SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to consistently win 7-figure software sales deals
24 Apr 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Chapter 2: What are the mistakes to avoid in software sales?
Hi, everyone. I'm Adam. So in the next 20 minutes, I'm going to just talk to you about three things. One is some mistakes to avoid that I've seen consistently that kill sales deals, and AEs make them all the time, even the best AEs make them. The other is to nail your ICP and how important really understanding who your ideal customer is.
If you don't understand that, you're not going to scale sales. And then finally, some kind of tactics and processes that I've implemented to win complex deals. So a bit about me. I'm a three-time software founder. I've generated 20 million of ARR across my three companies. I'm currently building DealPad, which helps sales teams generate revenue.
And I've also been a sales leader at Salesforce, Intuit, and three kind of 60, 70 million ARR SaaS companies. And across that period of time, about 20 years, I'm actually quite old, you wouldn't really know it, but I've built a process to help my sales teams win more of the deals they're working on. And as product differentiation gets increasingly blurred,
And competitive pricing kind of almost rules you out of the market. The one reason that you'll win more deals is your sales process. And so that's what we focus on at DealPad. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today in terms of what you can do to implement some ideas in your sales process that will help you win more deals.
So I like this, I'm a founder, I'm an entrepreneur, so this is a great graph of founders, but it's also really true for salespeople. One minute we're brilliant, we've got all the confidence in the world, we think we can go out and close that one million plus kind of ACV, and the next minute we're really shit and we can't do anything.
And so the line is there, just keep working because you're going to get there. And so I don't know how many founders are in the room, but this is great for founders and it's definitely great for salespeople. So the five mistakes that I've seen across my time in selling software over the last 20 years, except in the first pane that you see.
This is super important, and AEs, really good AEs don't do this, but the average AEs do. And what I mean by this is you're gonna talk to a buyer, probably not your champion, and you're gonna find a pane, and that pane probably sits locally inside the organization. It's probably not a global pane. It doesn't sit across the company.
And what you really need to understand here is that if you accept that pain, you're losing revenue massively. You're leaving it on the table. And so drill in. And I keep telling my AEs to drill into the pain because the first, second, third pain you see is not the real pain. You need to make sure that you've got access to the executive team. Is this problem business critical?
Does it sit across the organization? And that's where you're going to start to build out really high value deals. And AEs miss that because what they do is get excited when they hear that first pain and they dive in for that. It's not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with this. But it does mean that you're now going to be in an organized... I had an AE that sold into Oracle.
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Chapter 3: How can understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP) enhance sales?
Really important, you can waste hours of time in deals that don't close because you don't have access to the people that actually are going to sign this off. The third one is demoing too early. If you demo early before you've gone through really deep discovery, you're forcing yourself to get embroiled in feature selling because you're just showing people features. That's what a demo is.
The demo should come at the end. Don't show your product until you've actually gone through a discovery, you've identified the pain, you've agreed with your buyers, that we are a solution that can solve that pain. Now great, what does this look like? Who's gonna use this? Let's get them on a call and let's show them the product.
But you don't need to see the product until we actually agree that we can solve a problem for you and we know that we can solve it as well. And that takes time. If you're demoing on that first call, you're embroiling yourself in feature selling. and not value selling. And so again, your ACV is going to get low. You might close the deal.
You might not walk away from that deal and think, oh God, that was awful, because you've got a new customer, but you're leaving revenue on the table. allowing the buying team to dictate the process. This is a hard one, particularly as you get into more complex kind of higher enterprise type deals. Most buyers are fairly sophisticated these days and they have their own process.
One of the things that we've really focused on at DealPad is how to align with the buyer through the process so you're partnering with them. And so it's not me selling to them and it's not them running their process. We do this together. And it's a game changer. But make sure that
your team aren't just telling you what's going on in this process and you have no control over it because that's the worst place you could be as a salesperson. And then finally is not quitting fast enough. Staying in these deals that you don't think you're going to close. Really, really important.
One of my teams, I think I've got a slide in it, but one of my teams wasted two and a half thousand hours one year selling into deals that we didn't close across that team. If we redeployed that time into deals we thought we could win or had a better chance of winning, I think we delivered about 75% of our annual quota that year.
We could have smashed through it if we'd actually redeployed the time we wasted in deals that we didn't close. So close fast. And the benefits from doing the right thing are very small in sales. The benefits from pulling out really quickly are massive. It's discipline. Trying to coach a sales team to leave a deal and walk away from an opportunity is hard.
But in the long run, it's the best thing to do. So how do we find our ICP? Well, the first thing you need to understand is why are customers buying from you? A typical, if I asked nine out of 10 AEs, a typical answer would be, well, we've got an ERP system that helps automate accounting. Well, that's not why customers are buying from you.
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Chapter 4: What tactics can help win complex software deals?
Why is it inefficient? Why is their life not where they need it to be today? We really try to understand the pain we're solving from our ideal customer. And then we look at the customer themselves. Who are our buyers? You know, what do they care about? We actually go personal on this and we go deep and we really want to know who they are. This is probably not even work related.
We just want to understand who our ideal buyer is and what they look like. And it makes a big difference. So let's go into how we won ultra complex deals. So there's a few things here. 47% of enterprise sales deals don't close because you don't have access to the buying committee. 18% of competitors had stronger relationships. So these two are people related.
So we're looking here at almost 70% of deals that don't close are people related. And it just goes to show how important it is when you're sitting out talking about a sales opportunity, you have the right people at the table and you are able to access them. If you don't, it doesn't matter how good your solution is, how good your story is, it won't close. 17% no decisions.
How can you affect no decisions? It's the biggest killer of most mid-market deals is no decision. We're not going to do anything. And it's a challenge. And there's no real answer to no decision. It's more about how you partner with that buyer.
Because if you can partner with them, you can take them through the process together, you're more likely to force a no decision into a decision, which will mean they'll buy from you. And this was the 2,000 and a half hours lost. What's the opportunity cost of your sales team setting deals that aren't gonna close? And then champion everybody gets a champion. Everybody has believers.
The one thing that I see a lot of AEs miss is the coach. The coach for me is the most important person in your sales process. Your champion is probably gonna be the influencer. They're gonna be the ones that are gonna get the exec team to the table.
your believers are the people that really want this because they see the pain, they feel it every day, they live the pain, you're going to solve for them. But your coach, that's the person that's going to take you through that process. That's the person that's going to tell you, you know what, we've had this competitor come in and, you know, they've got a really great relationship with the CEO.
Or I was sat in a meeting last week and, you know, great sentiment about your product, but X, Y, and Zed, is a little bit, you know, you're a little bit skeptical. You need a coach inside that business. You need to understand how they're thinking. Finding the coach is difficult, but it's the most important role you can have, I believe, in any mid-market enterprise sales motion.
And then you've got mutual action plans. And this is kind of a bit of a demo for DealPad. So mutual action plans, if you don't use them, are a really great way of aligning through the process with your buyer on everything that needs to happen. With DealPad, you can lock in everything that needs to happen here. You can bring all the people in place. Your buyers bring each other in.
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