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oh hi I'm mark cranny and I am the operating partner leads the market development group for andreessen horowitz otherwise known as a 16z we're running a sells and marketing motion on behalf of the firm and for our portfolio companies to help them connect to the largest most complex buyers across the G 2000 the fortune 500 largest government agencies we teach a go to market boot camp they that'll really allows our portfolio companies to see what their go-to market organization could look like its scale and to help them accelerate their time to market as they build out the the processes and the people and the structures in place this content has been built to scale out an ion from a few hours to you know really over several days as we help our companies build up their own sales and marketing muscle and accelerate that the components of the bootcamp you know really span to go to market gamut but today we're going to drill down into more the field sales if we think about top-down approaches on the product if you know we may start that way with an outside direct sales force versus start with a bottom-up approach a lot of that depends on you know your readiness from a product standpoint is it a freemium to premium type model or are we in a situation with open source where we're going to definitely be bottoms up and later on we'll layer things in and who are the targets the initial targets from a persona standpoint are the executives are they VPS and directors and managers and or are they you know users of the products that we're going to be talking about and if we think about that we might you know if it is a bottoms up and we're going to start with users in more of a land and expand freemium premium things of that nature the progression of building out the layers of your cells and marketing organization may look something like this to start with demand gen and STRs and inside sellers you know layer and beefed up marketing customer success and support as things mature after we've expanded and gotten toeholds and beachheads in the organization will be layering in and outside in territory field account teams that can walk the halls of these big companies you know in some cases we may start with outside direct sales people that can walk the halls of these big fortune 500 global 2000 companies and or government agencies because it's going to be a lot more complex and we're going to have to sell things like architecture it's going to be too game changing and we're going to need the senior folks involved so we'll start there we're enough to put cells engineers in place pretty quickly professional services and and provide the field cells for some marketing air cover from a lead gen standpoint and then you know as we nail those first customers down build out the customer success teams and renewals and things of that nature and we'll backfill with an inside team to work our way down and across and augment and supplement a field sales organization in some cases the product may fit across the board where we can do a lot of things at once or it's going to be a lot more concurrent than sequential the point I want to make here is it's typical that when we go down one of these three paths without knowing the next steps in having the situational awareness of what I should be doing next if I am as chief revenue officer VP of sales marketing and/or a first-time startup CEO that I might wait too long because I don't really recognize what's needed so that's why I want to cover that upfront before we dive down much deeper so just as kind of a recap you know if you can ask yourself if you're one of those senior executives or founders in a high-growth or startup situation you know what is the solution complexity that I have how easy is it to use and deploy particularly initially how big it of a business case or ROI impact I'm going to have who are my buying personas you know is that going to start bottom-up is that going to started senior levels of organization am I in a cross-functional situation what are the size of deals I'm going to expect initially and or going forward you know what kind of technical validation event and or events am I going to have to go through a lot of these questions you know you're going to know better and have that feel but the purpose of this is just set that tone upfront so on that note we're going to die today deep into you know really more that outside direct in territory field sales organization a lot of things we'll talk about today are also applicable if you do have inside sellers inside sellers being they may be sitting in San Francisco on the phone to an outbound you know smaller transactions they can maybe close deals on the phone but to really go deep and you know get height and width in large complex organizations you may be selling to when you're talking about field cells you're going to have to have boots on the ground in territory that have familiarity with these big companies and they have context and they typically have some experience selling these organizations so but before we get too far on that so the first thing we need to do is just let's put ourselves in the buyers shoes and if we've done that upfront and you know some people have been in these big companies and kind of understand how things work the complexity the bureaucracy and things of that nature that go on is extremely complex so the first question we're going to have to ask ourselves and that the buyers going to ask themselves or prospect is why should I do anything I mean anything different than what I'm doing now the second is why you you know versus the competition and the third as you step through this cycle and journey with a customer is why now and if we take it down to the next level what across those three questions how are the buyers concern is going to change over time and if you see kind of left to right when we're up front in a in a situation like this and we're determining requirements the concerns are going to be more on needs early on and cost initially the number of choices and the depth around choices and or risk isn't you know there's not really a risk in the early stages if I'm a senior executive and or even a user in one of these big companies because you know I'm not there is no