Presentation, Demo, and Asking for the Sale

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.

Once you’ve completed discovery, you’ll move from the part of the conversation where you are primarily consuming information to one where you are both consuming information and communicating it. Note that I didn’t say that you’ll be moving from listening to talking. If you are doing it right, you will still be consuming lots of information, asking lots of questions, and eliciting lots of feedback. However, you will be doing this while communicating your sales narrative, as documented in your slides, presentation, and demo scripting.

Before we talk about specific parts of your presentation and demo, here are some overarching guidelines on things that will make you successful in your approach (and which may be different than prior presentations you’ve likely done).

Repetition

For many people, it’s a big change to adjust to the amount of repetition that goes on in sales presentations. As writers and communicators, we typically worry about saying the same thing more than once, for fear of being boring or insulting the intelligence of the audience. In a sales presentation, repetition is your friend. You need to appreciate how new the topic you’re covering is for your audience. You deal with the topic all the time, but they don’t. It’s critical to keep coming back to the key points that you want to get across, which typically correlate to the big messaging buckets in your sales narrative.

You can see what I mean in the TalentBin demo script we’ve already looked at. In brief, the key is that repeating the major points you want your prospects to take away—and constantly connecting various parts of your pitch, including pain point slides, solution slides, proof-of-value slides, and demonstrated features, back to those key points—will ensure that they stick.

Validation of Attention and Understanding

​important​If the goal of the presentation is the communication of information that drives a prospect toward a commercial transaction, it’s probably pretty important to know that the information is being consumed! How do you do this? Validate that your prospects are paying attention, and validate that they’re understanding.

How do you validate attention? If you’re face-to-face, look! Is your prospect looking at you or what you’re projecting? Or is she on her phone or her laptop? If the latter, you have to get her attention before you proceed, because otherwise you’ll just be talking past her. On the phone this can be more of a challenge, in that you can’t see what the prospect is doing. Tools like ClearSlide can tell you if the browser tab showing your presentation on prospects’ computers is front-most, but even that’s kind of weak. Instead, you have to ask things like, “Can you see this right here on this slide?” to validate that they’re following along.

Across the board, the best way to confirm that someone is paying attention, to regain attention if you’ve lost it, and to validate understanding is to ask questions. So after you make a point, ask something to make sure that the prospect has comprehended it—that will confirm whether she was paying attention and whether she actually got it. The most basic question is, “Does that make sense?” But the problem there is that prospects don’t want to look dumb, so this often invites a standard “uh-huh” response, regardless of whether they are following along.

This is a bad outcome. You desperately want prospects to tell you if they’re not following along so you can fix it quickly! One approach I use is proactively giving permission to say, “I’m not understanding.”

Another approach is to ask a specific question that requires a specific answer, ideally correlated to the pain point, solution, proof point, or feature being discussed.

Lastly, you can do open-ended questions as well, like, “Do you have any questions for me so far?” allowing the prospect to bring up anything that has been bothering her. By giving permission to do so, without judgment, you allow her to surface potential objections or concerns. Sometimes it takes real work to validate understanding, especially if you’re selling over the phone and not face-to-face. But you absolutely must do it. Otherwise you might as well be talking into an empty room.

Rolling Discovery

One thing you may have noticed in the preceding section is that the questions used to validate attention and comprehension often sound a bit like discovery questions—or at least shortened versions of them. This is not a coincidence. In fact, as you proceed along your presentation, you can implement a form of rolling discovery, where you learn more and more about the prospect’s pain points, existing solutions, and so on, right at the moment that you’re talking about a particular topic. If you’re presenting pain point slides, you might ask if the prospect encounters those challenges.

This sort of rolling discovery lets you get into discovery questions that are correlated to the specific pain point, solution statement, or feature that you’re covering right there, which helps with comprehension. It also helps you out if you forgot a question in your discovery section. And if you have a lot of discovery questions you’d like to ask, this lets you distribute them, rather than stacking up a ten-minute interrogation at the beginning of the call!

