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In today’s macroeconomic environment, B2B SaaS Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders and CEOs/founders are facing a hard reality. They need to steadily increase the number and size of deals and drive world-class adoption and retention, while radically improving GTM productivity — with fewer opportunities to influence buyer decisions and shrinking software spending.
Profitable Outcome Selling can solve that conundrum.
What is Profitable Outcome Selling?
Profitable Outcome Selling is a mindset enabling B2B SaaS businesses to reach, win, and grow large and strategic customers at scale and efficiently, by repeatedly aligning customer outcomes with company capabilities from pre- to post-sales.
Profitable Outcome Selling is based on seven years of hands-on experience building and refining Strategic GTM capabilities at ServiceNow and Stripe, in collaboration with many professionals who built similar capabilities at companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, VMware, and AWS.
It borrows and augments best practices from industry-recognized sales methodologies like Value Selling and MEDDIC, and integrates them in a customer-centric, seller-friendly way.
It is aimed at GTM leaders and field sales, presales, and customer success professionals in B2B SaaS businesses that are:
- At growth stage and beyond (>$10M Annual Recurring Revenue)
- Serving the upper-mid-market ($100M-1B Annual Revenue) and enterprise (>$1B annual revenue) segments.
While this article is focused on B2B SaaS businesses, the principles of Profitable Outcome Selling apply to any B2B tech business, especially industrial companies looking to expand their software offerings.
Below is an introduction to Profitable Outcome Selling and its benefits. Part 2 is coming to the PSC blog next week, which will provide a step-by-step guide for getting started, as well as real-world examples and use cases.
Profitable Outcome Selling Highlights
Here’s the rundown of Profitable Outcome Selling:
- Symbiotic buying and selling experiences: Align the seller's mindset with the buyer’s priorities from pre- to post-sale, and deliver value to both buyers and sellers.
- Executive positioning: Elevate the narrative to higher-order customer issues across account planning, envisioning, solutioning, execution readiness, and deal closing to accelerate sales.
- Continuous best-practice building: Appoint champions who will work cross-functionally to pilot practices and assets on a few large and/or strategic deals, and continuously refine.
- Rightsized practices and assets: Aim for “one size up” on GTM maturity, and pick minimum practices and assets needed to close and drive adoption in various customer situations.
- Strategic scaling: Elevate the DNA of the GTM organization by “winning hearts and minds” one team or region at a time, and through a tiered enablement model.
- Influenced growth and efficiency: Set semi-annual and/or annual lagging influenced revenue growth and sales efficiency targets. In the first 12-18 months, consider net new revenue targets per Profitable Outcome Selling FTE of 3-5X the average seller’s quota, and a target of 0.9-1 for the ‘magic number’* related to account cohorts covered by Profitable Outcome Selling.
*Ratio of new revenue generated by every dollar spent on sales, customer success and marketing
A SaaS Performance “Perfect Storm”
SaaS selling is becoming harder. Gartner research found that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers, thus discounting the perceived value of sellers. In many cases, the real decision-maker is only tangentially involved in the buying experience. The average Annualized Contract Value (ACV) was at its lowest point in three years in Q2 of 2023, according to Vendr, a SaaS buying platform.
But SaaS buying is also becoming harder. The same Gartner research found that the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers, each armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently and must deconflict within the group. At the same time, the set of options and solutions buying groups consider is expanding as new technologies, products, suppliers, and services emerge. As a result, SaaS buyers are scrutinizing ROI more than ever, switching to lower-cost alternatives before renewals and prioritizing usage-based pricing models.
These SaaS selling and buying challenges are aggravated by slowing year-over-year SaaS revenue growth, driving SaaS investors and leaders to focus on GTM productivity vs. “growth at all cost,” including by shifting strategies from sales-led growth (SLG) to product-led growth (PLG).
Risks of This “Perfect Storm” for SaaS Businesses
- Race to the bottom, with “feature bake offs,” commodity pricing, and sellers as “order takers” becoming the new normal.
- Slowing growth due to insufficient large deals to meet revenue targets and investor expectations on share of wallet.
- Subpar Net Dollar Retention (NDR) rates due to slow customer technology adoption post-deal — or worse, debooking and churn after a few months.