risk of me doing anything until I get that first question answered why should I do anything but over time understanding the whole process from a buyer's perspective what they're going through is important so needs as I get past answering that first question they actually start to go down as we go along with the prospect or customer answering that question cost goes down as well as you can see it'll pop back up towards the end we're talking about why now and then choices are in the middle when we're in that evaluate option Stage one is when we ran that buyer question why you over the competition including do nothing and then that will go down late and risk will pop up again as that buyer gets close to pulling the trigger so with that in mind we want to overlay our sales process to this buying process and everybody sells process is going to be different I think I have six Chevron's down at the bottom here the the vernacular the language you may have three you may have 16 but if I have those three big buckets and I'm answering those three high-level questions why do anything why you over the competition and or why now that's really where I want to start from a sales process standpoint I am there and/or our go-to-market engine is there to help that prospect or buyer through those three questions so and then overlay on top of that you know there's a lot to think about from a lens standpoint like when we're building out this sales process opportunity management how am I going to justify the opportunity how am I going to negotiate not just the end you know from a financial transaction standpoint but negotiate kind of all the stages and gates as we step through this buying journey and then the other thing to think about up front is really we're going to go through answering those three questions but there's three big buckets one is you know the early stages are really about discovery and qualification and once we get a little bit deeper probably early on or midway through the why you over the competition we're really into opportunity execution and a lot of this is nonlinear from a sales process standpoint we also need to think about what are the technical skills they're going to be needed and to support from a pre-sales engineering standpoint to a potential training a deployment and what are the kind of events we're going to need to do to prove things out and again this might start out as use an open source and then moving up the solution stack for more things like security and scalability all the way to freemium to premium type models and then we also need to think about the other groups in our go-to-market organization they're going to have an impact on this process from you know marketing the engineering product management as well as a customer success it's not just about sales in fact the sells individual contributor and ourselves management is in a lot of cases more of the quarterback and we want to make sure we're getting the right people in the right place the right time to advance that process and help that prospect through that buying journey so as we step through this another kind of setup to help take the abstract and make it a little more concrete at the bottom of this slide and subsequent slides you're going to see kind of the stages and gates going above that and gray as a potential template be able to layer in your activities that you're going to want to do throughout the entire buying journey for customers and then north and south are really deliverables that we can use as a sales and marketing organization that can help us determine if we've got customer buy-in because really customer buying is what is needed in each one of these steps before we can move on to another stage so that is the gating piece we have we step through the things that we need to do but and so we a we recognize where we're at with the prospect in a mutually agreed-upon process because it's just as important for us to qualify are we spending the right amount of resources and time as it is for the customer and if we overlaid that into some examples this is what something like that would look like so let's dive down a little deeper and start with if we kind of fill all these buckets in the stages engage the activities going left to right in gray and north and south the deliverables overlay that with answering those three questions that is the journey that we're going to go down to help get us into a trusted adviser status with our prospect and turn them from a prospect to a customer so let's dive down a little deeper I mean to start off we're going to start with taking a step back and really understanding that yeah there's this misconception that the purpose of a sales force is to communicate value and particularly in a start-up or high-growth situation and we're selling something that's completely new and differentiated that might be you know not easily recognized early on that the more that we dig in and understand what's going on in the prospective customers world the easier it's going to be for us to articulate our value proposition and help them through this process with that we want to really kind of start with really understanding it the customers business and that first step from a discovery standpoint and identifying what are their higher-level initiatives and avoid being you know hammer looking for now and you know running right to here's my solution because we don't have that context early on so and with that we'll overlay you know all the penetration discovery qualification type things we can do and create that deliverable you know that what I call a discovery tool and value framework because at the end of the day you know we're not really communicating because there's probably not recognition of what that value is until we've got that distinct understanding of what's going on in our prospect or customers world so the true value of a Salesforce is to create new value for customers and this kind of selling requires a different mindset and it that's only going to happen if we've got a deep understanding of what a prospect issues initiatives are and how we can overlay that with those unrecognized in a lot of cases needs with our selling process so maybe at a high level starting off with thinking about what's on the mind of executives really in three