How to Close Your First Million Dollar Deal
22:31 Share

They don't care about ROI. They care about like, is it easy to use? It's a crazy amount of work and it's just so different from what like another rep would be doing. This is a million dollar deal. It's not like a $30,000 deal. When I go out and ask great enterprise sellers, why do you win a deal? What's the number one reason why you win the deal? Any guess? I'm about to blow your mind because I bet I know this answer. All right. Hey folks, we got something new for you today.

So you may or may not know, but I've got a new YouTube channel called The Science of Scaling. It's a slightly different format and we have some other sales shows and content on there too. But everything you'll find on the channel is the same sort of super tactical sales advice that every sales leader and rep can use. I'm talking about lead gen, ICP development, really tactical sales call tips. It's all there.

So head over to YouTube, check it out, give it a follow, and I have a link at the bottom in the description here too. Now, today we're going to give you a taste of what you can find on the channel. I think it's super helpful to this audience, so I want to run it here too.

It's an episode we made on closing high-ticket sales, million-dollar deals. That's a topic I get asked about all the time, and people think they can just apply their existing sales motion, but it won't work. So I sat down with producer Matthew to unpack the required changes. Things like managing complex decision-making units, adjusting how you define your sales funnel, and required adoption of new qualified matrices. I'm Mark Roberge, and this is The Science of Scaling. ♪

You want to close a million dollar deal? I'd love to. So many companies underestimate how much needs to change to be able to do that. I'm going to bring out a story about a buddy and his territory was two companies. That's your territory. It wasn't, it wasn't Target, but I'm going to give you, it was like a Target. Okay. So he's got Target and they're an Oracle shop and he's, his job over the next year is to convert them to Salesforce.

So I was golfing with him. I'm like, okay, this is what a great learning opportunity for me. And I said, well, how do you even go about that? And he's like, and every sales leader founder is going to like kill me for saying this right now. But he's like, oh, I'm not going to call them for two months. I'm like, what? You're not going to call him for two months? And he's like, no. I'm like, what do you do? He's like, I shop at Target all day.

Like I go online and buy stuff. I take screenshots of all the emails they send me. I download the mobile app. I go into the store. I use my like Target, you know, frequent shopper card. I see what they send to me. I see what they remember. And over the course of that two months, he built a 30 page diagnosis of their marketing strategy.

And he mailed it. He printed out 25 copies and mailed it to every single digital marketing executive at Target. Within three days, he had to sit down with all of them. Just the amount of personalization necessary is off the charts. Your willingness to invest in a single account, the amount you're willing to invest in time and money is enormous because it's a million dollar deal. It's not like a $30,000 deal.

Is that shocking to you, Matthew? It seems like it's a crazy amount of work and it's just so different from what like another rep would be doing. You need to appreciate that whatever you learned in closing mid-market or SMB deals, that process, the buyer journey, prospecting, getting meetings, discovery calls, presentation, it all needs to be recreated.

Whether you're new to sales, starting a new role, or building a team around you, I can't stress enough how important it is to perfect the pitch. It starts with the first slide, but that's not where it ends. It's a lot more complicated than that. Luckily, Panadoc and HubSpot came together to create Perfecting the Pitch, pro tactics for mastering every type of sales deal.

It's a new resource that gives you an actionable guide, scripts and templates for closing the toughest sales deals. Click the link in the description below to download this resource and start perfecting your pitch today. Okay, back to the video. Let's start with the buyer journey. So what we're showing here is a little case that I teach at Harvard Business School from a pretty cool company called Acuna who developed this framework.

And, you know, unlike the simple buyer journey that we've laid out before, which is awareness, consideration, decision, they've outlined a buyer journey that has seven steps in it.

And this is a case about a warehouse supply chain management software company. So imagine like there's these warehouses, they have a ton of inventory and they're using software to manage that. The orders come in, products go out, there's software that manages that. In this particular case, we have four personas. We have the CEO, who's the decision maker at the warehouse. We have the warehouse manager,

We have the supply chain management person. And then we have the end user. And so what's happening here is with each stage, the buyer journey is showing the role of the individual at each stage. So at the very first stage of learning, it's really just like the warehouse manager and the supply chain manager that are involved. The CEO and the end user is not involved at all.