- Diminishing moat as sales plays become less customer-centric for the sake of “repeatability” and “efficiency.”
- Low return on previous GTM transformation investments such as Value Selling or MEDDIC enablement, specialized customer advisory resources and functions, etc.
The Profitable Outcome Selling “Storm Breaker”
Profitable Outcome Selling addresses these challenges by aligning the seller's mindset with the buyer’s priorities from pre- to post-sales:
Impact, Deliverables, and Success factors
Targeting Both Direct and Scaled Impact
Profitable Outcome Selling should both be rolled out to large or strategic deals (direct impact) and embedded in the DNA of the GTM organization (scaled impact):
- Direct impact: Engage with customer executives and partner with the SaaS company’s ecosystem to envision the value of a strategic partnership, build trusted relationships, share insights, recommend solutions, and pave the way for rapid adoption.
- Scaled impact: Increase the SaaS company’s mind share in the market, build repeatable solutions and sales plays that make sellers’ lives easier, and influence the marketing narrative and product roadmap to increase adoption at scale in strategic markets and industries.
Integrate Deliverables into the Sales Cycle & Customer Journey
While most of the following deliverables may be needed on large and complex enterprise deals, sellers might need just a few of these on smaller deals, i.e., the approach is highly modular.
Strategic Account Planning
Confidence in a path to a profitable and mutually beneficial partnership with the customer.
Business overview:
- How the prospect makes money
- Top three company priorities and challenges
- Priority-funded initiatives
Addressable opportunities:
- Priorities and challenges addressable with capabilities that are “on the truck” or “on the assembly line”
- Value at stake for the customer
- Competition and differentiators
Size of the prize:
- Total addressable market
- Current share of wallet
- Prioritized share of wallet areas to grab
Stakeholders:
- Decision-makers
- Business influencers in technology and operational roles
Account growth roadmap:
- Current revenue
- Revenue target in 2-3 years
- 3-5 opportunities to move from current to target revenue numbers, with targets at the opportunity level
Executive Envisioning
Confidence in a successful future state for the customer enabled by the SaaS capabilities.
Executive education:
- Plain English description of the problems and solutions addressed by the SaaS capabilities
- Market trends and customer stories showing why key players are acting and what they’re focused on
Shared vision and strategy:
- Compelling vision statement describing a buyer’s future state powered by the SaaS capabilities
- Strategy on a page, mapping the buyer’s priorities and challenges with key capabilities and quantified achievable business outcomes (e.g., revenue increase, cost reduction, productivity improvements)
Current/future state architectures:
- Business architectures showing key capabilities (customer, vendor, third parties), starting with a future state depicting the customer using all or most of the capabilities (the infamous “art of the possible”)
- Business architectures showing the current state, thus highlighting not just what the customer is using (if anything) but what they’re not using.
Capability roadmap:
- Key stages to move from current to future state, including incremental capabilities, countries, BUs, volumes, etc. at each stage.
Value hypothesis:
- One or more statements of value that the customer will achieve at different phases of the roadmap, illustrated by outside-in, “back of the envelope” estimates.
Human-Centered Solutioning
Confidence in the solution’s ability to address both the buyer’s requirements and end-user needs and pain points.
Prioritized use cases:
- Desirability (how much do end users and business / tech owners want the capabilities?)
- Viability (can the capabilities be delivered within acceptable business constraints?)
- Feasibility (can the capabilities be built and run with the available technology and within the operational constraints?)
Current/future user journey maps:
- Visualization of the experience of end-users interacting with the platform as it exists today (current)
- How the experience could be improved or evolved in the future (future), highlighting touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for enhancement
Solution design and architecture:
- Structured description of the solution, ensuring it effectively addresses the needs and pain points of end-users and stakeholders
Personalized demos for key stakeholders:
- Demos that showcase the most inspiring capabilities of the proposed solution to decision-makers and influencers, including capabilities that are on the product roadmap within the proposed partnership timeframe.
Execution Readiness
Confidence in all parties’ readiness to build and run the solution and deliver expected outcomes.