Relatedly, you want to make sure that you’re making use of the information that you surfaced through your discovery questions. This will allow you to make your pitch more impactful by correlating the things you are talking about to business realities at the prospect’s organization.

Building Agreement

Extending from repetition and comprehension is the notion of building agreement. At every opportunity, you want to elicit agreement from your prospect that his worldview is aligning with the one that you’re espousing. If you do this well all along, at the conclusion of your pitch the sale should be a no-brainer! At that point, the prospect has agreed with you the whole time about the pains he feels, the fact that existing solutions are not getting the job done, that it’s important to solve this problem now, and that the solution you’re proposing definitely does so. Now let’s just sign a contract!

How do you achieve this consensus? As with validating comprehension, the best strategy is to ask for agreement at every point where it makes sense—to score points. You can do this with leading questions that get the prospect to surface his agreement, or, just as important, his disagreement. Every time you can get the prospect to say that yes, he shares that pain point; that yes, it is substantial across his organization; that yes, he’s tried that other approach to fix it; and that yes, this specific feature looks like it fits that specific pain point well, you’re building agreement. You’re building a groundswell of alignment that leads inexorably to the prospect purchasing your solution.

Pacing and Pausing

By the time you’ve done a dozen or so of these pitches, you’re going to have it pretty nailed. And when you know something well, you have a tendency to speed up your delivery. Even before that point, nervousness also tends to compel faster delivery.

​important​Resist this. In pursuit of comprehension and agreement, you need to make sure that your delivery is methodical. Deliberate pacing will ensure that words aren’t missed and that your prospect has the best chance to comprehend what you’re saying and how it relates to what’s on the screen or projector. Further, pausing here and there to allow for questions, and to proactively test for comprehension, ensures that there are opportunities for the prospect to catch her breath and clarify, if needed.

This becomes all the more important if you are delivering the pitch via phone. Because the prospect doesn’t have the benefit of facial and gesture-based information, enunciation and conservative pacing will be all the more important. But even face-to-face, you want to make sure your presentation pacing is deliberate and includes frequent breaks.

Customization and Curation

We’ve discussed personalization of your pitch at length in Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics, and in Pre-Call Planning, but now is when you put it to use. Because of your diligent prospecting, planning, and discovery, you are at peak understanding of the account’s business context. So use it! The worst thing possible would be running through a canned presentation despite all that additional information—instead, put it to work for you.

You can feel empowered to completely drop whole slides out of your presentation or to skip over features in your demo that you don’t think will appeal to the audience. You only have a certain amount of time in which to make your case—you want to be spending those minutes on the topics that have the highest chance to resonate. This also means doubling down on pain points, value propositions, and features that will be particularly meaningful to the prospect.

Micro-Contract Creation and Execution

​important​It’s crucial during the pitching and down-funnel process that you have a good handle on where things stand. Is this deal still heading toward success? Has a potential block arisen that needs to be handled? Or has the prospect decided that there’s no way he’s moving forward? The reason knowing where you stand is so important is so you don’t spend time on opportunities that are dead in the water. As we’ve previously discussed, your most important resource in sales is your time. There are likely thousands and thousands of potential prospects for your solution, but you only have 40 (or 60!) hours in your week.

A great way to facilitate being on the same page is what are known as micro-contracts between you and the prospect. Before you do something with the prospect (for example, ask discovery questions, present slides, demo), you articulate what you want to do and why and ask if she is in agreement that it is the correct next step. This is a tool espoused in the Sandler Sales Methodology, called upfront contracts. You likely used it when setting the appointment, when you characterized the agenda and gained the prospect’s agreement to attend, but it extends to the pitch, and even beyond. As you progress through your pitch and your demo, and through incremental demos, negotiations, and implementation, setting clear expectations with the prospect will help keep things moving and prevent getting stuck.

If the prospect was genuinely interested in proceeding, then great—you get that meeting on the calendar right then and there. If for whatever reason the prospect was fudging a little bit, and there is another wrinkle (as in, they have no budget), it will surface. And that will be a huge benefit to you. The contract that the prospect wouldn’t make keeps you from wasting your time chasing Jeff around. It gives you clarity.