lenses what's going on across these big organizations from a function standpoint with VP's directors managers and then individuals and teams of individuals they all are focused on and accountable for different things if I think of about an executive they're focused on corporate objectives and strategies they're aware of and understand the relationship to initiatives and in some cases all the way down to critical capabilities if we think bottom-up from a solution set standpoint you know the people that actually using and may be deploying new technology and new techniques they'll they're going to be focused and accountable for more of the technical feature function type things of what we're selling understand critical capabilities with a lot of depth you know may not have as sharp a focus on you know the business strategies and/or initiatives but they're going to definitely be focused on an accountable form and the big value of a really high-end go to market motion and sells for particularly in the field perspective is a lot of the value that comes from the sales force is that depth of knowledge of how their prospects and customers actually work and them acting as that quarterback as they step across the sells process and how she helped their customers get things done internally you know that deep knowledge of how these companies work it can be a very valuable tool so if maybe just backing up a little bit and you know what is a business objectives and initiatives in you know what executives are focused on and and who are our ideal customers who are focused on particular things that that we can help solve is something you need to answer from a go-to market standpoint pretty early on corporate objectives pretty easy it's almost always for profit and revenue and for the company's owner and shareholder value every company has different business strategies you know how are they driving those objectives you know some companies may be more product focused unknown a lot more for their product innovation versus operational excellence versus customer intimacy kind of having that feel and understanding that early on in a selling and/or marketing situation is important if we drill down and when we're building out a value framework so how do business strategies turn into business initiatives and technology initiatives that is probably the secret sauce of a real high-end precise go to market and you know initiative is really the actionable plan that supports the strategy and if we can document and articulate that for whatever we're going to market with down to customer verticals and their industries so initiatives really are mapped up to and drive corporate objectives with you know just a lot more detail and then critical capabilities a little more in the you know the must-haves that support the initiatives and as we step through this they're going to kind of look like what you would normally think of as features and functions of maybe your solution and down below is the solution set that's kind of what your typical solution set looks like feature function wise a lot of early stage and even later stage companies and their sales organizations kind of start down here at the solution set and work their way up and one of the most effective ways of up leveling sells organization is to get them to step back provide them the tools and deliverables so this is how everything fits together and one way of doing that is you know really put this all together and and understand yourself if I look at our my typical customer and how all this fits together and I start with the top down I can start to really understand what is going on in that in this company's business and how an investment in my technology would map up to higher level initiatives because one of the most common things that happen in enterprise selling is that you know particularly in a start-up and or high-growth situation where I'm selling something that's completely new because of a platform shift it's a new way of doing things is there's not recognition of that new way of doing things and very common in my career where you know sales team would come back and say look there's no budget for what we're selling well of course there's no budget for what I'm selling they've never bought anything like it before and what I need you to do and/or I've in my experience we've provided them with is we need to look for the high level strategies and initiatives and be able to go have that situational awareness and just via a discovery process to understand where is the best place to go because we have limited resources we're just getting going we need to go find the point of the spear from a company and or vertical standpoint where they're going to they're going to be further down these are more the early adopters for doing new things and we've got a segment and target and and really do a great job understanding our perfect situation because everybody's not going to understand it and then the budget will be there so budgets going to be there it might not be budgeted what we're selling but if I look up at the Nishat of these big companies I need to have that situational awareness to be able to recognize that hey we can help them with that initiative and we can help them because we've we've asked all right questions we've home down there not a hammer looking for now we haven't even talked about our solution yet because we've done the discovery we understand the initiative the critical capabilities to fulfill that and a critical capability is really just the people process and the technology that's required to fulfill that initiative before we've even talked about it you know what we're selling or our solution set so how do we do that we'll first put in writing you know what are the list of questions that can help us answer that build a discovery tool the qualification questions across those three big buckets down to the granular level of the critical capabilities and how that Maps up to your solution set understand where there's pain recognized and or potential unrecognized pain and then you know what I've got to do early on what will be the potential competitive situation including competing potentially against doing nothing and understand kind of from a 360-degree standpoint what is our competitive situation going