But as we move down to, say, the selecting phase, the CEO is very involved. They're almost like a gatekeeper or blocker to the deal. And so you can see that we can get a lot more granular on how we're defining the way these people buy our software and the different needs of the people involved. This is called a decision-making unit or DMU.

And that's a big difference in enterprise selling. In a lot of SMB sales, you might be dealing with the president, the business unit owner. You're dealing with one person. You're discovering their need. You're telling your pitch to them and you're closing with them. That doesn't happen with million dollar deals. There are three people involved, seven people involved, 12 people involved. And your ability to manage this decision making unit is critical to getting the deal done.

Let's move over to prospecting. In this case, because we have a DMU, decision-making unit, we have to be multi-threaded, meaning we have to identify all of the people that could play a part in making this decision. And this is where one of these techniques called ABM or ABS come up. You might have heard this term before, account-based marketing and account-based selling.

Now that's a term that has like really exploded, has a lot of meanings today. I think the purest version that I like is used for these million dollar ticket sales. And it just means that like there are different people involved in this decision. We have to engage all of them at the prospecting stage and we have to adapt and personalize our outreach to their specific needs, right? So in the DMU, you typically have like

a couple of different personas. So an example is the economic buyer, person that signs the check. Could be the CFO, could be the CEO, whatever. They're typically very ROI driven. Dollars and cents, I'm going to pay you a million dollars. When do I get that million dollars back? Right? So that's all of a sudden start like the content you want to send to them starts coming to life.

Then you have the business user. They tend to be like focused on their particular goals on growth or, you know, whatever that business is tasked with. Then you got the end user. That's the person actually uses the software. They don't care about ROI. They care about like, is it easy to use? Do I get to go home sooner? Does it save me time? If it breaks, who do I call?

That's what they care about. Then you got usually someone like the IT person or security person that has to like implement the thing. They don't care about the ROI either. They actually don't even care what's easy to use.

They just care that like, it's easy to set up. It's not going to cause a security breach. I'm not going to get fired. You're going to maintain it. If there's a bug, who do I call? So hopefully that brings to life, Matthew, of like the different needs of the people involved. And we have to use an ABM, account-based marketing or account-based selling tactic, which means that we are very aware that

of each person's role and the unique needs that they're going to have so we can align our message around it. Is there one that you should prioritize first? Is there one that ultimately is more important? Is it like, like you really need to nail ROI, but like IT implementation, like that's always secondary? Or like, do you need to look at these all on the exact same level in order for it to be successful? This gets to an important point. This is going to be a quiz for you, Matthew. Okay.

When I go out and ask great enterprise sellers, why do you win a deal? What's the number one reason why you win the deal? Any guess? I'm about to blow your mind because I bet I know this answer. You probably do. It's whoever has the best champion. Boom!

We must have done this on a pot. You're right. I'm telling you, I have a future as a salesperson. Yes, it's crazy. The best enterprise sales reps are out there and they're like, I don't win because I have the best price. I don't win because I have the best product. I win because I develop the best champion, the strongest champion. And that gets to your question, Matthew. It's like, where do I have to pull? Like, bottom line is you are attacking it from on the prospecting side from every single angle.

But as we move into the discovery, the qualification phases and the presentation phase, this becomes about establishing the strongest champion. Because what's going to happen at some point is if you're lucky, you're going to get to the final vendor assessment. There's going to be two, three people in the mix. The decision is going to happen when you are not in the room. Believe me.

Like whoever is it, the CEO, the CFO, the, you know, the head of security, the head of, you know, the head of, you know, this user group, the general manager, they're all going to be in a room talking and debating. And there's a decision maker in there, like the economic buyer, who's basically going to like defer to the advice of the folks in the room. And your competitor is going to have a champion. Maybe their champion is, you know, the GM of EMEA.

And maybe the GM of me had just started six months ago and doesn't have that much political power. And you're going to have a champion. Maybe your champion is the CFO. And maybe the CFO has worked across three companies with the CEO before, and they've been best friends for 25 years. Guess who's going to win the deal?

