The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Propose to Close

In the first blog in this series, I described the 5 areas of activity for successful salespeople, and everything outside of those 5 activity areas is wasted time, energy and potential. In the second blog in the series, I went into detail on how high achieving salespeople prospect effectively. The 3^rd in the series covered the critical activity area of “cultivation”.

This installment focuses on the 4th of the 5 critical sales activities: proposing with the goal of closing. I'll share some key “do’s” and “don’t’s” that I've learned over the years, using examples of some of the biggest deals that took my companies to the next level.

Proposals should be incremental and iterative. In fact, all of the biggest and best deals I made were iterative and incremental. Here’s what I learned.

Don’t try to get it perfect the first time.

Don’t try to grow the deal as big as possible.

Don’t throw everything in right up front – all the terms and conditions and the extra pages of stuff you think is important, impressive, or that your admin, finance or engineering teams wants you to include.

The goal of iterative proposals is to establish a point of agreement you can work forward from. Any position you can get agreement on becomes a position you can go forward with and build on. Use an incremental and iterative proposal process to get you your first close – your “beachhead” position so to speak - on which you can gain ever increasing territory.

The biggest deals I made all started as small “foothold" or "beachhead" sales. One was a simple sale for 6 units and less than $9,000. It was on the other side of the world. Because of my cultivation approach (see The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Cultivating to Close ) , I knew this was an opportunity to land a future “best customer”. (See Entrepreneurial Epiphanies: "the Company with the Best Customers, Wins."). They had 28 plants and about 150 machines, but, being so far away, I had to figure out what they would say “yes” to.

They said yes to small deployment they could try out and install themselves, and from there, the rest was up to me to build on. They ran into some trouble deploying, and after two or three zoom calls, it was clear that the problem was buy in from the operators; the managers that had to train them and encourage them to use it, and the maintenance people weren't to motivated to install the equipment. People at my office said, “we told you so. We shouldn’t have taken that deal. If we’re lucky, they might not ask for their money back”.

But I knew the potential of the account and asked myself “what will they say yes to at this point?”.

I offered to travel there myself, on an expenses-only basis and train the operators, managers and maintenance staff. They said “yes” to that, and that’s what I did.

The training trip went exceedingly well. I was only in the plant for 4 hours, but hung around the area for a few days, just in case. A senior manager within the company was impressed with the uptake from the plant personnel and the empirical production data he was getting in real time and asked for a budgetary proposal to do about a dozen of their 28 facilities. I gave him a proposal for another 60 units. To ensure there were no bumps and resistance with the new deployments, he then asked that installation service and expenses be added to the proposal, which opened the door for a true win-win counter proposal.

I suggested, “while our personnel are there, why don’t we install units on all 128 machines? We’ll only turn the licenses on for the 60 machines, and when you want to get the others online, we will sell you the licenses and activate those plants.” He was intrigued and asked me for a budgetary proposal, for hardware and installations services for 128 units, and licenses for the first 60. I gave it to him on a spreadsheet so he could adjust quantities per plant as necessary.

A couple days later, I received a one-line email that said, “please consider this our purchase order to go ahead with the items on the attached spreadsheet”.

At that point, it became a bit of a sales job internally, but I was able to explain how we could mitigate most of the risks on our end, and the opportunity to succeed with the deal was now mostly in our hands. Internally, I had to follow a similar incremental sales approach to get finance, production, administration and engineering all on board.

The deployment went smoothly. Every month, there was another request to enable the equipment at another factory, and within a year, all 128 units were activated and fully paid for. The hardware and installation were paid for upon delivery. Installation commenced as soon as the hardware was paid for. Onboarding was done remotely and happened at the same time. It was a very creative but uncomplicated deal, and a good example of incremental iteration; finding the “yes” you can get quickly and then building from it by playing to your strengths, while making sure you meet their needs.  

Here are the key “do’s” illustrated in the above (true) story.

Do say yes when there’s an early opportunity to say yes. Don’t delay it, pause it, or bounce it back trying to make it a bigger or more complicated; take the yes that’s there, and build on it.

Do be prepared for the internal sales effort that may be required. Your admin, engineering, production and finance departments will all want the deal made to measure to suit their requirements, and they may even have the ear and support of ownership. If it’s a big deal and outside of their comfort zone, you will have to do your homework and you will likely have to sell it internally as well.

Do what you told your customer you will do, and make sure the team behind you does too. (This is why you need to sell it internally, to make sure you get that support).

The story above is only one example. It was a deal on the other side of the world that went from 6 units in one plant to 128 units in 28 plants in one year, and since then, has grown into other companies that are part of a large international corporation.

Over the course of my 40-year career, this has been the approach that led to my success and the long-term success of the companies I founded or helped build. One $15K deal 35 years ago has resulted in over $50M of revenue since that time. A single $40K deal 25 years ago resulted in the creation of new business unit that became a leader in its market segment and continues to thrive today. Plus, many dozens (perhaps hundreds) more, where the initial result may not have been spectacular, but the sales were win-win for the company and the customer, and they could be built on.

Conversely, as I review the biggest deals that the companies I was a part of ever made, I cannot come up with a single example of a major sale where all the first and easy “yesses” were skipped over in pursuit of the “big deal”. However, I can think of quite a number of cases, when, for whatever reason, the management team thought it best to get a final, complete proposal out to the customer rather than close a small initial deal and ended up completely killing the deal momentum. In those cases, they (the management team) contented themselves with explanations such as “it was good we found out early”, or “I guess they weren’t really serious”.

But we will never know what deals and business could’ve resulted from those squandered opportunities; the only thing that I know for certain is they resulted in nothing.

When you get a deal closed, even if a small one, the salesperson’s focus is then on fulfillment, because that’s how a 6-unit deployment becomes a 128-unit deployment, and how a $15K deal becomes a $50M long term account, and how a single $40K deal spawns an entirely new business unit. And that will be the focus of the next blog in this series - fulfillment, because your success is based on your customers’ success.

Here's the link to the 5th blog in the series, about how to use all the activities together to cultivate hunting grounds so bountiful and accessible, it feels like farming : The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Fulfillment to Farming