to be and anticipate that and then you know even anticipate are we going to be able to tie our technical fit with a financial fit down the line and and how does that map up priority wise with other things we're going to do so we've done a good job kind of understanding the customers business is there a fit up front we've got some depth we want it that gives us the qualification methodology to get to the next step that yes we should pursue this potential opportunity and it also teased us up for creating and delivering our value proposition but even more so our unique value proposition so as we do that we've already got a lot of ammunition and they're highly qualified before we've really ever done any what most people think of as selling and we've pre-qualified we've and now we're kind of testing and developing potential champions and making our value proposition very unique to their strategies their initiatives there are critical capabilities so we can build those types of tools out to do that and when we do that as we step into this phase back to kind of those three personas one of the things we want to focus on is really decision criteria and really understand that in all of these situations if you take a large organization you break it down into threes what are the what are the CEOs or CX OS or senior management care about it's going to be more of those high-level things high-level strategies and initiatives and it's really more of about business criteria and that's going to be a little bit different than you know mid-level management and cross-functionally this might be more around architecture or scalability or how things are going to work across an organization and then at the user or user management level you know what's kind of the feature function type criteria is we build out or go to market and our sales tools and train and develop our people we need to have those three lenses really defined whether we're doing a bottom-up go to market approach and sales process top-down and what we're layering all the layers in recognizing that it's going to going to help us as we step through creating that unique value proposition and that's where we you know kind of step ones we're going to build and test our value statements in these accounts because we've done the discovery we're going to be able to articulate you know what kind of an as is versus to be state here's gear as is based on what we've discovered here's the to be with what we can do for you step three you know we've got some use cases from other customers that feel felt found they had the same type issues what we found was this and and and we can step them through that and we can also start to develop and test anticipated technical and/or financial returns and metrics based on what we could do for them and that that's really the foundation and then we tie all this together this unique value decomposition with what's going on in their world with we've got from a solution set standpoint and then deliver those value statements that's unique to these big companies organizations in a very effective manner and articulate that all kind of together here's that is here's the to be you know me you really kind of need to think about AI well they don't recognize they're sick let's help them recognize the unrecognized pain and then show them a path to what could be with our value proposition back that up with customer case studies other people in industry or in personas that are similar to them and then I think we're off the races to really the next phase so once we get past that hopefully we've answered that why do anything we're in a kind of a motivating situation aha I get it yes that sounds interesting is so so interesting that we we need to kind of evaluate that versus what we're doing now and who else does think similar to what you do and that's that's where we're it's beginning that move to the second big question why you over the competition and the earlier we can be positioning there the better there's a very big tendency of people to not anticipate competing and just being happy to me moving on to the next level and we want to jump out in front of that and really insulate ourselves so we want to start establishing political alignment laying the groundwork for influencing the buying criteria and potentially executing a competitive strategy and again build all those discovery tools that account for that lay competitive traps and get ready for what I call technical validation event type process which can come in multiple forms so how do we do that well we really want I mean I'm a big fan of the art of war and Sun Tzu and and the great general establishes a position where he cannot be defeated he misses no opportunity to exploit the weakness of his enemy the winning general creates the conditions of victory before beginning the war so the losing general begins the war without knowing how to win it there's a big tendency in this game of again entering into and recognizing a little late that you're already behind so a very granular qualification and competitive deep positioning type process I think is just crucial because we want to start as early as possible beginning kind of really understanding how we do opportunity management and account planning and start laying out what all the moving parts are from political positioning to decision criteria and process teeing up for those validation events and qualifying what is a funding process is going to look like because it really does need to be a mutually agreed upon so at a high level I mean we're stepping into really the meat of the fun part and that's where the the sparks are going to start to fly we we want to look at these prospective accounts from an economic political competitive as well as operational standpoint economic standpoint there's a lot of different factors to look at from industry and vertical the to business strategies and key initiatives that might span across a lot of them to market position you know you versus your competition and/or them versus their competition and where their financial status is and where they're at from an adoption curve standpoint is also very important for us to know diving down early on you kind of using the Miller Heiman buying types who is our economic buyer or buyers the user buyers