Challenges to the Sales Cycle
- If Data Analysis is a big issue, our first risk is integration – not IF we can integrate, but IF they have money to spend on it. Knowing in advance that the total project cost is going to START at $25K means that we need to make sure they have a $25K problem.
- Are we high enough? Most of these clients in our space have 1 or 2 people at the top who make all of the decisions. We need to make sure they are with us right from the beginning.
- A VP at Salesforce has an ingenious way to handle this. Make the first meeting after the Prospect is qualified to you a “CXO/VP Introduction”. Hold out for this meeting and don’t proceed until we get it. At the meeting, we do a broad overview of Salesforce as market leader, an explanation of CRM (sometimes the customer doesn’t know). This meeting also sometimes tells the prospect what we don’t do. For instance, we don’t do EMR! We don’t do Practice control, we don’t do Finance.
- Is the client mature enough? Sometimes we see clients who do this work in Spreadsheets. They are desperate to get away from this, and they know that staying on spreadsheets or QuickBooks is a limiting decision, but they don’t have the money, resources, or processes to make the move from those tools to Salesforce.
- If the upfront costs are prohibitive, or if the prospect does not have the resources to commit to such a big project, it’s probably time to part friends. Clients who take on this much change are a GREAT candidate for CSAT issues later and potentially Carve Backs…