Here’s a story about my largest deal.

By Troy Munson

I’ve closed my fair share of deals. I’ve also lost more. But the largest deal I’ve closed was $70K short of 7 figures. How annoying, eh? Guess I can kiss that dream goodbye. But let’s get to why you’re here: to learn more about the $930K deal.

^{Here’s what you’re in for:}

• How I found the deal.

• Managing the sales cycle with a digital sales room (i love these ones).

• A technique I used to close the deal.

I remember it like it was yesterday…

I was in the Dominican Republic for a wedding. It was the last week of our fiscal year - I can’t believe my boss approved the PTO. Pina colada in one hand, phone in the other. I needed to get this deal in to hit over 200% of my quota. The last step of the process was getting through legal & procurement, both in which I was on a text-level relationship with. So let’s dive into the story, shall we?

How I Booked The Meeting

I wish I could tell you a fun, creative story here. But I can’t.

This meeting was booked through a cold email. Not the first one, but the follow up. I knew this company had my competitor in place, but also knew that my competitor was the cheap alternative.

My first cold email read: “Hey Name - there’s a lot of crazy email threats going on right now. Is email security top of mind right now?”
My follow up said: “Guessing it’s not an issue? No hard feelings if so.”

Yup. That’s it.

Sometimes, you don’t need to get fancy. But you will get more replies if you do.

One thing I did do was use Lavender to help make my email sound less complex. Highly recommend for the sellers always trying to sound smart.

How I Managed The Sales Cycle

Let it be known that this deal took 10 months to close. So managing the sales cycle played a big role in this deal. Two things really helped me here:

1. Building a strong relationship with my champion (personal and business)

2. Using a Digital Sales Room

This was the first time I used a Digital Sales Room. Now, I will use one for every deal that can become complex. A digital sales room allows you and your buyer to work together to get a deal done.

Here’s how I used it:

• Created a custom page with their company logo on it

• Had a running doc of notes from all of our conversations

• Added assets about us vs. the competitors they were evaluating

• Added a link to our information security documents for them to look at early

• Added use cases of similar companies & challenges that we’ve helped with

• Tagged the correct people when I added a relevant doc (for example, tagged the head of security architecture when I added the architecture diagram)

Then I tracked it. I tracked every single click, motion, and share so I knew what they cared about when I wasn’t in the room.

To this day, I think the Digital Sales Room is the reason I closed the deal.

How I Closed The Deal

This part could be several newsletters long, so I only want to talk about one method that I used that let me know they were serious about moving forward with us.

This is called The Stripline Method.

Here’s how it works:
The idea is simple - slow down the sales cycle in a scenario where they want to finish the sales cycle. Example from this deal:

They brought up our much cheaper competitor during negotiation..and I mean MUCH cheaper. They were being quoted $560k. Our price was over $980k before final discounts.

They said “but (COMPETITOR) is quoting us this price”.

(This is where the Stripline method comes into play)

I responded: “If (COMPETITOR) is still in the picture, that tells me we don’t have a technical win or you’re not confident our solution is best for you. Let’s take a step back and make sure we’re the best fit for your organization”

If this is a real problem they need to solve, they won’t want to slow down the process.

They responded: “No need to do that, let’s just see if we can get closer to their price.”

From here, we had to explain why there’s such a dramatic price difference and next thing you know, the DocuSign was completed & I celebrated by getting another pina colada.

ps - there are a handful of sales enablement tools that teach you tactics like this.

Next time we’ll be talking about..

• How to use video in the sales cycle..

Thanks for spending part of your day with Dimmo! See you next time — Troy

P.S. I’m ‘training’ for a half marathon next weekend. My ankle keeps hurting. WHAT DO I DO?!