If you do make the contract, restate it at the start of that next meeting to establish continuity of the deal in flight:

At any point in the sales process, if you uphold your side of one of these micro-contracts, but the prospect diverges from his commitment, it is an early warning system. And you’ll be justified in stating your concern:

Through continual creation and execution of micro-contracts, you can make sure that you’re effective with your time and always on the same page with the prospect.

Presentation

Now that we’ve covered some overarching principles for your pitch, let’s talk about its chronology. Some people think that a pitch should only be done in-product and jump straight to that. I feel it’s important to set the correct mental model, so that prospects are well primed to get the most out of the conversation. I like to start by getting them into the mindset of the problem that we solve, and how our solution is poised to help, and only then move into showing how the product actually works.

​caution​What we are not doing is running through a slew of features and screenshots, where the prospect sits back and just listens. A show and tell presentation (or sometimes, “show up and throw up”), and later demo, is a recipe for an unengaged prospect who is not actively considering your commercial argument nor seriously thinking about business pain and how your solution solves it. Instead of reeling off feature after feature in a one-way information deluge, you want to use the tone you set in your discovery conversation and cultivate rich back-and-forth with the prospect.

The best way to make sure that this happens, again, is to be explicit about it.

Disqualification

Of course, this is also the point in time where you can offramp a prospect that isn’t qualified. If the organization doesn’t have the pain points that you seek to solve, or it is clear that it has no ability to pay for solutions to solve the problem, then you should seek to conclude the conversation on great terms. (Remember, though, that if it’s simply your contact who doesn’t have authority to expend budget, but the organization does have the pain points you solve, you can partner with him to get to the right decision-maker.)

The best way to close out the conversation is to frame it in terms of respect for the prospect’s time.

You win credibility with prospects this way, and you make it clear who you’re relevant to (so they can refer their friends who do have the pain point in question). Ideally this doesn’t happen too much, especially if you’ve done a good job of using externally available information to prequalify prospects, and if your appointment-setting process is honed to put only valid opportunities on the calendar. But in the rare case it happens, close it out.

Introducing Your Narrative

If the account is qualified, there is a set of goals that you want to achieve during the presentation before you get into the actual product demonstration. First and foremost, you need to convey the parts of your sales narrative that are better communicated with slides than with a demo—things like pain points, the failures of current solutions, how your solution works (the conceptual framing), and qualitative and quantitative proof of why it is a better way to solve the business issue. As discussed in Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics, the visual nature of slides allows for much richer communication of these parts of your narrative than simply speaking to them in the abstract. Communicating your product’s features and how they work is typically better done in a demonstration, but for the other parts of your sales narrative, this is the exact reason you invested in building a sales deck.

While product features and their value proofs may be documented in your presentation, you generally should avoid getting into them ahead of your demo. Those slides are typically better used as offline reminders of the features you’ve demonstrated live. Think of them as something for your prospect and her colleagues to refer to after you’ve blown their socks off. The exception here is cases where, for whatever reason, a live demonstration of your software is not possible. Nowadays this scenario is pretty rare, and I would recommend figuring out a way to avoid it—even if you need to do a demo loaded with dummy data.

For your presentation, you’ll want to have your master deck, or the personalized variant of it, ready and loaded into Showpad or DocSend, or ready to project on your machine. As you progress in your presentation, especially if you’re doing a good job of facilitating a rich back-and-forth, invariably topics or questions will pop up that may make you hop out of order. That’s perfectly okay, and should be welcomed. You want to use all the materials you have at your disposal to achieve the goal set out above, and if that means backtracking to an earlier part of the presentation because one of your comprehension checks fails, or skipping to an appendix slide based on a question that surfaces, then do so. Don’t think you have to slavishly progress slide by slide, on a death march through your presentation, as that will trip you up in your pursuit of a rich consultative conversation. Moreover, if it becomes abundantly clear that the goal of your presentation (comprehension of the parts of your sales narrative not covered by your demo) has already been achieved, and the prospect is ready and eager to progress to the demo, by all means, skip ahead!

