Deal Fatigue
As the founder of an early-stage company, you know just how much effort it takes to close deals, but what is easy to overlook is just how much effort the buying process can be for your prospects too.
So much so that once contracts are signed, buyers often suffer from what I like to call “deal fatigue” – immediately disappearing back into their (already busy) day job and becoming unresponsive.
You’re probably wondering why this would be a problem? Surely once the contract is signed, everyone’s job is completed and you’ve taken one more successful step in building your company?
This is only partially true.
Whilst closing deals definitely helps to build your company, it does not help you sustain it for the long term. For that you need to ensure you can consistently –
- Retain this hard won revenue
- Expand it in the future
And the only sure-fire way to achieve both is to deliver on the value you promised they would get in the sales cycle – as quickly as possible and preferably with a minimal amount of effort required by the customer.
Speed is an important consideration here because the risk of not being able to retain your revenue increases the longer it takes for a customer to see the value of your solution.
The amount of effort required by the customer is also another vitally important consideration because prospects and customers do not live and breathe your solution like you do.
They are busy being a bank, insurance, tech or engineering company etc. and even though they may have paid you a substantial amount of money to address serious pains in their business, it does not automatically follow that they will put in the required time, effort and resources to get your solution deployed and adopted quickly.
The Buyer – User Gap
This is because there is always a gap between the buyer of your solution and all the other people at the customer that are required to deploy and adopt it, and without their active involvement and participation you will not be able to deliver the value you promised the buyer.
As they were not involved in the deal, these other people will usually have different priorities and little knowledge about or interest in your solution and to make matters worse they are almost always –
- Overworked
- Time poor
- Resource constrained
- Lacking in authority to make necessary decisions
- Resistant to any kind of change
The bigger the customer, the more of these people there are likely to be, and some of them may even be motivated to completely block your ability to deliver value.
It is important to remember that even though your solution should make their working lives better, these people are effectively being asked to take on the additional work of deploying your solution and changing the way they work by adopting it, so to have any hope of securing their active participation someone needs to answer the perfectly reasonable question they will have – “what’s in it for me?”
And this is where buyer “deal fatigue” becomes a real issue for you because your buyer is the one person with sufficient credibility and authority to successfully answer this question for them.
Common mistakes founders make here is to think that they have the credibility to answer the question, that the question only needs to be answered after the deal has closed or that the value of their solution is so overwhelmingly self-evident that the question does not need to be addressed at all.
None of these is true, and if you wait until after the deal has closed and your buyer is no longer actively involved with you, you will (at best) find yourself stuck at a much lower level in their organisation spending additional time and effort trying to ”re-sell” your solution to lots of busy uninterested people who will not move quickly (if at all).
The answer to closing this “buyer – user gap” is not to wait until after the deal has closed to figure out who these people are and then try to convince them to take on the extra work your solution represents, but rather to do the necessary discovery and engagement with your buyer during the sales cycle so your buyer is the one closing the gap with them.
Thankfully there exists another “gap” you can exploit to your own advantage here – the gap between finalising the contract and marking the deal as closed-won.
Closing the Gap
This gap is the perfect window of time to do the necessary discovery with your buyer, as during the bureaucratic step of finalising contract terms nothing else is required to get the deal done and so there is no risk of slowing the deal down or introducing any new deal blockers.
In fact, if done right, this discovery can help drive more urgency with your buyer to speed up getting contract terms finalised as they increasingly shift their thinking from closing the deal to getting their high priority pains solved with your solution.
The specific discovery you will need to do with the buyer during this gap in the sales cycle will depend on the nature of your solution, however these are the kinds of things you are looking to understand from them –
- How are new software solutions typically deployed at your company?
- When does the solution need to be live and fully adopted?
- Who needs to be involved for the deployment project?
- Who do they report to?
- Who will need to adopt the solution once it is deployed?
- How many of them are there and what departments / teams are they in?
- Who are their managers?
- How much of a change in the way they work does the solution represent?
- What communications channels work best when you roll out new software?
- How do you normally train people on new software at your company?
The goal of these discovery questions is to understand how they run software projects (and what their track record of success is), who needs to be involved for the deployment and what their priorities are, what the size and scope of the change impact will be for different people and groups, who has credibility with each of these groups to get them to adopt your solution (usually their direct manager), the company’s familiarity and experience with change management processes and tools, and where there is likely to be resistance or outright blockers.
It is unlikely that your buyer will know the answer to all of these questions, but what they will be able to do is to navigate the organisation and connect you to the right people so you can dig deeper and start building a positive working relationship with them.
By making these introductions for you, the buyer is effectively conferring their credibility on to you and your solution and acting as your executive sponsor. Should you encounter any blockers or resistance when engaging with these people, you can then go back to your buyer and explain the impact this will have on realising the value they want your solution to deliver. The buyer is then best placed to use their authority to engage directly with any resistors or blockers and get the deployment and adoption work required for your solution prioritised.
It’s a good idea to provide your buyer with some messaging that they can use when making these introductions. The messaging should include why the solution is being purchased, what value it will deliver to the individual they are introducing you to, the high priority and importance the buyer is placing on the solution and the risks for the company and this particular individual in not embracing it.
Minimising Your Revenue Risks
As a founder it is vitally important you understand the risks “deal fatigue” can have on your ability to retain and grow your revenue so make sure you continue working with your buyer during the natural gap in the sales cycle when contracts are being finalised so they can introduce you to anyone else that needs to be involved to realise the value of your solution.
Using this natural gap in the sales cycle, rather than the traditional approach of waiting “post sales” should minimise the time and effort it takes for your solution to deliver value which in turn will maximise your chances of retaining and expanding your revenue.
The key thing to remember is that it is your buyer, not you, who has the necessary credibility and authority to close the “buyer-user gap” and get your solution prioritised but if they have disappeared on to the next thing, exhausted and unresponsive from closing the deal, this gap will stand in the way of delivering the value you promised them and jeopardise your ability to sustain your company for the long term.