Every time. Exactly. So this is all about getting the best champion. All right. And so qualifying on a champion, a champion, and this is right from my mentor, who is ironically Brian Halligan's former boss back at PTC, John McMahon. He was my mentor while I was running a global sales team here for like four or five years. And yeah, he taught me about this. Champion is willing and able. Everyone's willing. The hard part's able.

So, Matthew, are you a strong champion? Are you going to get this deal done? Absolutely. You're willing, but are you able? So, how do you suss that out? Well, if it's me, I mean, I'm just going to say no because I don't have that kind of pull. But yeah, I guess you have to see like who their connections are, like who do they report to? Who are they in conversation with? And by the time you're assessing this, by the way, you're on the same team.

Like you've gone through so much work together that this person's a partner to you. They want this deal to get done just as much as you do. Like they're trying to probably use this deal to get promoted, to make a name for themselves. So like you're on the same team. And so you can, you can like really qualify them. And Sal says something like, Matthew, okay, great. Let's get this done. Like, tell me about the last time you got a million dollar deal through this company.

Right? Like, what's the process? Who do you work with? Who do you work with in procurement? What does Steve care about? Who do you work with in legal? What does Diane care about? What are her common red lines? If you have a strong champion, they're like, oh yeah, don't worry. I got Diane. Like, this is what she's going to care about. Like, I've done this seven times before. Like, you know, like you're getting closer to understanding if you don't have the right champion. If they don't have the answers, who has the answers? That's our champion.

You move on immediately. Yeah, Matthew, great. Oh, you don't know? Great. Who would know? Oh, my boss Steve would know. Okay, great. When can we get a meeting with Steve? Steve's my new champion. Got it. Now, am I ditching you? Absolutely not. We're still buddies. We're grabbing coffee. We're grabbing whatever it is, right? And now I'm going to get you promoted, but I'm going to get the deal because I'm going to get Steve on my side. Okay, so this is very much about the champion. Now-

We got a little off track because we were building up our sales funnel, but this is related to it. So we've established a new buyer journey aligned with high ticket sales. We've established a new demand gen channel strategy around big ticket sales with account based marketing, account based selling with the decision making unit. Now, when we move to the discovery stage, the big pothole here is that salespeople that don't have much experience with big ticket sales assume that every employee at the company has the same pain point.

has the same perspective. And yes, there usually is a general organizational pain, but each individual has a different pain. And that kind of came out when we were talking about the different roles in the decision-making unit. The pain of the economic buyer

versus the end user buyer versus the business unit owner versus the head of security. They're all very different panes. So even if we've been spending six months with an organization and we meet someone new, someone that might be important to the purchase of this product, like the head of security, we have to redo security, redo discovery. We can't just say, oh yeah, I know everything about your business. I know all of your problems and this is my product. No,

You got to give that person an opportunity to, what have you heard about us? If you haven't heard about anything, we solved this problem. Have you ever explored solutions around that problem? You know, what kind of hurdles have you, what goes through your mind when you hear about that? You know what I mean? Like, so we're redoing discover on each person. Okay. And then when we get to the presentation phase, again, we have to tailor the pitch to each individual if we can, but oftentimes we're presenting to an entire group at this stage.

And the big hurdle that people make is the first slide. Do you have any guess what the first slide is? You're walking in, right? So you're the enterprise seller. You've been working this deal for eight months. The big committee, the CFO, the CEO, the business, the head of EMEA, the security person. What's the first slide? Well, I'm already immediately terrified. So my first slide is...

About our company? That sounds wrong immediately, though, right? That's totally wrong. That's exactly what it is. The first slide is we've been in business for 12 years. We have 7,500 customers. We've raised $120 million from these awesome VCs. We won Employee of the Year in the US. Who cares? But look, we've been so good for so long. The first slide is a recap of what you know about their situation. Mm-hmm.

Your team has been phenomenal. I've spent seven months with them. I've had 17 conversations with all these folks. You have amazing employees. And what they basically told to me is you are losing market share because your demand generation performance has fallen apart. You haven't modernized your techniques in a long time. You're trying to figure out how to align these investments with current buyer trends. And what you've been leaning toward is to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do I have that right?