Ecosystem strategy:
- Description of the role of all parties involved in building and running the solution, including (if any) in-house vs. third party professional services
- Include multiple options with pros and cons
- Implementation strategy:
- Approach to build the solution (e.g., “Big Bang” vs. staged, Country/BU ramp up, success metrics by phase)
Delivery plan:
- Key milestones and projects needed to build and run the solution and realize expected outcomes
Resourcing plan and costs:
- People and other resources needed from the customer
- Vendor and partners to execute the delivery plan
- Associated costs
Business case:
- Total cost and benefit estimates of the entire solution
- Include build and run costs, ramped P&L and non-P&L benefits
- Include “worthiness” metrics like ROI, NPV or Payback Period
Deal Closing
Confidence in both parties' commitment to deliver their end of the agreement.
Executive-grade proposal:
- Easy to consume, plain English description of customer needs
- Proposed solution and path to build and run it
- Business value assessment
- Clear and transparent pricing aligned with the solution components
- Case studies
Executive readout:
- Presentation of the proposal to the decision-makers and influencers, ideally by the customer champions with the vendor support
Success factors
Don’t miss the conclusion to this topic coming next Monday on the PSC blog!
About Nic Delaye
I am an executive advisor and B2B tech Go-To-Market (GTM) executive with 30+ years of global, hands-on experience in Digital, AI, Fintech & ESG with Stripe/ServiceNow & PwC/KPMG/EY across most industries and segments. Special thanks to Lionel Berger for his contribution to this piece.
My professional purpose is: "Put technology in service of people to drive net positive impact at scale."
In today’s macroeconomic environment, B2B SaaS Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders and CEOs/founders are facing a hard reality. They need to steadily increase the number and size of deals and drive world-class adoption and retention, while radically improving GTM productivity — with fewer opportunities to influence buyer decisions and shrinking software spending.
Profitable Outcome Selling can solve that conundrum.
What is Profitable Outcome Selling?
Profitable Outcome Selling is a mindset enabling B2B SaaS businesses to reach, win, and grow large and strategic customers at scale and efficiently, by repeatedly aligning customer outcomes with company capabilities from pre- to post-sales.
Profitable Outcome Selling is based on seven years of hands-on experience building and refining Strategic GTM capabilities at ServiceNow and Stripe, in collaboration with many professionals who built similar capabilities at companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, VMware, and AWS.
It borrows and augments best practices from industry-recognized sales methodologies like Value Selling and MEDDIC, and integrates them in a customer-centric, seller-friendly way.
It is aimed at GTM leaders and field sales, presales, and customer success professionals in B2B SaaS businesses that are:
- At growth stage and beyond (>$10M Annual Recurring Revenue)
- Serving the upper-mid-market ($100M-1B Annual Revenue) and enterprise (>$1B annual revenue) segments.
While this article is focused on B2B SaaS businesses, the principles of Profitable Outcome Selling apply to any B2B tech business, especially industrial companies looking to expand their software offerings.
Below is an introduction to Profitable Outcome Selling and its benefits. Part 2 is coming to the PSC blog next week, which will provide a step-by-step guide for getting started, as well as real-world examples and use cases.
Profitable Outcome Selling Highlights
Here’s the rundown of Profitable Outcome Selling:
- Symbiotic buying and selling experiences: Align the seller's mindset with the buyer’s priorities from pre- to post-sale, and deliver value to both buyers and sellers.
- Executive positioning: Elevate the narrative to higher-order customer issues across account planning, envisioning, solutioning, execution readiness, and deal closing to accelerate sales.
- Continuous best-practice building: Appoint champions who will work cross-functionally to pilot practices and assets on a few large and/or strategic deals, and continuously refine.
- Rightsized practices and assets: Aim for “one size up” on GTM maturity, and pick minimum practices and assets needed to close and drive adoption in various customer situations.
- Strategic scaling: Elevate the DNA of the GTM organization by “winning hearts and minds” one team or region at a time, and through a tiered enablement model.
- Influenced growth and efficiency: Set semi-annual and/or annual lagging influenced revenue growth and sales efficiency targets. In the first 12-18 months, consider net new revenue targets per Profitable Outcome Selling FTE of 3-5X the average seller’s quota, and a target of 0.9-1 for the ‘magic number’* related to account cohorts covered by Profitable Outcome Selling.
