, But Can’t Make it Drink
At a certain point you as a seller can only do so much, send so many whitepapers, and have so many data points to share. There’s an old saying “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” That is very true in sales as well. So what can you or someone do? Leverage your reference network. Find a customer in your prospects industry and leverage their experience with your product/solution and how it helped them with a similar problem. That sounds easier said than done. Prep that reference to stay in a very tight lane. I’ve had a customer screw me out of a deal previously because they started going rogue.
TLDR:
This stage helps you prep and organize for the close — Drill in questions about criteria and begin leveraging your data to combat competitors. Identifying your victory path doesn’t start here, but it gets juicier.
