CEO Involvement: When and How Much?
Probably the most convincing salesperson for any SaaS company is its founder/CEO. After all, that person can commit the company to whatever he/she wants to deliver to a customer and the customer always believes whatever the founder says. So, when is the right time to bring your ace into the mix to help close deals?
Generally, there is a reason why the baseball team’s best pitcher starts the first and seventh games of the World Series and not the eighth (BTW, there is a maximum of only seven games in a World Series) — that’s because a team wants its best chance to win the first and last games and so puts itself in the best possible position to do so.
In enterprise sales, it is equally important from a credibility standpoint to show executive “face” early in the sales cycle and near the end of it, because those two moments are when your company’s credibility is tested most vigorously. Having said that, we don’t want to marginalize our CEO by overusing that resource or misusing that valuable resource; instead, we want to use the CEO meeting with his customer counterpart to accomplish two things: early in the cycle, it’s to establish a CEO-to-CEO relationship to show our commitment to the customer and at the same time measure the customer’s commitment to the project, and late in the cycle, it’s to reinforce to the customer that our company stands behind all the commitments made during the sales campaign, while also getting confirmation from the customer that they will be buying from us.
As your SaaS company grows, other senior leaders need to augment the use of the CEO, as the CEO can’t be involved in every deal. However, even very large SaaS companies still use the CEO in the most strategic deals; the real point here is that executive credibility is needed on every new logo deal.
Please note that the sales rep needs to keep control of all the resources utilized throughout the sales cycle and should NOT outsource deal management to the CEO; instead, the CEO needs to be used merely for credibility reinforcement. Similar to solution engineers, professional services people and others specialist roles, the CEO is another resource for the sales rep to use to help with closing deals. Much like an orchestra conductor, the sales rep needs to know when to cue the CEO for critical appearances.
If your SaaS company needs help determining how and when to use your CEO during the sales cycle, please call dave@moicpartners.com