*Ratio of new revenue generated by every dollar spent on sales, customer success and marketing
A SaaS Performance “Perfect Storm”
SaaS selling is becoming harder. Gartner research found that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers, thus discounting the perceived value of sellers. In many cases, the real decision-maker is only tangentially involved in the buying experience. The average Annualized Contract Value (ACV) was at its lowest point in three years in Q2 of 2023, according to Vendr, a SaaS buying platform.
But SaaS buying is also becoming harder. The same Gartner research found that the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers, each armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently and must deconflict within the group. At the same time, the set of options and solutions buying groups consider is expanding as new technologies, products, suppliers, and services emerge. As a result, SaaS buyers are scrutinizing ROI more than ever, switching to lower-cost alternatives before renewals and prioritizing usage-based pricing models.
These SaaS selling and buying challenges are aggravated by slowing year-over-year SaaS revenue growth, driving SaaS investors and leaders to focus on GTM productivity vs. “growth at all cost,” including by shifting strategies from sales-led growth (SLG) to product-led growth (PLG).
Risks of This “Perfect Storm” for SaaS Businesses
- Race to the bottom, with “feature bake offs,” commodity pricing, and sellers as “order takers” becoming the new normal.
- Slowing growth due to insufficient large deals to meet revenue targets and investor expectations on share of wallet.
- Subpar Net Dollar Retention (NDR) rates due to slow customer technology adoption post-deal — or worse, debooking and churn after a few months.
- Diminishing moat as sales plays become less customer-centric for the sake of “repeatability” and “efficiency.”
- Low return on previous GTM transformation investments such as Value Selling or MEDDIC enablement, specialized customer advisory resources and functions, etc.
The Profitable Outcome Selling “Storm Breaker”
Profitable Outcome Selling addresses these challenges by aligning the seller's mindset with the buyer’s priorities from pre- to post-sales:
Impact, Deliverables, and Success factors
Targeting Both Direct and Scaled Impact
Profitable Outcome Selling should both be rolled out to large or strategic deals (direct impact) and embedded in the DNA of the GTM organization (scaled impact):
- Direct impact: Engage with customer executives and partner with the SaaS company’s ecosystem to envision the value of a strategic partnership, build trusted relationships, share insights, recommend solutions, and pave the way for rapid adoption.
- Scaled impact: Increase the SaaS company’s mind share in the market, build repeatable solutions and sales plays that make sellers’ lives easier, and influence the marketing narrative and product roadmap to increase adoption at scale in strategic markets and industries.
Integrate Deliverables into the Sales Cycle & Customer Journey
While most of the following deliverables may be needed on large and complex enterprise deals, sellers might need just a few of these on smaller deals, i.e., the approach is highly modular.
Strategic Account Planning
Confidence in a path to a profitable and mutually beneficial partnership with the customer.
Business overview:
- How the prospect makes money
- Top three company priorities and challenges
- Priority-funded initiatives
Addressable opportunities:
- Priorities and challenges addressable with capabilities that are “on the truck” or “on the assembly line”
- Value at stake for the customer
- Competition and differentiators
Size of the prize:
- Total addressable market
- Current share of wallet
- Prioritized share of wallet areas to grab
Stakeholders:
- Decision-makers
- Business influencers in technology and operational roles
Account growth roadmap:
- Current revenue
- Revenue target in 2-3 years
- 3-5 opportunities to move from current to target revenue numbers, with targets at the opportunity level
Executive Envisioning
Confidence in a successful future state for the customer enabled by the SaaS capabilities.
Executive education:
- Plain English description of the problems and solutions addressed by the SaaS capabilities
- Market trends and customer stories showing why key players are acting and what they’re focused on
Shared vision and strategy:
- Compelling vision statement describing a buyer’s future state powered by the SaaS capabilities
- Strategy on a page, mapping the buyer’s priorities and challenges with key capabilities and quantified achievable business outcomes (e.g., revenue increase, cost reduction, productivity improvements)
Current/future state architectures:
- Business architectures showing key capabilities (customer, vendor, third parties), starting with a future state depicting the customer using all or most of the capabilities (the infamous “art of the possible”)
- Business architectures showing the current state, thus highlighting not just what the customer is using (if anything) but what they’re not using.
