The Pre-Sales Equation
By: Charlie Van Norman
Tags: Presales, Consulting, Sales, Solutions, Business Development

Hello! My name is Charlie, and I work on the Presales team at SoftServe Inc. on the Customer Journey Navigation Team. My official title is Solutions Consultant, and it’s my role to help our sales team discover, qualify, manage, and close deals.

After reading this article, my hope is you will

Better understand the many factors that may impact a deal

Use the equation variables as a guide for conversations and deal design

Quick primer on the Enterprise Presale

During the first client meeting, it’s our task to establish a potential engagement between our two companies — this includes doing some legwork ahead of time to know the right angles of approach, and there’s also a deep conversation to be had¹ around framing client calls around business value (rather than purely technical solutions.)

A typical sales cycle has 1–10 meetings over 1–10 weeks before either closing or disqualifying. It is tempting to say Yes to whatever the client (or partner) requests, but it is important to say No where appropriate, otherwise we can easily begin setting the expectation that we will take on a deal that is not a good fit for us. I’ve uncovered several deals that worked for us, simply by saying “No” to the first request — and quickly finding that the client actually had other needs that were a great fit for us.

[1] The Five Whys is one great starting point for insights based selling.

Qualification and Deal Design: an example

In this article I’ll refer to an imaginary client, “Client, Inc”. We learn in the first meeting that Client Inc has an urgent need around migrating 10 users off an obscure technology, T, which would take just a few weeks to do (perhaps with a $XX,000 price tag). On the surface, this is not a deal for us. Our ROI including time, money, effort, and overhead only becomes positive above $XXX,000 in revenue over the next 12 months. Here’s the simple equation in pseudocode:

if ($XXX,000 ≤ $Expected_Value), then GO;

$Expected_Value = $XX,000;

Therefore, NO-GO

Note: I’m using “XX,000” here instead of real numbers, as this is a nonexistent example.

So, no-go, right? Well — not so fast! There is often more to the story. We expand the conversation: “What led you to needing this now?” Answer: “We aqua-hired a company and after an internal review, decided we needed to do a bunch of migrations. This is one of them.”

My ears prick up. A bunch of migrations, you say? Further questioning leads to a deeper business case: “We realized our employees could be roughly 2x more productive if they had a unified set of internal platforms and tools.” We end up discussing the horizon on when this 2x productivity boost is expected to realize (6 months), as well as the top line impact (we can reduce development costs by $X00,000/yr and invest an additional X000 hours into R&D). Let’s assume the initial need is $X0,000, but these additional migrations including a discovery and program management is worth a lot more. The client agrees that the first migration can be a Phase I of the total migration project. In the biz we call this the “tail” because it comes after the first deal. Let’s revisit the equation:

if ($XXX,000 ≤ $Expected_Value + $Tail), then GO;

$Expected_Value = $XX,000;

$Tail = $XXX,000;

Therefore, GO

Simple enough, right? :-]

The Equation

Ok, that was a simple example. Reality is often much more nuanced. Here’s a more complete picture: