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[Music] hey closers in this video we're going to talk about the go live plan what it is why do you need it and how to use it so first let's talk about what it is well the go live plan is a document that is used by sellers in order to more diligently manage the closing stages of their deals it's a way of documenting the stages of the decision process and the paper process in a way that can be collaborated upon with your customers now a lot of experienced sales people at this point will be saying well isn't that just a closed plan and well it kind of is but i have a problem with the closed plan you see a closed plan by its very definition is for salespeople it's not for buyers it's not for customers it's focused on getting the deal closed and no customer ever likes to be closed so let's take a look at a closed plan now now this is a real close plan from a real deal now obviously i've taken off company names and changed names as stakeholders involved mostly just to protect their reputations so let's take a look okay as we discuss we're going to take a look at a real close plan this closed plan is from a real deal um the only thing i've changed is obviously to take company names and financial information and people's names off of it this deal actually closed uh not only did it close it was a multi-million dollar deal and it happened to be the biggest deal that the company in question had ever done so it was a very very big deal obviously a big lump on the forecast and a lot of attention being given to it and you might be wondering andy i thought you're about to show us why closed plans aren't a good thing um but if the deal closed then what's the problem well the problem is this this deal slipped two quarters two quarters from first being forecasted to when it was actually closed now i i guess some uh sort of a little bit of uh credit there because of the size of the deal that it was going to take longest close but the point was you should not forecast it until you know when it's going to close and you're having a a good solid understanding of the decision process and the paper process is part of that and having a good road to getting everything signed and sealed is a good part of that so let's dig in so fairly straightforward you know cover here information on it nothing really to see the first thing you'll notice is that this is a document intended for internal purposes there's nothing really here that the customers can want to read there's nothing in this text here that would say to the customer um you know this is what we think of you this is what we think we can bring to the table so this is first glance straight away an internal document um you can see that here with the internal um titles that people are using you know opportunity and relationship owner you wouldn't tell the customer that you're their opportunity owner i don't think and likewise you can see here you know you've got salesforce opportunity link so the link for the for the actual um opportunity here in in in the document um and this is not ready to do the close plan but it points to a bigger challenge i think which is that there's now these bullets here which don't which i guess point to the background of why they're engaged in this opportunity but they really really fail um any kind of test of prof what i would call proficient elite enterprise selling which is that you know these these these bullet points here improve this and prove that i like to do the so what test you're going to improve the website performance so what how are you going to do that you know what's the what's the way you do it how do you do it how do you do it better how are you going to measure those things all those kind of things is what will differentiate yourself in this situation and you know i know this isn't an internal document but even still you can kind of you can tell by the way that this person is talking about internally that they're not giving that and as an external and likewise you can see other alarm bells in here budget timelines is is for a whole quarter which doesn't necessarily make sense to me budget identified yes as if that's sort of some sort of binary thing for a multi-million dollar deal there's just some sort of budget sat there waiting to be pinched for it and then a close date of a quarter again all pretty vague at this point um compelling event i'm not going to dig into this but i've read for it there is no compelling event here these are just some things that are going to happen kick-offs and stuff but they're not compelling events um and i think um i'm not just going to beat up on this salesperson um but it's just a highlight that you if this was a go live plan you wouldn't be able to look at it and say there's any compelling events on here it's very straightforward and the customer would call that out um why would the slip procurement bring some problems or data security again you already thought them through whereas if this was collaborative document working with your customer you could actually put some more details you would have to put some more detail on that you got to put it in there they'll don't think you uh are not doing a very good job um this is this is this is kind of um an internal uh i guess this is supposed to be the economic buyer i guess and maybe the champion um but you know kind of you know see what music he's into i think is what's behind that youtube link and do you like good food good um and these are these are the stakeholders this is quite good this is good yeah i would say as a deal this size there's gonna be more than just this amount of stakeholders but it's a good start um to actually see who reports where but you'd want a lot more detail on this especially for the internal side of things um yeah pretty straightforward you know this is why we'd win well we've these are just the products actually the product names why you'd win and why you know threats objections again you're going to lift those and put those on any any single deal and budget isn't