Capability roadmap:
- Key stages to move from current to future state, including incremental capabilities, countries, BUs, volumes, etc. at each stage.
Value hypothesis:
- One or more statements of value that the customer will achieve at different phases of the roadmap, illustrated by outside-in, “back of the envelope” estimates.
Human-Centered Solutioning
Confidence in the solution’s ability to address both the buyer’s requirements and end-user needs and pain points.
Prioritized use cases:
- Desirability (how much do end users and business / tech owners want the capabilities?)
- Viability (can the capabilities be delivered within acceptable business constraints?)
- Feasibility (can the capabilities be built and run with the available technology and within the operational constraints?)
Current/future user journey maps:
- Visualization of the experience of end-users interacting with the platform as it exists today (current)
- How the experience could be improved or evolved in the future (future), highlighting touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for enhancement
Solution design and architecture:
- Structured description of the solution, ensuring it effectively addresses the needs and pain points of end-users and stakeholders
Personalized demos for key stakeholders:
- Demos that showcase the most inspiring capabilities of the proposed solution to decision-makers and influencers, including capabilities that are on the product roadmap within the proposed partnership timeframe.
Execution Readiness
Confidence in all parties’ readiness to build and run the solution and deliver expected outcomes.
Ecosystem strategy:
- Description of the role of all parties involved in building and running the solution, including (if any) in-house vs. third party professional services
- Include multiple options with pros and cons
- Implementation strategy:
- Approach to build the solution (e.g., “Big Bang” vs. staged, Country/BU ramp up, success metrics by phase)
Delivery plan:
- Key milestones and projects needed to build and run the solution and realize expected outcomes
Resourcing plan and costs:
- People and other resources needed from the customer
- Vendor and partners to execute the delivery plan
- Associated costs
Business case:
- Total cost and benefit estimates of the entire solution
- Include build and run costs, ramped P&L and non-P&L benefits
- Include “worthiness” metrics like ROI, NPV or Payback Period
Deal Closing
Confidence in both parties' commitment to deliver their end of the agreement.
Executive-grade proposal:
- Easy to consume, plain English description of customer needs
- Proposed solution and path to build and run it
- Business value assessment
- Clear and transparent pricing aligned with the solution components
- Case studies
Executive readout:
- Presentation of the proposal to the decision-makers and influencers, ideally by the customer champions with the vendor support
Success factors
Don’t miss the conclusion to this topic coming next Monday on the PSC blog!
About Nic Delaye
I am an executive advisor and B2B tech Go-To-Market (GTM) executive with 30+ years of global, hands-on experience in Digital, AI, Fintech & ESG with Stripe/ServiceNow & PwC/KPMG/EY across most industries and segments. Special thanks to Lionel Berger for his contribution to this piece.
My professional purpose is: "Put technology in service of people to drive net positive impact at scale."
In today’s macroeconomic environment, B2B SaaS Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders and CEOs/founders are facing a hard reality. They need to steadily increase the number and size of deals and drive world-class adoption and retention, while radically improving GTM productivity — with fewer opportunities to influence buyer decisions and shrinking software spending.
Profitable Outcome Selling can solve that conundrum.
What is Profitable Outcome Selling?
Profitable Outcome Selling is a mindset enabling B2B SaaS businesses to reach, win, and grow large and strategic customers at scale and efficiently, by repeatedly aligning customer outcomes with company capabilities from pre- to post-sales.
Profitable Outcome Selling is based on seven years of hands-on experience building and refining Strategic GTM capabilities at ServiceNow and Stripe, in collaboration with many professionals who built similar capabilities at companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, VMware, and AWS.
It borrows and augments best practices from industry-recognized sales methodologies like Value Selling and MEDDIC, and integrates them in a customer-centric, seller-friendly way.
It is aimed at GTM leaders and field sales, presales, and customer success professionals in B2B SaaS businesses that are:
- At growth stage and beyond (>$10M Annual Recurring Revenue)
- Serving the upper-mid-market ($100M-1B Annual Revenue) and enterprise (>$1B annual revenue) segments.
While this article is focused on B2B SaaS businesses, the principles of Profitable Outcome Selling apply to any B2B tech business, especially industrial companies looking to expand their software offerings.
