Closing the Million Dollar Deal

How did one of my clients close a million dollar deal?

1. It started with an event – a prospect, someone she had not done business with in the past, came to an event geared toward educating our audience on the trends and risks associated with today’s cyber criminals.

2. An assessment was done – it was complementary, but led to a greater discovery process that was fee based. Not a million dollar assessment by any means, but capable of introducing my client to just about anyone in the company. This took a change in the solution provider’s approach – normally they would send the engineers in to gather some data, put together some plans, and pitch it to IT. All of this had to be changed – the sales person had to get involve with senior management; she had to put her consultant’s hat on.

3. Gathering business related information, brainstorming over the right questions along the way, and building a strategy to create justification along the way – this required figuring out exactly who would be involved in the approval process, and what politics might get in the way. Most of this was outside my client’s normal process – but she was willing to take the steps – take on the risk of failing in order to reach her objective.

4. Delivering the results – normally this would be emailed over to the client. We had to change this. Instead, she insisted on meeting with both managers and technicians. The presentation would have been given by her engineer, but not this time. Instead it had to be done by her. Something she wasn’t sure she could do. But she did.

5. In the end, they said they would take a look at it. No immediate close, but momentum in the right direction…two weeks later, a decision was made in favor of moving forward. What made this successful?

There is no guarantee – these are people, subject to every kind of inconsistency. My client’s job was executing the plan and hoping her clients would see her value. They did.
The discovery process had to change – it had to be re-engineered for executives, using impact related questions. The end result had to demonstrate impact vs. likelihood.
The report had to be written by non-technical people, in business language, and the presentation had to be delivered to business people by business people.

None of these things were in the sales person’s normal comfort zone – she had to step out, take a risk, and do something she had never really done. It could have failed, but it didn’t.