Get practical about enhancing velocity by asking the right questions, from understanding their fiscal year to their board approval process.
April 07, 2021
This month we are talking about Velocity, the V in DRIVE. If you want to accelerate the sales cycle, few things are as essential as an understanding of the customer’s starting point, end goal, and process timeline. Fortunately, there are questions you can ask to get at this information—as well as research you can undertake even before you start talking.
A great way to mitigate the risk of “happy ears” in initial discussions with a prospect is to make things real. That’s why Maestro always starts the DRIVE information-gathering framework from the letter I, Impact. (See last month’s blogs for more detail.) Impact questions guide the prospect to visualize the effect investing in a solution would have—as well as the less satisfactory impact of sticking with the status quo.
Once they’ve visualized the end goal, it’s time to visualize the process of getting there. Certain types of question will help you guide an incredibly effective Velocity conversation. The most important first step is to ask about timeline at all. For example, you can literally ask, “What is your timeline?” Alternatives that may do a better job of getting at the specific information your onboarding team requires include, “When would you like to start?” or “What specific deadline are you working toward?”
Once you have an understanding of the beginning or end points—preferably both—for the purchasing and deployment process from the customer’s perspective, you can work toward a shared understanding of how long the intervening steps would take. For example, you can ask:
Answering these questions requires the prospect to think about the deployment process in detail. Visualization makes it seem more real, which is a good thing for your chances of closing (as we have discussed in the past). It can also turn up unexpected information.
For example, if your contact cannot answer these Velocity questions, they may not have a real need for the product. Or you may be talking to the wrong person. Or the organization may really never have purchased anything like what you are offering before. If that is the case, you can anticipate speedbumps as they work through the kinks in a new process—unless your team is expert at guiding people through untested waters.
Once you have a full understanding of their timeline goalposts and process, it’s time for the second level of Velocity questions. These are the questions that tie a successful deployment to emotions and make it much more likely you will close a deal. For example:
These questions induce the prospect to think about the true value of the solution and can trigger fear of missing out (FOMO).
They also provide you with essential information you can use to remind the customer of the value if the process lags later. Let’s say you had a verbal agreement and sent the contract, but they are now ghosting you. “I haven’t heard from you” is not nearly as powerful a message as, “I was under the impression you needed this software up and running before June 1. Please send back the contract so we can get started on deployment in time for full testing before your deadline!”
When it comes to sharing information, Maestro recommends giving an outline of your process starting with the very first, Level 0 sales deck. This can indicate the sort of information you need from them to more forward, and next steps that will occur on your end.
A detailed onboarding guide is another great piece of sales collateral. Especially if one of your differentiators is agility or deployment speed, you can put the evidence in front of a client by diagramming out how much time to expect for the different phases. Once again, show what you need from them. In many cases, speed to go live is heavily dependent on the effectiveness of communication between vendor and customer in sharing necessary data, configurations, and desired integrations.
There’s a lot you can do to infer information about timeline without even asking your prospect. Very few organizations operate on a fluid budgetary system where they constantly purchase whatever they need at any time. Here are some tips on commonly available information by sector.
Being aware of an organization’s fiscal year budgeting cycle is valuable. For one thing, organizations with a use-it-or-lose-it approach to budgeting may be interested in expending some extra funds before the end of the cycle. Think federal government, school districts, etc. Others are building the new budget for the following fiscal year and thinking carefully about what to prioritize. You want to be at the table for that decision.
The key here is to think about how your sales cycle interfaces with their decision-making process. For example, if you usually have to do three stakeholder demos before a deal is signed, make sure the right decision-makers have seen those demos shortly before their end-of-budget-cycle rush to buy. If a municipal manager prepares the operational budget for the board in November through January for voter approval in March, then even if the new fiscal year begins July 1, November is your target for getting buy-in from the municipal manager.
That leads into the next factor of timeline awareness, which is board approval. Especially for those selling into non-profits, this factor is both essential and easy to research. No matter how much your prospect wants to buy your product, if they cannot sign a contract without board approval, the board timeline needs to be on your radar.
For example, if the board only meets twice a year and you have a 60-day sales cycle, you are wasting your time if you start communicating with the organization three weeks before a board meeting. You should start communicating with them at least two months before the board meeting. On the other hand, if the board meets every month, you do not need to worry about this as much, but you can still demonstrate professionalism by asking your contacts within the organization what sort of supporting materials they will need in order to sell internally to their board.
Maestro team members love Google Alerts because of how they can help you keep track of important events for prospect companies and target buyer individuals. As when Maestro Mastery discussed “signals” like a promotion, if you sell into start-ups, then a new round of investment is a great time to reach out.
This is not only because people are more interested in hearing from you if you start from congratulating them. It’s also because they have a new cash infusion to help address their business priorities. In an ideal situation, they’re already aware of your solution. Maybe these are leads that went cold or ghosted you, or prospects who were disqualified on account of lack of budget.
Crunchbase (great for start-ups) and Seeking Alpha (for publicly traded companies) have research you can poke around in for free, as well as paid news alert tools you can use to automatically monitor major events and investment rounds in companies of interest. Whatever your source of information, keeping track of prospects’ financial good news and using it as a trigger to connect can lead to good news for you, too.
Other events can also be powerfully associated with buying decisions. Instead of a change in budget availability being the key, some organizations have highly predictable cycles of needs. For example, a non-profit will want to have new software up and running before its big annual fundraising drive—not in the middle. A university or K–12 school district tends to upgrade hardware and software over the summer, when IT staff are not busy supporting student and faculty needs and much of the equipment is not in use.
Conversely, you may waste your time if you start trying to sell educational software in September. Cultural awareness can also help; selling into Europe will be less successful in July and August when much of the population takes a vacation, and you can anticipate that many emails drop through the cracks during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Planning your sales cycle to avoid, or at least account for, these major society-wide communication gaps can help you to have much faster times to close.
The Maestro team developed the DRIVE information-gathering framework to speed up the sales cycle, but we also developed it because we just love gathering information and putting it to its best use. Do you have any great tips for how to get prospects and customers to share accurate insights about their timelines? If so, we’d love to hear!
Connect with Maestro in the comments below or at mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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