technical buyers coaches and champions there's a big differences across these three that and and the nuances that we we need to be accounting for one common problem is picking a skilling situation is what is the difference between a coach and a champion in accounts and a supporter and I asked this question over and over back in my operating days as well as today with a lot of our portfolio companies is do you have a champion and it's very common that a champion in a coach and a supporter the granularity is not built out on the difference between the three and it means really someone in that if if I leave that account or close the room and they're going to have a vote to move to the next level and or to buy from my company over something else that that champion is actually somebody that has the influence and the capability and the desire to sell maneuver on my behalf when that room you know when that door closes that's different than a coach who's going to potentially provide us some input and tell us maybe how to get things done in there but is not probably going to actively fight for us on our behalf and we want a lot of coaches that are telling us what's going on because we may have some enemies but at the end of day as we step across this buying process with our prospects we want to make sure we're building champions and coaches all and supporters all along this journey and the support or somebody we might get a vote from but it's just not going to go give us an advantage when that vote takes place so we've got to get very granular because when we stack things up and this is a process that needs to continually happen and will be baked in our forecasting and inspection and kind of our cadence along the way we're going to constantly be looking at these opportunities and understanding who's who the other one I would add to this that I don't have in this slide is I who are my enemies right because it might be just as important to stay close to the enemy or potential enemy might be the person that had brought the last solutions in it might be a competitive for multiple fronts but I need to know that and continually be looking at that lens as a individual seller as well as a sales management team another thing to think about is we're going into this situation is to understand that I'm going to need a strategy not even a strategy a lot of cases I may need multiple sell strategies from direct indirect divide develop defend and pulling from the taz methodology or target account selling I may be in a situation which is very common that I'm going to need different strategy four different competitors for instance if I have direct overwhelming superiority versus another startup that's a similar-sized I'm going to definitely take a direct strategy it's very common that people that's only strategy they have they don't have any other strategy or they try to take that when they really don't understand that they're not in a position to do a direct strategy and that can cause a lot of problems I might have another competitor or I need to take a divided strategy where there's a piece of business I can win maybe this is an incumbent you know you're dealing with in a company situation I'm really not I've got to go get a beachhead and coexist for a while because of the political situation or I'm doing a bottoms-up I can get departments that the users and user managers are recognizing but senior executives have made a big political decision a long time ago and you know we it's just going to be hard to tear something out that's more divided type strategy for an incumbent and then I'm there might be one or you know similarly or I need to develop where I'm not I'm just not quite ready to take the whole business and again I can get a piece of it and or develop might be I don't want a decision be made right now because we're just not ready or I'm not in a position so I want to slow things down in fact the sales campaigns I've been involved with some of my best efforts have been around stopping deals from getting done versus actually getting them because once these big investments are made I mean it can be a long time and in a lot of cases never that you're going to get back in there it really is do or die so slowing things down and tell you already maybe that's from a selling standpoint and your position in the account maybe it is from a product standpoint but things things like that you need to think about and getting granular on what your strategies are versus your competitors and the situation is just super critical the other thing to think about is time and where am I at in the particular prospect or account that I'm calling on and if the party's already begun and I'm behind and competitions come in and define the criteria I do not have the time and cannot afford to be working bottoms up in organization I've got to escalate and get high to see if I can get in if I'm starting low and there isn't a hot initiative they're working on and I have the time and capability of maybe starting low and working my way up so having that situational awareness as we go into competitive situations is crucial to know that's going to drive a lot of things so we're moving past so we've set things up we're getting ready to go enter in the real meat of you know competing we've answered that question why do anything we're down that path Midway kind of through all right we get it the the prospect or customer is looking at multiple options including do nothing they're pulling a lot of different people in to look at things and we really need to be thinking on about the following things you know how do we go position manage and execute the validation event process and really hopefully lock out our competition early and the other thing to remember is I just see it over and over again there's this tendency particularly in startups in and high-growth situations to kind of wait for the buyer or the prospect to you know hey what is your criteria what's your buying criteria what's your process what we got to remember is they might not have bought something like this before they might have bought something like it before but it was you know is on the on-prem world now we're selling a sash solution or it was a proprietary closed software on an appliance and but now it's you know open-source and