You can come back to slides after the demo too. In fact, this is a fairly typical pattern. Jumping from the live demo back to a slide that talks about the benefits and ROI of the feature you just highlighted is a great way to connect the live product to the value the prospect will get out of it.

Demo

We talked about your demo script earlier, so you should be familiar with what you want to talk through in your demo. However, to reiterate, the difference between your sales presentation and your demo is that your presentation is about setting the correct mental model, and the demo is about demonstrating how the actual product delivers on the promises you’ve made. It’s also an opportunity to do so in a way that makes maximum use of the fact that you and the prospect are synchronously looking at the same thing and can have a rich discussion (whereas slides can be consumed asynchronously at a later date).

Customization

One of the biggest differences between the sales presentation and the demo is that while the sales presentation slides will frequently be the same from prospect to prospect (with perhaps some light customization as discussed in Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics, the demo is far more likely to be heavily tailored to the prospect’s needs.

The best option is using actual data or materials from the prospect in your demo.

It’s a bit flippant, but it really gets the point across. The demo had proven that the solution did what was promised in the sales presentation, and did so with the prospect’s actual work environment.

If your product has a partial freemium component, and some employees of the target organization are already using it in some regard, a good approach may be to use that particular instance, perhaps alongside one set up for a demo.

Not every product is going to be easy to use with real customer data in a demo. But as you’re thinking about your product and its features, you’ll be well served to consider how they can best be demonstrated, not just how they work in the abstract. Remember, too, that you’re customizing your demo not just for the account in question but for the type of stakeholder you’re talking to.

Demo-Ready Data

If you can’t use your prospect’s real data, you can use the next best thing: data that supports all the use cases and proofs you want to demonstrate.

You’d be amazed how many demos I’ve watched where the data being used made it nigh impossible to get the point across. That’s not just a huge lost opportunity, it’s also an ugly turnoff. You have total control of the demo instance, so definitely be sure to get it into a state that easily demonstrates the value of your solution. Don’t take shortcuts. They will not instill a lot of confidence. Any time you find yourself saying things like, “Well, ignore that” or, “Imagine if XYZ,” you probably have a data problem.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need product investment or engineering assistance to fix the problem, but you do have to do the work to get yourself properly set up—which likely isn’t all that challenging. But if, for whatever reason, you can’t manually get the data in your product into a state that lets you demonstrate effectively, well, then you might need to have a conversation with engineering and product. You’re going to be doing a lot of these demos, and later, if you’re successful, there will be many sales reps joining you. (Not to mention that having example data in your product for new customers is often helpful and makes for more compelling first-user experiences.)

​important​Think about this every time a feature ships. You likely add a slide to your sales deck breaking down a new feature, so what do you have to do to your demo to make sure that you can showcase this new feature and its implications in a high-impact fashion? If you’re spending those expensive engineering resources on building something, you certainly want to make sure it’s nice and sales-ready, with all the associated sales materials.

Focusing on Features That Matter

As with your sales presentation, you should think about which specific features you want to focus on to make your demo most effective. You probably only have 15–30 minutes of time to do actual product demonstration, so make sure to prioritize the features that will be most compelling to your prospect. Now’s the time to put to use all that excellent prospecting, planning, and discovery you did, and to remember to speak the language”of your prospect.

Obviously there are going to be parts of your demo that you’re very excited to share across prospects and core use cases you’ll include to make sure your point comes across. (We discussed this earlier in Demo Scripts.) But make sure you know what parts are optional and can be cut out so that you can spend more time on high-priority features.

Proof Demonstration

The demo isn’t the conclusion of the sales call; it actually sits in the middle. Once you’ve completed discovery to arm yourself for the call, the slide presentation to set the right mental model, and the demo to show off the actual goods, it’s time for the next step: “Why we know this works and why this is a great investment.”

