Closing and Expansion Plays
There are more than three dozen plays in a fully developed Revenue Acceleration Playbook. Every single play you put in place will have a positive impact on your revenue outcomes.
A Renewal and Customer Success Playbook re-anchors customer conversations to value. Linking product implementations, training, and onboarding to achieve customer value leads to higher renewal rates, higher account values, and faster peer referrals.
Pricing as an Investment
When you lead your pricing discussions with a restatement of the buyer’s value and ROI case, you remind the buyer that they are investing in something they really care about and not just adding another budget expenditure. Consider discounts or concessions only after you’ve heard the buyer’s reaction to the investment thesis.
Value-Driven Negotiations
Strategic price discounts or non-price concessions come into play when a buyer has confirmed fit, but identified friction to a close. Strategic discounts should be linked to something the buyer highly values. Examples could include a product bundle, a high-volume purchase, a multi-year contract, early payments, or a premium customer brand.
Path to Partnership
For proposal-ready deals the “last 10 minutes” of any sales call should be used to create a Path to Partnership close plan. It starts with a target start date and builds an explicit agreement between a seller and internal champion(s) on the financial, legal, and technical steps in the closing process.
Mutual Success Plan
A mutual success plan focuses on a buyer’s immediate need to support an initial close while not losing sight of other needs that support account expansion. A mutual success plan brings your buyer, sales team, and customer success team into alignment and identifies phases of a partnership.
Sales to Success Process
Traditional department-level activity measures are important, but cross-team measures that connect sales to customer success drive faster account expansion. Account velocity increases with shared metrics that reward linking an initial sale to expansion sales and the account value at 12 months.
Authentic Account Plan
A traditional account plan considers a buyer’s goals as one of several elements. In an authentic account plan, by contrast, the buyer’s goals anchor all other elements. Large expansion sales typically require legwork of confirming goals alignment with multiple individual buyers.