Because of a change, I am in a situation where I have a lot more transactional deals.
It is completely different than enterprise sales. Sometimes the deal cycle is only a few weeks. Sometimes an email exchange is enough for an upsell.
These are also my learnings:
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To be successful in transactional business, everything has to run like a machine: many meetings, many opportunities, many deals - there are a lot of parallels with the BDR job.
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There is often no re-negotiation: sometimes there is only one chance - if the price is too high, the deal is dead.
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Price is a significant driver of the deal, sometimes the most significant.
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Value Selling is of little interest for small transactions, often the decision is made on the basis of soft factors; nevertheless, I am convinced that Value Selling can be a game-changer when applied correctly.
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It is damn hard to outperform: many small deals make it very difficult to break the quota: there are few chances to catch a “whale” that makes the quota explode.
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Transactional SaaS customers are often not sticky, the retention rate for small customers is often low.
What are your thoughts/experiences on this?