This is where I like to switch back to slides, where all of these proof points are laid out. As with the pre-demo sales presentation, the visual nature of slides makes for better communication of quantitative and qualitative material. If you talk about ROI and other proof points while the prospect is looking at features, he’s not going to retain anything. Use visual exhibits.

You can refer to the previous section on proof points slides for your sales deck to refresh yourself, but the point here is that you’re now talking about why everything you’ve presented so far is a great investment. And you’re backing it up with proof. Whether that means feature-by-feature ROI studies, aggregated customer ROI information, customer-by-customer ROI examples, or qualitative proof—or a combination of all of that—you’re progressing to the “Why this is a no-brainer” part of the presentation. Don’t skip this important step before attempting to close the sale.

Pricing and Asking for the Sale

​caution​This is typically the concluding part of the pitch, although you may not get to it if you haven’t done all the preceding steps correctly. If you have, it is critical to not skip this step. For founders and first-time salespeople, presenting pricing and affirmatively asking for the sale is often where the most mistakes are made—largely because they don’t do it. After going to all this trouble to find the prospect, make an appointment, and then present the value of their solution, they drop the ball short of full execution.

It’s an understandable error. This is where you can feel the most exposed to rejection. It’s akin to another common founder error, selling to people they know versus qualified accounts because acquaintances are less likely to reject them. But we’re going to surmount this! And we’re going to get good at it. Part of the trick here is convincing yourself that your solution is worth it. And if your pitch is well formed, with great proof points and a rational pricing scheme based on market comps or proven ROI, you should have zero fear. Your engineers cost money, and you need to pay them. Your solution will put money in the customer’s pocket—either through reduced costs or increased revenue—so you are completely justified in taking part of that created value for yourself. Let’s ask for it!

First, prospects often ask for pricing on their own. If you’ve followed the flow we just walked through—discovery, presentation, demo, proof—and done so with a prospect who has your pain points, validating along the way that he is qualified, you’ll be amazed how frequently prospects ask for pricing information at this stage. Don’t be surprised! They’ve been in commercial conversations like this before; that’s part of what makes them qualified prospects. Particularly if a prospect is already using inferior existing solutions—paying money to solve the specific problem your solution solves—the revelation of your magical new solution to their now-validated pain points will of course lead to the logical next question: “Wow, this is all really great. What’s pricing?”

If a prospect does indeed ask for pricing, you should be happy. People typically only ask if they’re interested in buying, and you just captured a valuable piece of information: this prospect likely thinks your solution makes sense, provided the price is right. This is when it is helpful to have that pricing slide that you can flip to quickly. Also, this is why, when we covered appointment setting, I encouraged you to forestall discussion of pricing until you could help frame the conversation with the prospect. Telling someone, “Yeah, it’s ten thousand per recruiter per year” in a vacuum could result in a lot of sticker shock. However, once you’ve presented the problem, how you solve it, why this is better, and all the proof points associated with that—well, ~$10K might be a screaming deal.

If a prospect doesn’t ask for pricing unprompted, I like to use this as an opportunity for a trial close, rather than just driving ahead to a pricing slide. I gather more information about his mindset, post-presentation—something along the lines of, “Given all we’ve covered, is this something that you see being useful in solving your challenges?” If the answer is no, that’s potentially very concerning, since they’re articulating lack of interest without even knowing the price. Yikes. It will be all the more important, in that case, to dig into the prospect’s objections, because this may be indicative of an issue with your prospecting, discovery, presentation, and demo process. More on handling these sorts of objections below.

If the answer is yes, the prospect has just given you an interesting piece of information: he’s excited about paying for your product, even though he hasn’t heard pricing yet. This seems like a pretty good sign for you, given that he certainly knows your product will cost something. In fact, in the back of his mind, he likely indexed off of an existing solution that he’s already paying for.

Presenting Pricing

Depending on your model, the pricing you present will often be just a straw man of what you eventually put together in an honest-to-goodness proposal (more on this in a second). If you sell on a per-seat basis, you would likely present the list price for a single seat to gauge reaction. Or if you sell on some other per-each basis, the same would be true. If you sell based on some other constraint, like size of an organization, it’s going to be fairly obvious what pricing will be, so you’ll want to jump to that. When presenting pricing, it’s great to frame it in the context of existing solutions, best alternatives, or opportunity costs that you’ve already touched on in discovery and your presentation.