And even if it's the first time I'm with the CEO, I hope the CEO disagrees. Why? Because now I have an opportunity to ask them, what's right? Because it's very hard to do personal discovery in a group meeting. So basically takeaway is that first slide needs to be a recap of the problem. So hopefully you have seen...

how you have to adapt some of the basic frameworks we've established, buyer journeys, prospecting methods, discovery call methods, presentation guides for these multi-million dollar ticket sales. Now to tie it back to the champion, and this is, there's a big debate around who's invented this framework.

But I'm going to introduce what we call a qualifying matrix. Okay. And a qualifying matrix is nomenclature that we establish in our company that's a consistent way for us to understand how qualified this potential deal is. How likely are they to buy? The simplest, longest running one that I know of is called BANT.

I think it was invented at like IBM or Intel back in the 70s. And it stands for budget authority need timing. That's great for small business leads, mid-market leads, etc. It's not sufficient to encapsulate the complexities of a million dollar ticket sale. There's a more advanced one called Medic that...

Many people credit John McMahon with inventing, PTC with inventing. It doesn't really matter. I don't even think John really cares. He was definitely a driver of some of the foundations, even if he wasn't the inventor. And there's plenty of other people circling around that had major contributions to it. MEDIC stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Process, Decision Maker, Identifying Pain, Champion.

And some people throw another C at the end for competitor's champion just to influence that champion bake-off. Now, there's other examples like MedPick and people mess around with the orders and all that kind of stuff. But you understand, like, you know, you can start to see that this is a more advanced qualification around this. So metrics is like, how are they quantifying the ROI for this purchase? We need to know that. Cool.

Economic buyer, who's signing the check and what do they care about? Decision process, how does that decision get made? What are all the steps? Decision maker, who is that person that's actually making the decision? Identify pain, what's the pain that they're doing? And then the champion, who's the champion we need and who's the competitor's champion?

So hopefully you can see it's like, just like everything else, it's a little more complicated, a little more advanced, but it's justified for these million dollar ticket sales. All right. So what are our takeaways? Yeah. All right. So hopefully you all feel a lot more equipped to close these million dollar sales. They can totally change your business. So let's just hit the three main takeaways. The first thing we covered was the concept of a DMU, a decision-making unit. Really sets the stage for what it's going to take to up-level our sales approach and

Um, there's a lot more people involved and they all have different political views, different role views, et cetera. We have to appreciate those and adjust our style accordingly. Okay. Number two is we brought to life how you're going to change the sales funnel, the sales playbook, the sales process, each, each piece of it to adjust it to this reality of a decision making unit.

We talked about a more advanced view on the buyer journey, a more sophisticated approach to prospecting with ABM and ABS. We talked about discovery on the personal level, not just the organizational level. And we talked about how to handle that really stressful pitch with the whole committee there.

And the good news is like, remember my friend at salesforce.com, the million dollar seller, our willingness to spend is much higher because of the upsides there. He took two months before he placed a call, but he got the meaning. The third and final point is also implementing a more advanced qualifying matrix, in this case, MEDIC.

Right. So Bant is the simple version. It's used great in S&B and mid-market deals. These deals are more complex. You need to inspect these deals on a closer lens. So we introduced the concept of Medic. You can go ahead and implement that. My name is Mark. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you enjoy our channel. We have a whole lot more content like this. So go ahead and subscribe now and check out all the rest of the stuff. Happy scaling, everyone.

Happy scaling, everyone. Mr. Rogers. Happy scaling, everyone. Yeah, make me a mug of that. Put in my coffee. All right, that does it for today, folks. Our episode was written and produced by my favorite producer, Matthew Brown. Editing comes from Patrick Edwards. The

The science of scaling is a proud part of HubSpot Media. And if you like what you heard today, make sure you follow or subscribe to us wherever you're a fan of the show. And if you're a founder ready to scale, check out my VC firm, Stage 2 Capital. We are backed by over 800 CROs, CMOs, CCOs from the best companies in tech and we're ready to help with your scaling journey. Okay, see you on the next episode.