Close-Winning

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

​important​While hearing the prospect say yes is definitely super exciting, that doesn’t mean your work here is done. Don’t stop to do a happy dance and risk your deal. You have to run all the way until the money’s in the bank, and then run to make sure that the new customer is up and running and getting value out of your solution. We glorify the closing bit of selling, but it’s just another step to nail, of many before and more after.

Order Forms and Contracts

Once you’ve agreed to a price, you need to act as quickly as possible to execute the contract. You don’t want to leave any room for second thoughts to creep in—get the contract signed and the client on their way to your customer success team for implementation and training.

An important part of your toolkit will be your order form, associated contract, and e-signature software. Different from your proposal, which is more a piece of marketing collateral than anything else, your order form is simply there to memorialize the key terms that were already agreed verbally and allow for signature by the purchaser. The goal is easy, friction-free execution. We used this TalentBin order form all the way through acquisition. At the very beginning, I would manually enter the relevant terms and then upload the document to e-signing software—initially I used HelloSign, but then moved to Adobe eSign because of its integration with Salesforce—to send to the prospect. Later we used Adobe eSign’s integration with Salesforce to automate the population of terms. But the key was that we kept it simple.

This isn’t to say that you won’t have a contract with the associated legalese. However, that doesn’t need to be on your order form, and by presenting it to the prospect, you’d just be reminding him that there’s a bunch of legal arcana to consider. This is why I’m not a fan of Y Combinator’s Sales Agreement Template in its current form, namely because it includes many pages of legalese appended to what could be a simple order form. That legalese is fantastic to protect you—or help you with things like publicity rights, and so on—but not attached to the order form, where it will just raise questions and slow down your deal process. Have it hosted somewhere else, and link to it from the order form. While there will be situations where you have a sophisticated buyer whose procurement or legal department will want to review this, most of the time the purchaser just wants to see that the basic terms are right and then sign something memorializing that. Don’t add complexity and sandbag yourself.

That said, you’ll want to have an actual master service agreement (MSA), and using a standard one from either your corporate counsel (they likely have a template) or that Y Combinator template is a good bet. Just link to it from the order form, and in the event the prospect or his procurement or legal department wants to see it, provide it in the form of a Word document or PDF. There may be situations where you encounter redlining—the purchaser’s legal organization may want to change certain terms in your contract to ones they are comfortable with. This is always a two-edged sword. On the one hand, you don’t want to delay the signature of the contract, but on the other, you don’t want to agree to something that will be problematic for you down the road.

One way to handle this is to indicate that your contract is the one that is going to be used, and that otherwise, it’s a no-go. If you feel that you have the power to make that claim, try it out. If there’s pushback, you can always cave. Otherwise, you can get help from your corporate counsel to review the redlines. This can be tricky, because if you have corporate counsel that costs ~$300 an hour, pretty soon a big chunk of that contract’s value can be consumed in legal fees. So be mindful if you encounter this. It’s another reason why selling to “deer”—mid-market companies without legal departments and procurement departments looking for something to do—can be nice. They don’t have the resources to redline your contract. They just want to get things done, like you!

​important​Always, always, always use an e-signing solution—it will reduce the friction associated with, “Hey, can you print this out, sign it, scan it, and send it back?” Instead, with the right templating, you can fire an order form over to the prospect while she’s on the phone, or even while you’re sitting together in a conference room, and have her e-sign it. There’s less risk of dropped balls or stalls. Further, it’ll make it easy for you to store those contracts; save them in your CRM, tied to the opportunity for the prospect in question.

Getting Paid

Once you have an executed contract, that’s not the end of things. You’d be amazed how many times I’ve seen startups with outstanding contracts for many tens of thousands of dollars, simply because no one was collecting on them. First, make it easy for the prospect to pay you. At the earliest stages, using something like FreshBooks, with an e-payment option like PayPal turned on, can be very helpful. While paying a 3% fee on a ~$10K contract can feel aggressive, if you consider the cost of an employee to manage collecting a dozen of those contracts a month, the distraction of having to do it yourself, or the risk of not collecting that money (remember, when you’re early-stage, cash is king!), credit card collection suddenly becomes pretty appealing. On the other hand, especially given that you should target being paid up front for annual contracts, recurring solutions like Recurly, Stripe, or even something more advanced like Zuora are less interesting. Maybe later, but for now, you want to get paid ASAP and avoid accounts-receivable headaches.

Customer Success Prep

We’ll cover implementation and customer success basics in more depth in the next chapter, but as you are tying up loose ends before moving on to that part of the customer life cycle, there’s a set of things to pay attention to.

First, you actually have to consider customer success as a seamless transition from closing to succeeding. That means that you should be facilitating a kickoff call or training or whatever the first step of your customer success process is. Whether that’s calendaring a new meeting for you to train the user(s) in question, or introducing them via email to the person who is responsible for that, make sure it is executed. Relatedly, there is information that’s easily captured at closing that will make your customer success process much easier. This may change from company to company, but a good example might be the name, title, and contact information of the decision-maker, executive sponsors, and users of your product—especially if they are different people. Eventually in your customer success process you’ll be reporting on success to executive or decision-maker stakeholders; make sure you have their information captured now.