Eventually you may do this more formally, using text and visuals, in a follow-up proposal, but doing so verbally is the first step.

​important​When you’re verbally presenting pricing, you’ll want to start at the most extreme case, knowing that you’ll probably end up being negotiated down. This is why presenting just a single unit of pricing (for example, one seat, one discrete unit of use) is helpful, because when you then roll that up to the 50 seats that the prospect needs, you’ll have baked in wiggle room for yourself. Don’t back yourself into a corner and start negotiating against yourself at the start, like, “It’s ten thousand dollars per seat, but don’t worry, I can get you a deal.” Just state the pricing and the rationale that backs it, shut the hell up, and see what the reaction is. This is often one of the hardest things to do, sitting in silence waiting for the reaction. But you have to do it.

From there, you can take a variety of paths. If the reaction is positive—along the lines of, “Well, that’s not bad” or, “That makes sense”—you should move on to asking for the sale and closing. We’ll have more on this below. If the reaction is negative—like, “Wow, that’s really expensive” or, “There’s no way we could pay that”—you’ll have to get into handling that objection. And if it’s in the middle—like, “Well, that’s a lot, but I see where you’re coming from”—you’ll progress along the same lines as the positive case and ask for the sale.

Asking for the Sale

When you have leading indicators of interest, it’s time to proactively ask for the sale—no “So, what do you think?” wishy-washy stuff. Forthrightly ask for the business.

As noted before, so much of business-to-business selling is simply understanding where you stand with your prospect and taking the next appropriate action. Nothing quite cuts to the chase like asking the prospect whether she wants to make a deal.

There are a variety of other skillful closing techniques, but all are really just versions of asking for the sale. There’s the waffles or pancakes approach of, “Would you prefer one seat or two?” And the timing-centric, “We have a number of openings with our customer success organization for implementation calls next week. Would you like to schedule one?” and so on. You can Google around to see other approaches. But the point is, directly asking for the sale (compared to beating around the bush, or avoiding it because you’re afraid of rejection) is 90% of the battle.

If the answer is yes, fantastic! You’re closer to the goal. The next step would typically be to put together a proposal with a couple options for them to choose from, assuming there are different options.

If there’s no reason to present a proposal with varied options—it’s clear there is really only one path to a purchase for the prospect—it’s better to just skip to the contract.

Again, you would only do this if the customer is qualified, she has articulated that she wants to execute on this, and you believe she has the authority to do so. Conveniently, all of this was covered back in discovery, setting you up for this very moment. Now you can see why we do this!

If the answer is no, welcome to the most common response. But instead of meaning, “No, never” or, “No, no way,” this is typically, “I’m not sure” masked in a no. Your job is simply to uncover the objections that are blocking you from progressing, handle them, and then loop back to, “Okay, now will you buy?” We’ll explore this further below.

Proposals vs. Contracts

A proposal is a helpful way of framing a couple different options to a customer who has articulated a desire to buy.

That stated interest is crucial—you definitely don’t want to be in the business of sending proposals willy-nilly to prospects who haven’t asked for them. Do that, and you’ll be losing out on a key signpost on the progression from prospect to customer. Proposals should be reserved for prospects that have said they want to buy.

Why a proposal and not just a contract? Well, an order form/contract is probably the most basic proposal that you can produce, and shouldn’t be disparaged at all. It has the added benefit of being executable (assuming you send it via digital signature method, like DocuSign, HelloSign, or Adobe eSign). The downside with sending a contract is that a contract is typically just for a single offering—like one seat of your solution. So if you want to show a couple options, you’re stuck. Moreover, a contract or order form is more about documenting the price that someone is going to pay for a set of services. It’s not a piece of marketing collateral, and to the extent that your deal isn’t closed yet, you would like to use all the tooling available to get that deal slammed shut.