out of the cloud and then and it was bought by developers and then and used by you know the operations team but now it's you know DevOps you know organizations are coming together and things are changing now they might not recognize that they may be behind that adoption curve but we can help them so the earlier we can really understand and help the customer and kind of say here's how it's being done the easier it is for us to help define that criteria front or help our prospects with their criteria so we need to think about this and part of this is how you go about technically validating and there's also you know if this is a tough one you know talking in a forum like this but you you may be in a framing to premium or an open-source type model where it's bottoms up but really nailing that whole process of moving from freemium or open-source to a package situation for the for additional functionality you need to get out in front and help define that as well as you know how do you go about doing a demonstration how do you go about doing a proof of concept or a pilot mapping all that out and then thinking of it from those three lenses what are the business users going to care about what's kind of more the technical qualification and what is you know the actual evaluators get out of it is important and then get very granular with your own understanding of not only you but all your competition I mean what's truly comparative what makes me different from every single competitor out there versus what's really kind of comparative where everybody kind of has it because that's going to be important as we step through the you know technical validation whether that's you know moving from freemium to enterprise and or you know going on site with pre-sales or services team and showing how things would scale in high-end enterprise situations this is our opportunity to really set traps for a competition versus step in them and I don't know about you but I'd rather be the one out in the forest setting the traps versus the one stepping in there and if you're wandering around out there then you do step in a trap you're going to die pretty quick if I'm getting an RFI if I'm getting an RFP and I haven't gotten out in front of it and influenced that I probably wasted my time and or even understanding your competition to the point where okay I can see that my competition is defined this part of an RFI RFP type process I can probably escalate in and see if we can get our criteria in and or potentially even educate the customer I think you might be going on the wrong path because you're not looking at these things and if I can do that that would it's an easy way of qualifying should I be playing in this process or not versus kidding ourselves that we're just entering in a situation where you know very high high probability of losing and it's also an opportunity to get hyped to qualify and that hike is something we can come back to later on so we want to understand that a very very very granular detail and be able to help with that process not just to understand it but you really from a seller selling organization standpoint and partner with marketing as well as product management and organizations like that and customer success teams really build out a customer kind of seed slash requirements document it's something we can kind of seed into accounts early on again they may have a lot of this if they're really deep in in the area that you're you're selling in they may not and because of the newness of what you're doing there's a lot of things that you're going to hopefully be bringing to the table but they are not aware of and making their job easier and I need to list all the questions they may ask right and have the answers that always helps I've been in several situations where yeah we got all the answers mark but you know and you know man have been there a few weeks and but all right well what are the answers I mean do we do it well we have some gaps right well that's important to know and then kind of build out that document what I call a technical validation event document or a customer evaluation document and a PLC plan and being prescriptive in this area again a lot of this can be the beginning for for high growth situations or startups avoid what we call PR D or a product requirements document for engineering and product management and marketing we understand what our gaps are and we've got an eye on the ball on how we can close those gaps in our product to build out that enterprise readiness that we're going to need particularly in front of bottoms up situation where hey it's great to land but I'm going to need to expand a might take a year it might take a few years but the quarter we get that customer feedback the better as well as it's the beginning of the process of setting up for a customer success deployment and turning plan that we're going to have to scope to make sure that we have successful deployments so doing this early and understanding that it's going to be integrated across the entire go to market as well as deployment and how it relates back to our product development engine is very important to do so we want to do that and then we want to get into execution we want to think about I mean let's get extremely detail-oriented about really how we go about crushing our proof-of-concept technical validation events things that are well defined repeatable we have situational awareness for the type of involvement that we're going to need to be taking and the size of deal and understand that process Trump's heroics every time we're going to have to negotiate even before I mean we're always negotiating and qualifying should we do this all this extra work is this qualified if we do are going to be successful that we're setting up for competition from a trap standpoint that we're proposing and being prescriptive of the process versus having it imposed upon us and it knee really does need to be mutually agreed-upon from both sides because both sides the buying and the selling side are expending resources and sometimes I need to you know you need to go up and and have that conversation with the executives they say link we're going on this path with your technical team if we go down this path what is your decision and buying criteria and and is there is