Closing big deals for HR

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good morning it's ian cognac and today we're going to talk about how to close large enterprise deals if you're selling a seven or an eight-figure deal chances are that it has to go to a board or some type of committee and that the people that you're working with even if it's an executive even if it's the cio or the head of sales or someone high they're still going to need to sell this internally so a key thing that you can do to close a big deal is instead of trying to sell the person that is your champion or that wants it take the position of helping them to be able to sell this internally so rather than sitting on the other side of the table with them sit on the same side of the table and ask them who do you need to sell this to based on this size deal based on what's being provided what has to happen do you have to go to your cfo do you have to go to a board what does your process look like and then ask them is this something that you're going to present or is this something that you want our help to present with you to them so find out if they're selling by themselves internally or if you can actually meet or present in front of that board or committee now the bigger the company the less likely it is that you're going to present in front of the board or the whole executive suite but it does happen for large enough deals but most of the time what you're going to want to do is empower them to sell internally so instead of thinking i got to get this guy to buy or this woman to buy remember that the person you're trying to sell to wants your product or service and when they resist a lot of times they're resisting the pain or the difficulty it's going to be for them to have to get the cfo approval for this size budget or to have to go to their ceo or whatever so if you're getting resistance it's not because they don't want that it's because they're anticipating it's going to be very hard for them to sell internally so that's why it's really important to help them sell internally when you do your presentation when you do your deck what you want to do is present it as hey i want to run the proposal by you the numbers by you i know you have to position this a lot of people so i'd love to get your feedback on this first draft see what needs to be changed see what you'd you would do differently or things that i might add or may have missed and literally position it for them as a as their work right uh one of my biggest deals that i sold the night before that i had the big presentation i actually met with the vp of applications for dinner and we had our laptop out we were working on the deck he said take that out put this in and he told us the executive actually really likes stories and visuals and pictures so get rid of the text and put some images that are going to tell the story that you could talk to less is more so with his coaching we actually got the deck ready to present and we ended up nailing it and getting the deal okay what's really important is you have to empower the person that you're working with to be able to sell this internally so there's some key things you always want to have in your presentation the question is why do we need this what's our challenge today that we're trying to solve for what's the plan of attack how are we going to make this successful and most importantly what is the business case what's the roi of this solution so it's really important without those components it's very difficult for them to sell this internally so if you don't have those components say hey who can help me on your team with collecting this information if you're going to save employees time you want to know how many employees are touching the process that you're saving and you know what their roles are so you can plug in some salary and some time saving estimates if you're you know reducing their number of calls in a call center you want to find out how many agents they have and you know what what types of calls they're getting so it's really important that you show here's the current state no here's the form here's where we want to go here's our current state and the challenges we have in getting there and then here's how your company sales force in my case can help you get to the desired state and here's the business impact of going there this way when you show a seven or eight figure deal the executives are focused on the roi they're focused on the future state and they're aware of the pain but you haven't shown them or they haven't come up with a plan to address the pain on their own and a lot of times you're solving things that have been in place forever so really important to show them the plan to get there show them how you're going to help and how you can fill in the gaps between their future state in their current state and again we're not trying to sell to our champion we're trying to help the champion sell to their peers or counterparts or executives really important treat your client as a partner you're there to help you're there to really craft the message with them a lot of times you'll put it on their template so they don't even know it's your company i've had that happen many times where they'll take the nuggets out of my presentation and they'll put it in their template or their deck right that's ideal is if you can actually work with them on their own deck inserting your content into there hope this is helpful remember we're not us first them it's them and us versus their cfo or whoever they have to sell to take care