A lightweight proposal can help with these downsides. First, it lets you present a couple of options whereby you can direct the prospect toward an outcome that is more beneficial for you. By presenting options, you’re removing cognitive overhead, so the prospect doesn’t need to compose his own option. At the same time, you’re making it clear that this isn’t about whether he’s going to buy—it’s just a question of which option!

At the earliest stages, bigger purchases are better—within reason—provided they don’t overwhelm your customer success resources. The marginal cost of adding another seat of software to an account is typically pretty near zero; this is the magic of software. Yes, there may be more support costs, but even those are usually added on a per-account basis. Selling three seats to a given account will not cost three times the support as one seat to the same account. So if you can figure out how to get marginal revenue out of a given opportunity, you should try to jump for it.

One strategy for maximizing a sale is to present three options in your proposal, where the middle option is your target (and the highest option is still a realistic reach).

Ideally the various options land at helpful price points, just below potential psychological thresholds (~$10K, ~$19.5K, and ~$24K, as an example). You can take this approach, as well, when you know there’s a certain amount of budget available. You might price your middle option for that known good budget, your bottom option below that (but very costly on a per-each basis), and the highest option as a stretch goal that is a screaming deal on a per-unit basis.

If you know that the maximum budget could potentially be in play, then you certainly want to not only present a proposal for it, but guide the prospect toward that best deal via pricing inducements. Many corporate purchasers are used to taking the gold-plated option, so having something at the top end, while also providing some air cover by making it look like a deal, makes it more likely they can jump on it. Plus, if it’s not there, they can’t even consider it. So include it! Even if they don’t end up going for that high end, by presenting it you make it that much more likely the prospect goes with an option above the very bottom one. Going back to our TalentBin example above, if you only presented pricing for three and five seats, the five-seat option would be the “expensive” one, potentially impacting the prospect’s perception of its viability.

There’s definitely an art to these sorts of things, requiring an understanding of how much potential demand there is in the prospect organization, how much budget is available, and how much pain is present. You don’t want to overthink it and get too complicated. And if the prospect pushes back and decides to go with a lower-tier option that wasn’t presented, that’s fine; send over an order form and call it a day. But there is a lot of potential upside associated with presenting options that are above and beyond just trying to sell the base-level deal and running on to the next one.

A note on cannibalization. At a later stage, you might be worried about cannibalizing potential demand via discounting what you could sell for full price. If you have confidence that your solution will spread within an organization, you might be concerned that you were taking ~$16.5K (5 seats for the price of 2.75 x ~$6K per seat) for seats that could eventually earn you another ~$30K at full price. Early on, don’t worry too much about it. Instead, strive for that incremental cash that will turn up in your bank account right now.

Another thing that proposals can be nice for is framing the projected ROI associated with those different options. This goes to the concept that a proposal is a piece of marketing collateral, helping to sell for you even when you’re not engaging directly with the prospect. They can also help your champion play Show and Tell with the ultimate decision-maker, if necessary. If it’s just your contact who needs to make the decision, then having this information nicely presented for her is helpful. However, if there is a CFO or some other back-check authority, having all of this bundled up in a nice tight package, ideally including your logo and the prospect’s, will do wonders for the credibility afforded you, and your champion. You make her look like she’s done her homework and is bringing a well-reasoned proposal (ha!) to the table, reducing potential skepticism by her internal back-check counterpart.

When it comes to delivering a proposal, it doesn’t have to be too fancy. To start with, you can do it manually. I’m a fan of a templated PowerPoint presentation where you can drop in the relevant options, the prospect’s logo, and any sort of ROI projections. Later, you can get more involved and tie information from your CRM Opportunity object into a programmatically generated proposal using something like Conga Composer, Drawloop, or Octiv. Not only do these save you the time of manually putting the relevant information into a proposal, but often they will have their own e-signing functionality or let you integrate with DocuSign or Adobe eSign. That way, when the prospect chooses which option she wants, she can just click through and sign, rather than having to tell you her selection. Anything that can remove a step of friction and back-and-forth is beneficial.