Below is an introduction to Profitable Outcome Selling and its benefits. Part 2 is coming to the PSC blog next week, which will provide a step-by-step guide for getting started, as well as real-world examples and use cases.
Profitable Outcome Selling Highlights
Here’s the rundown of Profitable Outcome Selling:
- Symbiotic buying and selling experiences: Align the seller's mindset with the buyer’s priorities from pre- to post-sale, and deliver value to both buyers and sellers.
- Executive positioning: Elevate the narrative to higher-order customer issues across account planning, envisioning, solutioning, execution readiness, and deal closing to accelerate sales.
- Continuous best-practice building: Appoint champions who will work cross-functionally to pilot practices and assets on a few large and/or strategic deals, and continuously refine.
- Rightsized practices and assets: Aim for “one size up” on GTM maturity, and pick minimum practices and assets needed to close and drive adoption in various customer situations.
- Strategic scaling: Elevate the DNA of the GTM organization by “winning hearts and minds” one team or region at a time, and through a tiered enablement model.
- Influenced growth and efficiency: Set semi-annual and/or annual lagging influenced revenue growth and sales efficiency targets. In the first 12-18 months, consider net new revenue targets per Profitable Outcome Selling FTE of 3-5X the average seller’s quota, and a target of 0.9-1 for the ‘magic number’* related to account cohorts covered by Profitable Outcome Selling.
*Ratio of new revenue generated by every dollar spent on sales, customer success and marketing
A SaaS Performance “Perfect Storm”
SaaS selling is becoming harder. Gartner research found that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers, thus discounting the perceived value of sellers. In many cases, the real decision-maker is only tangentially involved in the buying experience. The average Annualized Contract Value (ACV) was at its lowest point in three years in Q2 of 2023, according to Vendr, a SaaS buying platform.
But SaaS buying is also becoming harder. The same Gartner research found that the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers, each armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently and must deconflict within the group. At the same time, the set of options and solutions buying groups consider is expanding as new technologies, products, suppliers, and services emerge. As a result, SaaS buyers are scrutinizing ROI more than ever, switching to lower-cost alternatives before renewals and prioritizing usage-based pricing models.
These SaaS selling and buying challenges are aggravated by slowing year-over-year SaaS revenue growth, driving SaaS investors and leaders to focus on GTM productivity vs. “growth at all cost,” including by shifting strategies from sales-led growth (SLG) to product-led growth (PLG).
Risks of This “Perfect Storm” for SaaS Businesses
- Race to the bottom, with “feature bake offs,” commodity pricing, and sellers as “order takers” becoming the new normal.
- Slowing growth due to insufficient large deals to meet revenue targets and investor expectations on share of wallet.
- Subpar Net Dollar Retention (NDR) rates due to slow customer technology adoption post-deal — or worse, debooking and churn after a few months.
- Diminishing moat as sales plays become less customer-centric for the sake of “repeatability” and “efficiency.”
- Low return on previous GTM transformation investments such as Value Selling or MEDDIC enablement, specialized customer advisory resources and functions, etc.
The Profitable Outcome Selling “Storm Breaker”
Profitable Outcome Selling addresses these challenges by aligning the seller's mindset with the buyer’s priorities from pre- to post-sales:
Impact, Deliverables, and Success factors
Targeting Both Direct and Scaled Impact
Profitable Outcome Selling should both be rolled out to large or strategic deals (direct impact) and embedded in the DNA of the GTM organization (scaled impact):
- Direct impact: Engage with customer executives and partner with the SaaS company’s ecosystem to envision the value of a strategic partnership, build trusted relationships, share insights, recommend solutions, and pave the way for rapid adoption.
- Scaled impact: Increase the SaaS company’s mind share in the market, build repeatable solutions and sales plays that make sellers’ lives easier, and influence the marketing narrative and product roadmap to increase adoption at scale in strategic markets and industries.
Integrate Deliverables into the Sales Cycle & Customer Journey
While most of the following deliverables may be needed on large and complex enterprise deals, sellers might need just a few of these on smaller deals, i.e., the approach is highly modular.
Strategic Account Planning
Confidence in a path to a profitable and mutually beneficial partnership with the customer.
