right pROCESS
Smartsheet customers would come to us with big problems they needed help solving and we needed a credible way to show them how we would help them evaluate our solution. This was the driving force to develop a solution sales process, which I did by gathering an internal team of hotshots spanning the revenue functions and setting an 8 meeting / 8 week timetable to deliver the process. This team also rolled out the process and the approach yielded strong field engagement and adoption. It also delivered 160% of our targeted solution deals in its first year.
Making the solution sales process ‘customer facing’ was important to get credibility that we were ‘big kids’ that could help them solve big problems (see below).
Easy access to the sales process tools and step-by-step account team roles and expectations were important for a successful roll-out (see below).
Solution Sales Process
Joint Engagement Plan
A key sales challenge is moving from a vendor-based relationship to a value-add oriented relationship. Joint engagement plans help make this happen because they elevate the evaluation from a ‘do a demo and I may call you back’ to joint agreement on which resources are needed at which points in the evaluation cycle to deliver a successful evaluation and implementation. Our win rate doubled when our customers interacted on engagement plans. We used our product for this and so also started selling the solution to our customers (below).