Getting beyond Negative Trust

While most healthy relationships begin at a point of positive trust or at least a neutral position; many sales reps begin their relationships with buyers at a negative trust point, burdened by the promises of their brethren that preceded them.

Even with the best-intentioned sales rep, it’s not hard to have misalignment between the thing your buyer thought they were buying, and the thing your company ultimately delivers. Most of that is not the intent but rather the result of a broken telephone, or misalignment of what words mean.

So how do you build trust quickly?

The formula is really simple:

Where t equals trust, D = deliver,  E = expected.

Simply put, all you have to do is set expectations and beat them every single time. In software sales, the most critical part of the trust relationship is aligning what the buyer bought your stuff to fix with what your product can actually do to help the problem they want to fix.  But doing this in a vacuum is pretty useless.  Software sales are most successfully executed as a team. Sales working closely with services, sharing the insights gleaned during the sales process; ensuring that learning is fully baked into the decisions, and actions that come through the implementation.

Problem Identified

This is one area we really really wanted to focus on when we built TekStack.  We wanted to make it as easy as possible to align sales and services. The most significant point of failure between a customer’s outcome and what they thought they were buying comes in the form of the end product that was delivered.  Mis-aligned expectations on scope, timeline, and budget. So we tackled this by:

• Enabling companies to standardize their service offerings through templated projects
• Reducing the timeframe needed to turn around quotes in the sales process
• Improve the accuracy of the quote by establishing assumptions and limitations and transferring that information to the services team
• Formalizing the quote process (for a fixed price, T&M, and productized delivery methods)
• Improve the quality and consistency of quote or SOW documents
• Keeping the services team fully engaged during the sales process without making them a roadblock
• Track Project process along the way to spot smoldering fires.
• Providing self-help tools so that customers can track progress independently
• Track a real-time RAID log
• Analyze lessons learned and what tasks you spent the most time on so that you can improve future quoting accuracy

The Result

• A happy customer that will give you future opportunities in their company
• One that will refer you to their peers, or use your services at their next stop
• A customer that will provide you with a critical reference
• Services invoices paid, on time!
• A happy customer that will happily renew with you
• A happy services team that will never turn away any future ask you have of them

However, it would take about an hour to show all the stuff we’ve done to manage this expectation setting, this short video will highlight some of the things we’ve stitched together. Contact me if you would like to see an end-to-end demo (no obligation!).

What are you seeing here?

• An opportunity that ties to a quote, loading the quoted value into the opportunity, so you can actually forecast!
• A quote that creates a new Project in a ‘scoping’ stage so that services know they have some work to do.
• The ability for services to take the templated project, add effort or new tasks, assign roles. The result of which drives a new project cost (roles x role costs x effort)
• From that cost, a way to mark up the project and establish billing milestones (we do T&M too, but that’s easy).
• A way for PMs and management to see how the project is performing. How planned gross margin compares to actual or expected.