You have obtained the verbal commit from the economic buyer and it’s now time to close the opportunity and get the deal signature. You will need to reapply MEDDPPICC throughout this phase to accomplish the following tasks and close the deal:
A mutual close plan is a visual timeline of all the necessary tasks, individuals, and deadlines necessary to get the deal through closure and into deployment. A mutual close plan must have mutual outcome. It is created with your champions, advocates, and economic buyers. It will highlight gaps on both sides of the table so that they can be addressed and advance the deal to closure and deployment. Additionally, it allows you to coordinate/facilitate closure of the deal through your guidance of the process. Here is a example/template you can download to complete with your champion, economic buyer, SA, and CSM.
Rediscovery involves additional engagements to capture and re-verify the business drivers of the opportunity. You will use deeper open-ended questions to gather the following information:
A deal package is an additional component of the customer deck you used earlier. The deal package must include everything the customer needs for a complete solution for long term use while also taking into account budget information you captured earlier. The deal package within the customer deck should include the following components:
Rule to Remember: You should only discount when real budget constraints are the hold up to the purchase.
Negotiations are defined as a discussion aimed at reaching a mutually beneficial agreement. At this point in deal closure, the economic buyer has received the deal package. You have conducted a number of engagements with the economic buyer, the technical champion, and advocates to create a package that provides a definitive solution to their business problems while also being priced in the appropriate product tier necessary for the customer to be successful. Yet, they want a discount.
Rule to Remember: If they push back, you probably missed something during your discovery process.
When this happens..you need to conduct additional discovery to work around the customer push back.
Additionally, during the negotiation phase you should also be working with the Customer Success Team to plan a smooth transition for the customer. Below are the three tasks/deliverables that need to be captured and executed prior to closing the deal.
The Solution Architect (SA) Documents Success Criteria This can be accomplished by facilitating a discovery workshop asking questions about what a successful rollout plan looks like, the expectations around user experience during a transition period, and how to educate the customer's end-users. This process will help clarify whether positioning professional services is appropriate at this stage during the customer buying journey.
This activity should produce a document that clearly articulates what done looks like and when done is successful. The document should be signed by an accountable individual from both parties and verbally discussed.
The SA and CSM work with the customer to create a Customer Success Plan. A Success Plan is an interactive map to align the purchase (including renewals!) reasons to customer outcomes, develop joint accountabilities, measure progress and evolve as customers’ needs change. Put another way, it’s the way the customer can see and know that they’re obtaining significantly more value than the cost of a product or service. Click on the link above to follow the steps to create a Customer Success Plan.
Once negotiations are concluded and a final price point per user and terms are established, a final quote and Master Service Agreement (MSA) needs to be created to submit for signature.
This step can be looked at as an extension of the negotiation process and the time horizon for final quote approval, and MSA review can vary greatly between the Commercial Sales and Enterprise Sales based on the customer’s purchasing processes.
A quote is created in Salesforce. Click the heading above to follow the process. Generally once you submit a quote it will be sent to the customer's legal team to redline and review.
EMEA specific Quote Creation Considerations:
A master service agreement (or MSA) is a contract reached between parties in which the parties agree to most of the terms that will govern future transactions or future agreements. Generally, Sales works with Legal to redline the document with the customer’s legal representation. Once the redlining is completed, the deal is then ready to move to signature.
The final stage is signature. By this time the due diligence, negotiations, and revisions have been done and it’s now time to have the deal signed by the economic buyer. The following components are submitted as a package:
Congratulations! You are now ready to move the deal to the Retain and Expand phase.
