Hi everyone, last quarter I closed my second 6-figure deal.
It was an inbound lead, and our solution was a perfect fit for the company’s pain.
One challenge from the beginning was that the company is a bit too small for our ICP. In other words, our pricing could have been too high.
To set the right expectations, I therefore gave a price range as part of the qualification process (after understanding the pain!).
As the price is an essential investment for the company, there were initially concerns on the customer side. My offer was that we would calculate the estimated business impact together. For this step, it is important to have quantitative KPIs that can be clearly measured.
Together with the colleague from my initial contact (both director level), we challenged each other and, after signing an NDA, calculated a range in several iterations that corresponds to the expected economic impact they could achieve with our solution. We used three scenarios for this: Worst Case, Base Case and Best Case. Regarding the calculation, we used average values that roughly match the company’s peer group.
We were conservative in our calculations and still ended up with a strong value calculation that justifies an investment. In other words, a true win-win solution.
Once the value proposition was clear, the next steps were easy. The CFO was convinced by the calculation that this was not a “nice to have” solution, but one that really impacted the core business, and after two directors and the CFO supported the solution, the other CxOs were convinced as well.
In parallel with these discussions, we also organized a reference call with one of our peer group customers, which provided additional reassurance.
I believe that such value calculations are becoming increasingly important in tough markets, especially in Enterprise Sales, and that these calculations in combination with QBRs help to achieve a higher LTV per customer in the long term.