there going to be some gold at the end the rainbow or are we just dealing with a bunch of window shoppers so it's just as positive for me to have that conversation with the c-level executive and find out that no they don't know what the hell they're doing we're not buying any of that stuff I'd rather know that early versus after I've put a whole sales team and technical resources on it because we only have so much it we're starting over a high-growth situation even a large companies shouldn't be doing that so let's qualify that so we go that technical validation event process it's custom day I mean it's going to vary that could be completely self-serve for a land but you know and if we're going to go do the bigger deals it typically requires a lot more effort concurrently it's important to know that we're doing that technical validation event process to answer that middle question why you over the competition there's a third question that's coming up why now and while we're at the point of the spear working the closest getting through that competitive situation technically there's no better time to be gathering the financial metrics and what this means to the prospect from a business standpoint and if the earlier we pull in and and in bed in our technical validation event process the opportunity to pull together a business case and put together an ROI or return on investment the better what I see over and over happen is we go through and we win technically and then we go all the way down to the end and you've got something on the forecast and the customer has to go put it and they might even run it up to executives or finance but they got to go put an ROI together right and we've wasted all that time we were in the bowels of the company and we were there and could have done that in fact shown that that okay if we go do XYZ we're going to save you this in productivity and total cost of ownership where you don't have to buy as much hard work because we're going to go to assess and/or you'll remove from capex to operating and we had that opportunity and we weren't prescriptive about it we're going to know if we've really put a high end go to market enterprise sales force and process together that we can demonstrate and prove out cost savings impact on a lot of things if we do this upfront so putting that on the front of the process or in the middle of the process with your technical validation event is very important and we get later on we're answering that why now question executives are going to want to know why now versus the other things they can do so how do I reduce costs mitigate risk even potentially you know augment revenue I mean and it really breaking that down into two buckets one what are the hard dollar savings of reducing cost but it getting risks and then what's more software that I might not get as much credit for and be able to map that over these technical validation event processes wearing show and prove out things are important so one of the things this does is going to insulate us from a sales process standpoint particularly later on we might be negotiating because I'm going to know when if I'm rolling up six seven or even eight digit proposal and you know it's getting flipped over the wall from the the evaluating team and the executives and they're hammering me over the head about a per unit price or size of the deal and it's you know let's say it's ten million dollar proposal but I've actually done the work with them and everybody's agreed that we can save them you know 100 or half a billion dollars then it's a little tougher to beat me over the head on price as well as technical differentiation that if I've got use cases that are going to have a higher financial impact over a competitor that's going to be important as well so again granular detail get the spreadsheet out understand what you do for your customers with an investment in your solution what does that mean financially put that together what are the questions another kind of rule of thumb be able to put together kind of ranges you know conservative versus aggressive because it's very rare that you're going to go in and get the entire environment upfront that that's going to build over time but if you do the big ROI upfront and it is attached to a high level funded aggressive initiative with the executives your chances of getting more investment and more deployment done upfront or gonna be a lot higher and different people in the organization are going to want to see and/or be held accountable to different things that the bigger number is going to be more appealing to an executive than the users are the ones charged with evaluation your solution and they might not want to roll up the aggressive figure right they might only want to be able to do the figure that's going to give them the internal IR internal rate of return to get the thing funded but they don't want to held over their heads now the executive might want to see that what is possible so make sure you put these in ranges you get agreement as you go along and you're validating that and then you're putting that together and kind of showing the possibilities of that ROI diagnostic handle or business case analysis so armed with that well that's when I'm really feeling comfortable taking on the larger deals with the next phase of you know really the proposal we step through why do anything and the second question why you over the competition now we're in the why now we're rolling up a proposal we feel confident that we've influenced buying criteria and we put an ROI together in the process of finishing that out then I'm really confident from a proposing standpoint we're confirming a decision process you know we build out a proposal template and in quote tools and you know we've got the ROI modeling and the deployment plan is coming together as far as we go make this investment I'm actually have a plan going forward above and beyond that initial investment and attached to it is the technical validation event process we went through and that's really kind of a phase dot five of what the deployment plan would look like and everybody's feeling super confident we're going around all the different components of the proposal and this is going to be super customer what you're doing and again we want to give options it's very rare that we get an opportunity to go get the entire environment in fact I see it over and over again and in these in start-up situations and or even Highgrove that that first deal that we're going in we spend so much time you know what is the first quote and it's going to be for a hundred or a thousand you know units of whatever you're selling but what would it be if we did the whole thing and we took care of that customer across their entire environment not enough time in a lot of cases is spent understanding what that's going to mean long term that that land or that initial deal is going to turn into a much bigger one as we move up in an organization that we're selling to one of the big questions that the decision-makers are always going to be asking an economic buyer or a high-end technical buyers all right what does this mean it's great we're going to go do this with this bu or business unit or this department or that department or we're doing this in a phased approach what's it going to cost us over time and what's that are I going to be overtime in a lot of startup situations we're so focused on the initial deal we forget that we're going to create friction if we don't give them options and a proposal what it's going to look like over time because and it really costs a lot of people a lot of time tickler things get thrown over the wall for procurement because the first thing the prospects can ask is I'd if I don't know what 5,000 units is going to cost me we're good as a cool for a thousand even though I'm telling you I want a quote for a thousand I need to understand what's a long term potential for that account because I can take a lot of friction off the table by already having these types of things pre-built and even proposed along the line and that puts me in a position potentially sent incentivize them to a larger deal upfront particularly if I've done a very good job with the technical validation event the ROI diagnostic really proven the value and putting this kind of in a systematic format for your sells teams to go do and incentivize them to move forward a lot quicker the customer that is we want to stop and ask constantly as we're going through this process you know what's our political position is the decision criteria changed is the process changing what are all the competitors doing where am I at from a validation standpoint and funding process and and constantly be turning that account plan a lot of this needs to be baked into your CRM solution and in your cadence and of forecasting and inspection and really formalizing kind of what your deal process an approval process looks like from a cup some standpoint whatever works from you might be high-volume situations where you got different processes for the high volume low dollar transactions versus the the larger deals but really baking and automating that as much as possible and then we're moving more to you know negotiating clothes and final contracts from that standpoint you know and then kind of bringing all of it together I mean what does my sells process look like at the top what's the buyer process overlaying my sells process what are all the other teams underneath going to be doing / - Bob just sells my sells engineers maybe my customer success people what are the customer verifiable outcomes and questions and deliverables I need to step through what are the sales tools I need to be using and/or automating to enable this and then what are the forecasting guidelines which we cover in depth and other modules and then the tool architecture to support all this I mean if I need to start designing that and it's you never be done with these buckets and things will always be changing and we're always going to be upgrading but having that context of what I need to be asking is important so as we move from negotiate to closed field cells it's also important to understand this is directly related to forecasting that forecasting that lays over the top of cells process your forecast process your cadence and execution we have a whole separate module in our our sales and marketing bootcamp that covers that but these are very interrelated and want to make sure everyone understands that a sales process and forecast process are you know interrelated but there is a whole different layer of inspection process that you need to think about particularly as you go to scale and we cover that later so and then wrapping up some are deploying and developing I have it in my in the the regular cells process because again it's interrelated so how many will partner with my customer what am i what have I done to put the beginnings of a customer employment plan or customer success plan together because where is the best place to sell something best and easiest place is where I've already sold something so I've gone through this whole process with someone it's rare that I'm going to get a hundred percent of the opportunity upfront it's the beginning of a journey with your customer and we want to overlay that again because I mean we're deploying to develop we're working with customer success team we're implementing we're building or supporting we're starting that nurturing and creating new opportunities to cross-sell to upsell renew things of that nature so again all intertwined and it's a lot easier to go through the second time if we do a good job on the customer success front so where are we at ask yourself I mean here's some high level questions where you add from Salesforce definition as your sells process clearly defined enforce how well are you doing qualifying that from a customer deliverable standpoint before you can move on to the next stages of gates do you have clear consistent messaging around your value and differentiation give a clear defined technical validation event process and are you really investing enough on a help of your prospect put business case or our leg diagnostic together are you just relying on them to do that and then you know how much have you done and thought through from a consistency on your pricing your packaging the size of deals and then how that because that's also going to be able to tu up for again another module we do which is forecasting processes and tools and on that note that wraps up the field sales go to market bootcamp section