Picture it: Boston…November 4th…2022 (any Golden Girls fans out there?). You’re forecasting a $400,000 deal with UnitedHealthcare (a 290B company). It’s your first deal with them ever and it’s forecasted to close by 12.31 (lol).
Rep: Our champion is meeting with the board on Dec 9th, and then we’ll have the rest of the year to hustle the deal in once they approve. We haven’t started talking to procurement yet as it’s outsourced and they won’t let us touch them until approvals happen.
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You already know that the deal bled to 2023, but here are just a few of the missing factors for this specific scenario, one we see SO often in our strategic deal reviews with clients:
1. “Meeting with the board” – what does that mean? Is the champion presenting a case for the spend? Are they asking for permission? Are they TELLING the board they’re doing this?
2. Asking the champion, “why won’t this deal happen?” Pull apart your blind spots and objections early.
3. Asking the champion, “Have you made a presentation to the board like this before? What questions do they typically ask? Any hurdles we can anticipate? How can we best arm you with data around potential objections that could come up?”
4. $400,000? Huge for the rep, insignificant at year-end for UHC. If you’re battling for time at the end of the year, you might think you’ll get priority given the size, except that they’re prioritizing deals for tens of millions of dollars that have greater impact to their org.
5. Asking the champion to see “their paper” so you can start to look at terms, info sec, conditions that your own legal counsel can start to get ahead of.
6. Proactively booking time with procurement the same day of the meeting. Note, this is also a killer way to pressure test your deal. If you ask your board-presenting-champion to connect you with outsourced procurement to schedule a meeting, in anticipation of the board approval that day, and they push back, that’s a warning sign to dig in to.
7. Sam: let’s say you get board approval on the 9th – what are the exact next steps, milestones, and dates for this deal to close in time? Do you know if the outsourced procurement team works until 12.31? (spoiler alert, we didn’t have the answers here)
8. The most painful one – multi-threading was extremely limited here. 75% of deals are single-threaded (according to LinkedIn data) – MASSIVE red flag for your deals, and great way to gut check existing pipeline, leaders!
Think about all these aspects for your big deals that feel like “We can’t do anything until the board meeting happens” because HOLY. CANNOLI. can you do a ton of work before that meeting!
Take control, be proactive, don’t just wait for the date to roll around and to point you to next steps.
-Sam McKenna