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so selling enterprise software can be hard a long journey and you know take you in a lot of different directions so I have a method which I don't claim is the perfect one but I have used it a few times both as an advisor and also in um in the companies where sit on the board to restructure the sales process uh of SAS Enterprise sales teams in order to uh speed up the pipeline and make it a little bit more effective and increase the close rate so I'm just going to share the model with you in the hope that you know you find it helpful and maybe you can use somewh let's start with the problem first the problem is that you get a pipeline of leads that you then contact you have all sorts of different conversations with them you have different sort of technical conversations you have different sort of legal or compliance conversations you have different commercial conversations and so on a lot of the time it is sort of in a let's say a hodge podge where your sales rep is trying to drive them forward towards a decision trying to understand their process um getting a commercial offer on the table getting through negotiation getting through sort of contract a long form negotiation on on the actual deal before signing all of that is great um and should happen the point however is that all of that should happen so what I often see is that sales reps and their managers fail to actually put it into sort of a more structured process where we anticipate all these things happening and then speed them up if we know that the customer is going to have to make an overall business case decision on our product then sure let's orchestrate that and give them the best possible opportunity to do that if we know that the customer needs to do technical due d on our product then let's orchestrate that and give them the best possible opportunity to do that if the customer has to do let's say legal due diligence on the contract and so forth then let's orchestrate and make them able to do that at Express speed the way I usually think about this is that in your CRM system you have your sales F where you say Elite comes in here then we do a demo then we do this meeting then we do this meeting then we send the contract then we do the negotiation then we do that thing BL and then we close just take that and flip it into a process that you then describe to your customer say Hey you know we are here at the beginning where we have meeting one what I suggest happens next over the next let's say 100 days or whatever the sales cycle is that we then have this meeting where we discuss these things then we have that Workshop where we discuss whatever the technical uh details then we have this decision where we run that then I send you a proposal with the commercials which we then meet and discuss there and then we do the long firm contract thing with your lawyers and our lawyers and then we eventually sign sounds good assuming that you can get off the train at every step right so we don't have to run to the conclusion but we can agree that we need to cover all all of this if there is a sale right let's just get them into the calendar make sure that whenever there is something I need to know about that we need in step three because your procurement department does it like in their special French way or whatever then I can anticipate that prepare for it and make sure that we're ready for it so that we don't slow you down and usually in my experience one customers really appreciate this you just come off more professional if you have a process you should shouldn't stick to the process so that you know I will never reschedule this meeting before that meeting if the customer wants that it makes sense just do it right there's no no necessary need to to just insist on the sequence but just giving them a sequence as a default as something you can start from so that they know there is a process they can see that you're thinking about all the same things that they are thinking about and you want to anticipate the need and don't waste their time that is a positive with most flies that's good usually it also means that you're not suddenly you keep the intensity you keep there's a Cadence in the sales process that usually allows you to move through it more quickly I have seen processes like this take sales Cycles up towards 200 days and cut them in half overall doesn't mean that we still don't we still have outliers that take 2 or 300 days but we can get sort of a median sale down to 100 days if we have sort of more structured process to run them through that's also great because usually a shorter sales cycle means a higher conversion rate all things being equal the faster you can get someone to a decision the more often that decision will be a yes I tend to see these sort of I usually call them like the the like a like a flip funnel you take your CM system and you just like like you show them all the steps that that you think that they should go through before they have been qualified and negotiated and proposed and closed or whatever and then you think of each of the these steps from the customer's perspective almost like a service design perspective see hey how can I make the technical dillian be like a like a really good step for the customer where they feel invited into the product and they get to sort of really sort of do their proper due diligence and ask all the necessary questions and then you turn that instead of being like a check mark like in in the in on your sales website where they just need to sort of oh we did this with the customer then you turn it into something that you do for the customer so that you can do the check mark and move on which which really just overall helps the sales process is a really good framework to also use to talk about different obstacles in the process with your sales reps and educate them and increase your overall quality I and I mean there are more professional sales people and and sales Engineers out there than me but but just from from my let's say almost simplistic Viewpoint that's that's actually what what worked and um and uh and it's actually sort of usually worked pretty well to to just like design our CM pH f as the sales process fliping towards the customer and just run through it like this maybe you already do this uh maybe you do like an even better version I'd you know be happy to hear in the in the comments or some of the sort but uh if not I I hope that uh that is helpful or at least gave you one good idea so take care out there hey there so I create these videos for free so that you can take your great SAS product and turn it into a great SAS business so if you like the video and you got value from it you should of course subscribe to the channel and also tell a friend so write someone and say Hey you know you're in SAS this guy talks about SAS maybe there's something in there for you so that is the only way that this channel actually grows or these videos gets around and this is sort of how I try to provide value to everyone I have a network of clients that I have and I get most of my business from referrals only so the reason I make the videos and write the Books and so forth is actually to just provide value to everyone else because I can only be in one place at a time so my hope with all these videos is just to do more good in the world and if you tell a friend or you share you can help me do that so thank you