Maintaining Momentum
As we are in prime vacation season, there is the risk that some of your deals will stall - perhaps to never restart. How do you keep deals moving in a way that is valuable to both you and your customers? You need to think strategically about maintaining momentum.
During this season a lot of deals go into suspended animation. Hopefully after September 1st, or in the US after Labor Day, they come back to life. But, some of them don’t - they become zombies: deals that are dead but we haven’t killed them yet; we just keep pushing them out and pushing them out.
Two points to consider as you work to keep things moving: First, the best way is to maintain momentum is with a Mutual Action Plan, a MAP. Developed with your sponsor or your champion, and based on their end date. Not your close date (although that’s important), but the date the customer needs to see business results. A MAP is simply a timeline—a project plan that’s built backwards, starting at their end date, working back through deployment, through implementation, through the procurement process, through the remainder of the sales process, to today. Be sure that the plan includes three or four events or activities that have to happen in these summer slow times. You want commitment to the MAP, and especially to those critical events in August.
Secondly, make sure those events are meaty events. Not just status or review meetings that can easily be cancelled. Instead take advantage of the natural seasonal cycle. Everyone’s going to be back at work in September; they’re going to be available to make decisions, so you can schedule critical review meetings in September. Your strategy should be to have activities in August that create deliverables that are needed at those meetings in September.
Examples of concrete outputs that make meeting unlikely to be canceled:
Solution design
Business case definition
Scoping and configuration
Implementation planning
In summary, keep the momentum through the last weeks of summer. Go through your pipeline and identify the deals that are most at risk of stalling. Get a meeting with your champion and, ideally, with your executive sponsor to discuss a plan to maintain momentum. Your focus is to help them achieve their goals on their timeline—then both of you will succeed.