really a threat or objection that just means you haven't done your job as a sales person anyway this is not not about beating up the sales person this is an example of where the shortfalls of a closed plan arrive um opportunity timeline um this is cool this is quite good um this is kind of calling out the dates ahead and as it's planned but again because this is only an internal document the customer's not going to see this so unless you're creating a customer version this and sending it through to them then you're going to come you know this is pretty pointless this is only just reporting up and satisfying your team internally that you know when things are going to happen now even if this was to be a customer-facing document it still doesn't solve a big problem which is this is only like a a point-in-time reflection of the opportunity timeline so if you were to make this customer friendly and send it to your customer they'll look at it digest it make you some feedback send it back that's that um so yeah you uh it's not a collaborative document it's not a live document it's it's not gonna do very much to help yourself and then likewise the next steps um again just like i said on the side before useful to call them out but in terms of actually getting consensus buy-in support from the customer on these things unless you send this through to them and then kind of ask them explicitly can you help me with these things by these dates they're probably just going to read them and push them to the side whereas a the go live plan would make them accountable to this so you're probably looking at this thinking this is not a great close plan i'm sure there's better examples but those fundamental issues still lie that even if you do make it customer-facing in a in a document like this if they see it as a closed plan they're going to feel unhappy about it if they um even if they take note of any next steps or or things that you want them to do it's not a live document it's not a collaborative document you can't jump in there together and add comments and things together so it falls and fails for those reasons let's get back to talking about go life plans so as you can see from that example that straight out of the gates the clothespin already has the customer on the back foot if they want it to be anything other than a one-sided internal document to figure out the path to signature even if you do share it with the customer the goals are not going to be aligned as salespeople we're all aiming to get the signature so we can get the deal closed but for our customers that is likely to only be the halfway point of what they think the process is they'll be thinking about implementation rollout training adoption and therefore the earliest likely end date they will have in mind will be the go live date hence why i built the go live plan and have been using it successfully as a seller and sales leader for the last six years but the difference isn't only in the name and the end goal there is one other major difference between the go live plan and a closed plan and that is that the go live plan is designed to be totally collaborative with your customer basically you share the document with your customer and work on it with them in real time as the deal develops and evolves towards the end goal so now you know what the go live plan is let's answer why you need it well end supplies and complex sales are hard not only the selling side of things but in many cases once your solution is the preferred solution only then does the really hard work start there are likely to be a whole raft of different levels of authorizations and approvals and and different things required by different stakeholders at different times of different dependencies and that's before you even reach the doors of procurement and legal and then once you're there you can lose weeks and sometimes months if you're not in control of the process the go live plan allows elite sellers to work with their champion to map out the entire process towards going live i've seen a seller open up a blank go live plan at the end of a first meeting that went well to start mapping out the pathway to getting the solution live but most typically it tends to come into play when a seller reaches the point where they are the vendor of choice and need to transition from selling to closing the go live plan is going to help you clarify all of the steps that lie ahead with your champion what are the dependencies and stakeholders for each step ahead what can you do now that will save you time later on what happens next after this stage etc etc etc only when you have a clear pathway to the signature are you able to accurately forecast your deal and until that point you're playing just a guessing game and it's unlikely that the leadership within your company will be very happy to accept the credibility of your forecast the other thing to keep in mind is that the closing process is rarely a linear process it is rare that everything will go to plan and that other stakeholders or unexpected levels of authorization won't come up therefore having a go live plan that is a live document that both you your champion and stakeholders from both sides are using is going to be crucial let's jump into the document and we can talk a little about how each section works okay so the first thing you're going to notice with the go live plan is that it's built inside of google documents and that is favorable because how flexible how widely adopted and how easy to share google documents is um the actual within the package of the go live plan it's also got a template in there for microsoft word uh notion and evernote as well so you have the other options of different formats but i would definitely say that google docs is the preferred uh medium to use so this is a uh blank go live document we've got a blank one and a sample one here that we're going to both look at um let's start by just looking through the different sections um so you can kind of see what's involved here so at the top you've got your the information about the deal um a summary section a section to put links in and then the who's involved from both sides of the deal then you've got the kind of steps uh of each step of the go live plan and then any compelling events and q a at the bottom so first thing to do when you get a go live plan before sharing with the customers you want to build it up to a certain level of completeness so that when you share it it kind of tells the story to the customer even if you do brief them on what it is they can kind of look at and get really good grasps very very quickly what it is so the first thing i like to do is put a customer logo at the top their customer logo at the top and actually what you can do as well if you want to take it to a couple of stages further is to personalize the document to be in their company's branded colors so as you can see medic's colors are kind of this light green and so it matches here but if we switch over to the example document we've got here um which is for huli you can see that actually we've changed the colors in this case to match by python but if we wanted to match huli we would use that light blue color and the the benefit of using the company's colors who you're selling to is that as it starts to get shared internally across different stakeholders they'll start to assume that it's actually an internal document not the vendor document which obviously gonna increase the likelihood of it being adopted so let's stick with this example document for the time being so you can see you know you update there's a number of sections on this bit that will have be highlighted that you'd need to update to put your company name your customer's name that kind of goes without saying the first thing is at the top keeping it up to date if you keep the date of how it's been updated sometimes i've seen you put a version number on there as well but it's important you keep it up to date because you want to keep um keep the impression going that this is a live document that every time there's a change someone has to update it at the top here so when it was last updated and who buy is important then lots of self-explanatory stuff here like who the company name is you're selling to what the target contractual signing date is i think this is an important one because this is this is not a space a space you want to leave blank you want to fill this in as soon as possible if you don't know what it is well it's a pretty important action point for your forecast to find out what the target date is you're going to get signed and actually filling out the go live plan will help you see if there's actually a feasible date you can all aim for target go live date as well hypothetically speaking if you sign on this date based on our current resources and the the the complexity of your implementation should be this day it's just nice to get those dates front of mind it also will help you keep the momentum moving as you move towards those dates as time starts to run out it will put urgency into the process which i think is very very important so you can put the solution proposed here because you know remember in an ideal world this document will be shared much further than just the people you are directly selling to so having a good um explanation of what the solution is and that's where the the summary comes in as well is going to really help the adoption and understanding of what this document stands for we'll come back to summary in a second but having the software licenses or whatever the solution metric is of of cost here i think is important now if you don't know what it is i always prefer to put a hypothetical figure in here and obviously the higher the better because that's where it'll stop the price condition the customer now if if they do question you and you know why is it what is this big figure what is this big number in here you can say well i i don't know what yeah we haven't figured out what the cost will be yet but that is you know that's just a placeholder don't take too much notice that but you know it'll stick in their minds price condition so the brief summary this is an important box because it's a chance for you to kind of summarize the deal but from your perspective so you will definitely want to highlight the pains that you've implicated in this section you want to underpin all of what you put in here with metrics which again which would be the metrics two of the solution next bit important resources you can see if like a shared folder here if you've got like a drive or a dropbox or a box account where you're putting all the documents in or maybe like a landing page somewhere that you can point to and likewise you can put in you know like previous presentations you've made or data samples or you know your responses to their security survey whatever it is it just what it does is it makes it nice and easy to to find those documents and it means that if you start to create the go live plan to be a place almost like a base camp like a project management tool to where people come back to when they need something instead of having to search through emails and what it will do is it will just increase the stickiness of this document and increase the traction of how it's used and it'll it will have a a by proxy event of actually helping people to update other parts as you go so here you can see the pi piper team which is the vendor team this is your sales team you can put their details in there their titles their contact details all that kind of thing i quite like to sometimes put in here you put in like uh the initials of the person so that when you get down to the owner um you can have it being a bit more specific if there's more than one um and then the customer team here and again put in put in people in here and start to fill this out with your champions make sure you've you've thought about all the different people would be stakeholders really getting them to think about if there's anyone else they'll be involved in this decision process you've not included next bit pretty much the most important bit of it all so this is the actual plan steps to lie ahead now one thing i think is really really cool to do here is even if you're you know six months into a deal and you're creating the go live plan i think it's really really really cool to actually back date a little bit about the information you're putting in here so for example you're six months in your first meeting happened six months ago i would still put the data that initial meeting in it shows um that the amount of investment from both sides has been considerable and it would just remind people looking at this even if they're new to the engagement they're new to you they'll remind them that other people in their organization have spent a lot of time to get to this point and therefore it will just add the credibility to what you're doing and also just provide a nice timeline and a nice sort of way of reminding people what's going in so i would put not necessarily every meeting you've had especially if you have a lot but i'll put important sort of milestones here you know rfp presentation date date that you're awarded you know vendor choice whatever those things are put them in here and it's important you put who is kind of the owner the dependent person of it who's the person responsible for this action when the action has to be completed by and the status of it um and then that's this is where google docs really comes into its own because you can tag people so in this case here you can see on the example we've tagged sarah here and asked her if she can confirm the technical validation as per our discussion earlier today so this is a really cool way of using google's documents tools to embrace the the go live plan in this case sarah huli would have got an email through and when she you know that email she can either respond in the email or ideally she's going to open up this document and see the other things inside of it so very very good now one thing that you'll notice is the go live plan uh sorry the go live date is here um and there's a couple more dates on here now i have been doing as i said before go live plans for over six years now i've never once used the go live plan further than the signature normally i work for an organization who has an implementation process a whole you know a whole load of much much better ways of managing the implementation than what the go live plan could ever do but the point is it's just keeping that go live date in mind keeping it prominent in the minds of everyone especially if there's a compelling event around it and then once you get to actually having the contract signed people don't really go back to the go live plan again but i like to have the dates on there for those two reasons first it it aligns everybody's focus on going live not just closing which is uh only interesting to the sales person um but it also keeps the pressure on for those dates for those those important dates that lie ahead so having those on is i think is very very important likewise you can make some of these stages dependent of each other so you cancel 9a 9b if there's a dependency on each stage um then we get into the compelling events risk so you can call out anything that may be a um a compelling or important event so an example of this could be a board meeting that's coming up and if we you know if we miss that board meeting then it's going to throw out all of the all of the dates to get everything signed and so on another example could be if you're replacing another solution there might be a renewal date in place it's worth calling that out in here that's you know if you don't get everything wrapped up ahead of that renewal date they might have to renew with a solution that they're trying to replace this next bit here is q a so this is a really really good tool when utilized well what it is is throughout a enterprise or complex sale there are no doubt going to be tens and tens if not hundreds of questions that you are asked as the salesperson the sales engineer solution consultant security all number of different people are going to be asked and those questions generally come up in meetings they come up in emails they might even come up in the whatsapp messages and text messages and what this does is this is the place to capture the q and a so the idea is if you get asked something in a meeting or um if you get asked something um in an email or anywhere else you put the question into the global life plan and then you tag the person to answer it inside of the go live plan then tag the person who's asked the question so they can see the answer the beauty of this is two things first it creates a database if you like of q a because quite often if you ask a question and you hear the answer you might not remember the answer and you might want to come back to it again in the future or show it to somebody else if you if you've got the answer it's a bit more technical as it often will be so that's the first reason the second reason is it's just another way of making the go life plan a little bit more valuable to your customer it's another reason for them to open up to find um a cue to ask a question or to find an answer and while they're there they might remind themselves actually they need to chase something up or they need to action something or that there might be something that's falling behind so it really really allows you to not just make this a closed plan not just about getting a signature but a very collaborative document that's going to help you move your deal towards success towards getting your life and all those good things so i hope you like this video i hope you enjoyed the insights that it's given and i really hope that you invest in the go live bank because i think that it's um as someone who's been using it for a number of years and kind of came up with it because i was frustrated with the the rigidness and one-sidedness of closed plans themselves i think this is the perfect medium to manage the decision process and pay practice thank you very much for listening and may your champions be strong