Way, way, way too many sellers run their sales cycles like this:
- "I need to do a discovery call."
- "Then I need to do demo."
- "Then a proposal call."
- "Then a check-in".
If you want to run meetings for the sake of meetings, do the above.
But if you actually want to drive your deals forward...
The secret to driving deals fast is to know what you need to get, not what you need to do. As a VP of Sales at Pave, these were the 5 stages I used with exit criteria for each:
- Problem Agreement: Champion agrees to a problem.
- Solution Agreement: Champion agrees that we're the best solution.
- Power Agreement: Power agrees to both of the above.
- Commercial Agreement: They agree it's worth the price.
- Vendor Approval: They completed IT/legal review and signed contract.
Now, you can get these things in 1 call, 2 calls, or 20 calls depending on your sale. You can't skip stages, but you can absolutely combine them.
Get problem agreement in the first 10 minutes of a hot discovery call? Go get solution agreement with a harbor tour demo on the same call and skip the demo meeting entirely!
Big enterprise prospect still not at solution agreement after the demo? You might have to do another deep dive before the meeting with power to really leave with a champion.
So let's break down each stage, what you need to get, and how you can get it fast.
(and I have to give credit to my leadership cohost, Mark Kosoglow, CEO at Operator AI and former VP of Sales at Outreach. He's shared his stages on 30MPC multiple times, which has helped me perfect my thinking on the stages that I originally built at Pave.)
Stage 1: Problem Agreement
The exit criteria is that your champion needs to agree to a problem. Good problem agreement means your champion agreed to a problem that impacts both them and the business:
- Bad Problem Agreement: "They love Pave!"
- Good Problem Agreement: "Their Head of Compensation is spending so much time planning comp in spreadsheets, that they can't oversee manager decisions and that led to inequitable comp decisions that boiled up to the CEO."
- Who's Involved: Champion
- Ways to Get It: Discovery calls, before vs after audits
The most common way to get problem agreement is through a discovery call. But another way you can get it is with a before vs after audit.
For example, one of my advisory clients, BRM Labs helps companies track all of their software spend. After a disco call, they pull all of the contracts from their prospect's inbox and show them every renewal they've already missed which amplifies the problem.
1 way you might accelerate deals here is by doing a harbor tour demo in discovery. That allows you to get problem and solution agreement in a single call, while foregoing the deep dive demo or even inviting power to the deep dive to jump right to stage 3.
Stage 2: Solution Agreement
The exit criteria is your champion needs to agree that you're the best to solve it. This means that independent of price, your champion believes you're best equipped to solve their problem:
- Bad Solution Agreement: "They were asking tons of questions in the demo and asked to see a proposal."
- Good Solution Agreement: "They looked at competition and said that they wish they bought Pave last quarter. Plus, their CHRO really cares about stock option planning and no one else has that, so I think we'll win them over too."
- Who's Involved: Champion + 1 (at the line or on their team)
- Ways to Get It: Demos, pilots / POCs, Case Studies
In addition to the big team demo, you might use a POCs or case study to validate that you're the right solution of choice. You might realize they don't feel the solution is "real" enough for them yet, so you've gotta get them in the car.
Or you might realize they're already sold and pull power into the demo to get power agreement too. Combine stages for speed, or slow it down with calls, case studies, and anything else needed to close the comfort gap.
Stage 3: Power Agreement
The exit criteria is that power needs to agree to both the problem and the solution. The most common mistake here? Power always has a lot of problems. But is your problem a business priority for them? (and are you really best to support it?)
- Bad Solution Agreement: "The CHRO agreed it'd be nice to free up some time for her compensation team."
- Good Solution Agreement: "The CHRO explicitly said this was a problem they have to solve for their next compensation cycle and that while we're expensive, we're certainly the best solution to support them."
- Who's Involved: Champion + Power
- Ways to Get It: The big team demo, business case, reference call, exec-to-exec call, roadmap call
This is where you can get really creative on what you do to get power agreement. Some leaders wanna get in the weeds, so you bring them through the demo. But others just want to see the quantifiable results in a business case.
Other executives won't believe a word you'll say and they need to hear it from another customer or one of your executives that they know they can heckle if things go wrong.
You can accelerate commercial agreement here if your champion tells you power is already onboard. If I knew the presentation was just a formality and the champion had the internal clout to pre-sell it, I might tuck in the proposal slides at the end of the business case presentation so that we can get power onboard, then cover price while it's hot.
Stage 4: Commercial Agreement
The exit criteria is that power needs to agree that it's worth the price. By now, you should be vendor of choice independent of price, and leaving this stage means that you've clearly agreed upon all major commercial terms and secured budget:
- Bad Solution Agreement: "The CHRO said we're in the right range and said they were going to go to finance."
- Good Solution Agreement: "The CHRO agreed that $75k on a two-year deal would get it done. They went back to their finance team and got approval to kick off legal and security review now that budget is fully secured."
- Who's Involved: Champion + Power + Finance
- Ways to Get It: Proposal meeting, negotiation meetings, procurement meetings
Again, this might take 1 call or 7, but there are three mini-stages in a negotiation. You generally need to present the number and get all of the negotiation items on the table (term, rate locks, products, etc.), then they need to come back with what really gets it done, then you present options of what your team can approve.
The biggest hack here is to try to kick off vendor review in parallel before you get commercial agreement. A savvy buyer won't do it because kicking off legal before price is agreed upon gives away their negotiation leverage. But if they do do it, then you know you've got the deal sealed and don't have to give away as much.
(Huge callout: Even if you shared price in the discovery call, that doesn't mean you're in commercial agreement stage. This is when you're truly in the negotiation after they've agreed that you're the vendor of choice.)
Stage 5: Vendor Approval
The exit criteria is a fully completed IT and Legal Review with a signed contract. This one's pretty straightforward:
- Bad Solution Agreement: "Uhm they didn't sign yet but can I CW it early?"
- Good Solution Agreement: "HIT THE GONG!!!!"
- Who's Involved: Champion + Power + Finance + Legal + IT/Security
- Ways to Get It: Legal-to-legal calls, security reviews, weekly vendor review calls
Velocity Tip #1 is to run all vendor review workstreams in parallel. Give your champion everything they need to kick off vendor review and then ask them to create separate threads for IT, Legal, and Procurement if applicable. Do not run legal for 6 weeks, then start IT review and run that for 6 weeks.
Velocity Tip #2 is to set micro deadlines for every vendor review workstream. My favorite way to do this is with redline deadlines where you set a deadline for first cuts back on the contract, second cuts, and pre-set a legal-to-legal call so that there's a backstop in place and the lawyers don't sit on your contract for 4 weeks.
***
Aaaand that's a wrap folks! If you liked this, Nick and I broke this down on a podcast last week where we went into more detail on how to run the calls in each stage.
I really recommend you build this for yourself as well and think about what you need to get in your sales cycle (and what you can do to get it).
So I've put all of these stages in table form so that you can make it your own:
