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Originally Posted by OUTSource Sales
Joe, you asked for "a brief description of at least one of the closes you referred to in this transaction".
To make any sense of this thread, I'll need to put some of the politics into perspective:
1. our supplier was managed by an overly agressive, boor of the worst sort ... during forecasting calls, his favorite line about lost deals was, "...someone's going under the bus for this one..." (during a time where their revenues & margins were off); and,
2. our company had the rights in Canada to their software (testing, performance/capacity mgmt tools); and,
3. the user group within the customer did application development and the specific need, in this instance, was capacity planning (ie. they had a massive percentage of their revenue forecast predicated on video on-demand ... the capacity planning tool offered them an accurate way to "predict" what was required);
4. legal counsel within our client had seriously dropped the ball when they did not point out the (not so) subtlety regarding software licenses NOT being "transferrable" when a company is acquired ... our supplier's legal counsel could NOT relent on what appeared to be a iron-fisted stance (appropriately so);
Closing samples:
1. I hit a brick wall with the supplier's legal counsel because they did NOT want to set a precendent by ignoring what is considered "cast-in-stone" (licenses) BUT I pushed them to consider the entire situation by doing a rendition of the Ben Franklin close ... UNsuccessfully;
2. during numerous teleconferences, the VP sales at our supplier was an arrogant jerk who would not listen to our justificiation for providing massive incentives to get this done quickly as the list price for the required configuratoin was approx. $250K US (remember that, given the erroneous assumption wrt software licenses, this was entirely UNbudgetted) ... we had proposed a number of alternatives (eg. give them 'X' seats free + pay list for balance; propose discounted professional services: waive the license fiasco; etc.) but he needed the margin for his bonus and was concerned that his forecasting bonus would be lost (I found these points out quite by accident) ... I positioned the situation, "...the competition is at his desk weekly with their tools attractively priced. If pressed, they might drop back 10 and punt this whole thing into next fiscal year. Remember, 100% of zero will NOT get you to your targets this year, so, it comes down to it you either:
a) accept the heavily discounted existing software and make it up with additional seats at list with implied PS revenue; or,
b) table something else immediately which illustrates that we are genuinely interested in assisting them with their business"
Without breathing I finished with, "... which works better for you, (a) or (b)?"
3. during a training session at our supplier's H.O. (in the summer), the president walked in to participate one of the luncheons with channel partners. He sat next to me, talked small stuff for a few minutes, then, blurted out, "when will this be coming off the forecast?" His body language was brutal as he was leaning almost on my shoulder as he sat in his seat: talk about anxious! I briefly told him that we had everything in front of the user group and, given the fact that it was an unbudgetted initiative over $100K US, it MUST go to CFO at the the customer's global H.O. in the Netherlands. He asked if I would be upset if his SR for Canada made a direct call to my contact. I said, "... if you are expressing frustration, I acknowledge it and I understand. BUT if you are expressing some sort of lack-of-confidence, then I can only assume that you're getting a jaded report on what's transpired to date." Without waiting, I added, "However, where I acknowledge the fact that you guys have a lot riding on this opportunity, you're putting your fiscal/forecasting issues in front of someone within the user group (ie. my contact) who has absolutely no interest in YOUR problems. Which would you rather do:
a) without injuring the process, ask me ANYTHING you want today about what's in-process; OR,
b) have someone who the client doesn't know, phone out of the blue and put the entire relationship into jeopardy?"
Joe Closer, I think you get the idea that I can't do this without getting the situation into perspective. So, for the sake of brevity, I'll wrap this diatribe here ...
Good luck & Good selling!
Pat
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