Business overview:
- How the prospect makes money
- Top three company priorities and challenges
- Priority-funded initiatives
Addressable opportunities:
- Priorities and challenges addressable with capabilities that are “on the truck” or “on the assembly line”
- Value at stake for the customer
- Competition and differentiators
Size of the prize:
- Total addressable market
- Current share of wallet
- Prioritized share of wallet areas to grab
Stakeholders:
- Decision-makers
- Business influencers in technology and operational roles
Account growth roadmap:
- Current revenue
- Revenue target in 2-3 years
- 3-5 opportunities to move from current to target revenue numbers, with targets at the opportunity level
Executive Envisioning
Confidence in a successful future state for the customer enabled by the SaaS capabilities.
Executive education:
- Plain English description of the problems and solutions addressed by the SaaS capabilities
- Market trends and customer stories showing why key players are acting and what they’re focused on
Shared vision and strategy:
- Compelling vision statement describing a buyer’s future state powered by the SaaS capabilities
- Strategy on a page, mapping the buyer’s priorities and challenges with key capabilities and quantified achievable business outcomes (e.g., revenue increase, cost reduction, productivity improvements)
Current/future state architectures:
- Business architectures showing key capabilities (customer, vendor, third parties), starting with a future state depicting the customer using all or most of the capabilities (the infamous “art of the possible”)
- Business architectures showing the current state, thus highlighting not just what the customer is using (if anything) but what they’re not using.
Capability roadmap:
- Key stages to move from current to future state, including incremental capabilities, countries, BUs, volumes, etc. at each stage.
Value hypothesis:
- One or more statements of value that the customer will achieve at different phases of the roadmap, illustrated by outside-in, “back of the envelope” estimates.
Human-Centered Solutioning
Confidence in the solution’s ability to address both the buyer’s requirements and end-user needs and pain points.
Prioritized use cases:
- Desirability (how much do end users and business / tech owners want the capabilities?)
- Viability (can the capabilities be delivered within acceptable business constraints?)
- Feasibility (can the capabilities be built and run with the available technology and within the operational constraints?)
Current/future user journey maps:
- Visualization of the experience of end-users interacting with the platform as it exists today (current)
- How the experience could be improved or evolved in the future (future), highlighting touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for enhancement
Solution design and architecture:
- Structured description of the solution, ensuring it effectively addresses the needs and pain points of end-users and stakeholders
Personalized demos for key stakeholders:
- Demos that showcase the most inspiring capabilities of the proposed solution to decision-makers and influencers, including capabilities that are on the product roadmap within the proposed partnership timeframe.
Execution Readiness
Confidence in all parties’ readiness to build and run the solution and deliver expected outcomes.
Ecosystem strategy:
- Description of the role of all parties involved in building and running the solution, including (if any) in-house vs. third party professional services
- Include multiple options with pros and cons
- Implementation strategy:
- Approach to build the solution (e.g., “Big Bang” vs. staged, Country/BU ramp up, success metrics by phase)
Delivery plan:
- Key milestones and projects needed to build and run the solution and realize expected outcomes
Resourcing plan and costs:
- People and other resources needed from the customer
- Vendor and partners to execute the delivery plan
- Associated costs
Business case:
- Total cost and benefit estimates of the entire solution
- Include build and run costs, ramped P&L and non-P&L benefits
- Include “worthiness” metrics like ROI, NPV or Payback Period
Deal Closing
Confidence in both parties' commitment to deliver their end of the agreement.
Executive-grade proposal:
- Easy to consume, plain English description of customer needs
- Proposed solution and path to build and run it
- Business value assessment
- Clear and transparent pricing aligned with the solution components
- Case studies
Executive readout:
- Presentation of the proposal to the decision-makers and influencers, ideally by the customer champions with the vendor support
Success factors
Don’t miss the conclusion to this topic coming next Monday on the PSC blog!
About Nic Delaye
I am an executive advisor and B2B tech Go-To-Market (GTM) executive with 30+ years of global, hands-on experience in Digital, AI, Fintech & ESG with Stripe/ServiceNow & PwC/KPMG/EY across most industries and segments. Special thanks to Lionel Berger for his contribution to this piece.
My professional purpose is: "Put technology in service of people to drive net positive impact at scale."
