This was Year 2 of our engagement with this client. They were very happy with the executive coaching we had provided to their leaders in Year 1. What mattered most to this client was the need to see tangible results, so we together set the target to double their number of million-dollar deals. 

Now, the traditional approach to doubling deal sizes would be: How do we push our people hard? How do we make them work harder? 

And, sometimes even going ahead and pushing our customers hard, right? 

The philosophy is that if we ask our people to jump to the moon, maybe they will go ahead and jump and land somewhere in between. 

The fallacy in this perspective is that because of the force and pressure, most salespeople lose their motivation for the jump even before they start jumping.

In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into how we achieved this incredible feat of doubling their million dollar deals.

We’ll explore the specific strategies we used to improve the quality of engagement and the size of the deals, and how you can apply these in your own business.

If this resonates with you, 

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Every Friday morning, I’ll email you 1 actionable tip to get your sales teams to overdeliver. (other benefits include a big bonus and company-wide recognition :). 

Let’s get started. 

The first key is,

1.The Sales Manager is the Fulcrum for Change

You have to get your sales people to believe in a higher aspiration and motivate them intrinsically with emotions.

The sales managers we started work with, were traditional in their approach to managing their teams. Their approach to their teams was “I tell you what to do, and you do it” 

We found that this created a lot of pressure in the system, people were frustrated, stressed out, anxious and leading towards burnout. 

The shift is to equip your sales manager to move from telling and giving orders to coaching, which is the art of asking questions to help team members discover and commit to their own latent potential. 

This enabled them to slow down.

Slowing down so that they could achieve more, appreciate people better, elevate their potential and cultivate a high-performance mindset.

This shifted the entire trajectory of commitment and results across every sales member.

The second key is, 

2. A Framework for Focus

There is a saying, a person who defends everything, defends nothing. 

So you may have a hundred opportunities in your pipeline, you should decide where you want to focus, and in sales, focus means the rigor of qualification. 

So as you think about your pipeline, do you rigorously qualify the pipeline to shortlist the specific opportunities that you need to focus on?

Please remember, activity is not a proxy for progress. Just because you are busy across tens of opportunities does not mean you are meeting your numbers. 

When you focus, you are able to elevate the quality of conversation with your customers

When you focus, you’re able to bring quality into the interaction with your teams

When you focus, you’re able to grow deal size and increase the win rate.

The third key is, 

3. Relentless Customer Obsession about their results

When you meet the customer, it is not about you and your smartness, it is all about the customer and their greatness.

So what you are looking at is, how can I amplify my customer success?

It’s not about you or your quota achievement.

The conversation should focus on the customers’ growth, their innovation and their market share.

It automatically multiplies your deal frequency and size because your customer feels they are getting the maximum attention, empathy and business results through you.

The fourth key is, 

4. Leveraging customer Risk as a Competitive Advantage

Your customers’ perception of risk is directly proportional to your deal size and close rate. 

Think consciously about the kinds of risks that your customers are facing now, and will face in the future. 

Your sales process is the systematic elimination of customer risk. 

So how are you ensuring that you’re able to understand your customer’s risks? 

How are you able to mitigate all of those risks? 

Strategic. Operational. Financial. Innovation.

There are so many types of risks.

When you bring them to a customer and associate your solution with the removal of risk, your customer agrees to larger and faster deals. 

Adapt the risks in the context of every stakeholder in the decision making process.

When we started off with this customer, they were at 24 million dollar deals.

At the end of nine months, when we concluded this project, we got to about 58 deals.

A quarter later they came back and said, you know what? 

This 58 has actually climbed to 65. 

Success is possible, you just need the right frameworks, discipline, and cadence.

Next Step 

Subscribe to the CXO Sales Playbook Newsletter.

Every Friday morning, I’ll email you 1 actionable tip to get your sales teams to overdeliver. (other benefits include a big bonus and company-wide recognition :).