Get the Money Back
If your prospective customers were hooked up to a polygraph machine, the world of software sales would be a remarkably different place. We all know that prospective customers are rarely totally candid with potential vendors about their intentions or biases. Why is that? What’s at risk from their perspective?
The prospective customer rightly suspects that if they were entirely forthright with all potential vendors, then many potential vendors would withdraw from consideration early in the process, assuming that they had zero chance of winning the deal. This situation would leave the prospective customer with less information and fewer alternatives. This sounds not good from the prospective customer's perspective.
However, from your sales rep's perspective, let’s imagine he/she is currently working on four deals. If even one of the four accounts is actively working with you deceptively and this deception is difficult to detect (this is easy to manufacture in enterprise sales), then that account is taking 25% of your time, (and consequently) 25% of your money. This is serious. If your sales rep's base is $40k per quarter, then we might say the deceptive prospective customer just took $10k of YOUR money. Seems like a polygraph machine would be a good investment. The sooner the better, as the opportunity cost of pursuing deals that have little chance of closing is high ($10K/quarter/sales rep in this example).
In more than 40 years of selling enterprise software, we have developed a pretty good machine for detecting deception. It isn't perfect, but it got us to 90% accuracy on a consistent basis. To test your deception detection, load four deals of your own into the MOIC Pipeline Grader and find out who has their hands in your cash drawer -- four deals, five questions each, ten minutes total investment. Take back your $10,000/quarter/sales rep today.
If you want to get your money back, start here. Become first in your market and best in your class. Copy this google sheet, fill in the form, PDF the result to Dave@moicpartners.com. Dave is former Head of Sales at Salesforce Energy, SAP, Siebel Systems and LiquidFrameworks.
He has sold more than $300 million in enterprise-based annual subscription value software. He will take your data from four deals and handicap your pipeline and email you the result. Dave@moicpartners.com.
