The Big Deal Review Tool

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Big Deal Review ToolT

he

inTRoDucTion:

41% of b2b sales organizations missed the Q1 revenue target.

Historically, 90% of companies who are behind the number at the end of Q2 (June 30th) miss the annual revenue number.

If you missed Q1, you need a monster Q2 to save 2013.

According to those who missed, the #1 reason for the miss was the delay of a big deal. In most cases, the difference between a make, or a miss, comes down to 1-3 deals.

Yet, when pressed, sales leaders admit to not knowing the real reasons why big deals push.

An incomplete understanding of why big deals push is a big problem.

The solution to this problem is the Big Deal Review Tool. The benefit of performing a Big Deal Review is to prevent any big deals from pushing out of Q2.

The Big Deal Review will allow a chief sales officer to identify the big deals in the q2 pipeline that may push and apply corrective action early in the quarter- while there is still time to make sure they don’t push.

Each Big Deal will be scored on a scale of 0-100, with 100 representing a likely push and 0 representing a likely close, in Q2. The attributes used to score each deal represent the top reasons deals push, as determined from SBI’s win/loss database of over 11,000 companies.

Each Big Deal Review Score will be accompanied with recommendations designed to prevent the big deal pushing out of Q2.

The Big Deal Review Tool

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Quality Assurance

Product Development

Product Marketing

Product Management

Legal

Finance

Customer Support

Professional Services

Channel Management

Sales Engineering

Operations

Analysts Relations

Manufacturing

Marketing Communications

Competitive Intelligence

Public Relations

SaleS Deal waR Room

Big Deal

What you’re looking at here is the big deal war room, which is how companies are closing the big deals in Q2. As you can see, it’s an all-hands approach to focusing on closing the big deals. Everyone involved has a seat at this table.

The big deals need to get put in the middle of the table. The level of insight each of these stakeholders can provide is critical to the success of closing your big deals in Q2.

Let’s talk about the deal war room. This is the best practice that we’ve seen by most effective at pre-venting the dreaded push. Think of it this way, put the big deal in the middle of the circle and surround that big deal with every possible corporate resource you can provide.

Let’s discuss a few of them on the next page.

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Product: you’ve got product management, marketing and development. Are they aware of the big deal? These are the people that invented the product. What influence might they have on the prospect, to get that prospect to buy? Let’s talk about quality assurance and manufacturing.

QA: If this is a hard good, or if it’s a piece of software that needs to go through quality assurance, has your customer or prospect understood the care upon which each of those processes is executed against? And how does that help that customer get over the fear of issuing a purchase order?

MarCom: How are you creating buzz around your product? What is that “social proof” for that buzz? How does that make that customer who’s thinking about that big deal move toward the finish line?

Competitive Intelligence: Hopefully, you have a CI group inside your marketing department. What is the competition’s strategy going to be on this big deal?

Legal: is there anything you can do from a legal standpoint to make it easier to do business?

Finance: what type of terms are we requiring? Are they reasonable? What type of credit requirements are we placing on the marketplace? Are they reasonable?

Operations: a customer doing a big deal is going to want to understand what happens after the sale. How am I going to be supported from an Ops standpoint.

Chief Sales Officer: have you visited with this prospect? Do you know the top 1-3 deals this quarter that are going to make or break you? Are you personally involved in each one of those campaigns? If not, why not?

Sales Engineering: Are the best and brightest of your sales support teams working on these big deals? If not, how come? What could be more important?

Channel Management: Are there some channels that can get you access to some accounts that put these big deals on the table in the first place? And, if so, what have we done to entice them?

Professional Services: Maybe the customer has the courage to sign this big deal but the people inside the company aren’t going to know how to get benefit from it. They’ve never used it before. What can the professional services team do to make sure that that customer realizes the benefit of the product after the sale?

Customer Support: Has the customer support team visited with this prospect? What happens if something goes wrong, which might happen in a big deal. Is the customer comfortable that your customer support team? Does the Executive Vice-President of customer service knows who they are, maybe even on a first name basis, so if something goes wrong, they know at least that the company is going to stand behind its product?

This is how you make Q2: You win the big deal. Put the big deal in the middle of the table and make sure the entire company is aware of it and market it internally and don’t leave any stones unturned.

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Here is a checklist to run your Big Deal against. Simply check Yes or No. Send into SBI at Christina.dieckmeyer@salesbenchmarkindex.com. Christina will have a big deal straregist review your information and schedule a call with you to receive his advice.

The Big Deal Review

Phase Question

Have we collaborated on problem diagnosis?

Has the prospect etablished a timeframe?

Have you and the prospect agreed on an expressed need?Have you explained the di�erence between expressed,unexpressed and unknown needs?

Have you quanti�ed with the prospect how the problem contributes to cost or revenue?

Have you identi�ed the Buying Decision Team?

Have you demonstrated the product?

Do you know how long has the prospect been experiencing the problem?

Was there a method to de�ne the problem (internal/external project) or is it gut feel?

Have you discussed the political bene�t for the prospect to move forward with this project vs others?

Do you understand past internal attempts at solving the problem including successess and failures?

Have you discussed potential risks?

Have you encouraged the prospect to do nothing?

Have we explored the 3 options?

Yes No You Competitor Notes/ActionINFLUENCED BY:

ACCOUNT:

BIG DEAL NAME:

POTENTIAL REVENUE:

ASSESSMENT DATE:

ASSESSMENT STATUS:

DAYS ACTIVE:

TOTAL:

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Historically, 90% of companies who are behind the number at the end of Q2 (June 30th) miss the annual revenue number.

If you missed Q1, you need a monster Q2 to save 2013.

We look forward to receiving your Big Deal Review Tool and will be in contact shortly to discuss what to do to make sure your deals don’t push.

concluSion

The Big Deal Review Tool

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