There's a market correction happening around us now. Investors, media, and customers have started speaking about it openly. The next few months look quite challenging for companies that have an inflated valuation, high burn, or are planning to raise financing in the next 12-18 months.
As with any other company in business today, we want to be of use to our customers in these difficult times. We recently brainstormed how BuyerAssist and Mutual Success Plans can help our customers with their new strategic initiatives, and we felt that this information could also benefit other revenue leaders.
We’ve identified three key strategic initiatives that most companies are currently thinking about where Mutual Success Plans could help. Needless to say, this is how we also plan to use BuyerAssist for BuyerAssist.
Collaboration, Transparency
One of the biggest concerns CROs in venture-backed companies have today is the uncertainty in their 2H pipeline, especially the enterprise deals that are probably in the early to mid stages at this point. While you continue to train and coach your team on repositioning your solution and/or pressure-testing deals in their pipe, the biggest challenge with the existing pipe is that your buyers are going to add more steps in the buying process to make sure this spend meets their new internal benchmark in terms of the desired ROI and is signed off by some new stakeholders as well.
Mutual Success Plans help your selling team identify these steps early and ensure that they align with their buyers on potential business value and a revised strategy to get to the mutually desired outcomes. It also means that your team now has a systematic approach to enable their champions to drive consensus and alignment across your buyer organization on ‘why this problem needs to be solved now’ and ‘why you are the best partner for them to do so.’ From a leadership standpoint, it puts in place a continuous approach to ensure that you are not blindsided at any point through the deal.
Here is an example of how the Business Objective and Timeline on BuyerAssist might be updated based on mutual discussions with a mid-stage opportunity. In this example, it’s BuyerAssist selling to a company Acme. This helps realign with all relevant stakeholders on what’s needed for us to win this customer and ensure that all efforts are anchored around this new understanding.
Before the realignment discussion with the primary buyer (Original Plan)
After the realignment discussion with the primary buyer (Updated Plan)
Outcome alignment, Influencer Map
Assuming the timelines predicted by industry experts are somewhat accurate, i.e., at least 1-2 years of recovery, then one of the first areas to get hit would be demand gen. At least for the foreseeable future, until things are clear, companies would be very scrutinous about how they spend their money. Most companies I speak to already have a partial hiring or spending freeze in place. In response to this, you might need to increase the ARR contribution coming from existing customers through cross-sells and upsells.
With the BuyerAssist approach to Mutual Success Plans, you would be able to quickly collaborate and align with your current champions on identifying and exploring such opportunities within their organizations. You would be able to build trust and goodwill in an efficient manner by using your champions as internal champions and advocates. Additionally, you could also bring your extended team into the account - the story so far, who’s who, and what’s the strategy from here. After all, it’ll be an all-hands-on-deck effort in the next few months.
Here is an example of a customer using BuyerAssist to align their team around the stakeholders and deal strategy for a potential EMEA expansion.
Process efficiency, People efficiency
In such circumstances, the underlying mandate for any hiring freeze is ‘do more with what you have,’ in other words - to drive efficiency. Research says that more than 20% of the time is spent on non-customer-related activities when it comes to customer-facing roles. Every week, almost an entire day goes into updating internal teams, sharing reports with managers, updating CRMs, etc. Driving automation in most of these processes is one of the earliest value propositions realized from using a Mutual Success Plan solution.
At BuyerAssist, we are heavily invested in giving back selling/customer time to our users. BuyerAssist makes the latest and greatest information about a deal readily available in the CRM, right within the opportunity record, so that other internal stakeholders don’t need to look any further. We automate the data flow to the CRM when it comes to key dynamic fields like your sales methodology, next steps, etc., directly from the Mutual Success Plans, which makes your CRM reports many times better. Last but not least, we also automate the creation and management of Deal Rooms on Slack to make sure all stakeholders are up to date at every single point on what’s going on in each deal. Done right, this functionality alone can cut down the time reps spend on updating different people across your company.
Here’s an example of a Slack Deal Room powered by BuyerAssist that automates many aspects of internal collaboration and helps drive accountability with all internal and external stakeholders involved in the opportunity.
We strongly believe that Mutual Success Plans are, any day, a great way for revenue teams to drive discipline as well as operationalize true customer-centricity by rallying around their customers/ prospects and their unique business goals. In pressing times like these, it’s also very important for companies to learn and adapt at an unprecedented pace. A systematic approach to buyer engagement, like BuyerAssist, makes the data collection, processing, and insights generation workflows far more objective and agile. Leadership teams have the ability to make quick decisions based on reliable insights on the market and individual sales deals, which again is something very critical as we all navigate this financial downturn.
If you believe Mutual Success Plans can be the secret weapon for your team as you navigate in these trying times, give us a shout-out here. We're committed to making this work for you.
As they say, every downturn is also an opportunity for great companies to be created, and I am sure all of us are in the process of answering those critical questions which will get us there. On behalf of the entire BuyerAssist team, I wish you the best in that pursuit! Looking forward to seeing companies emerge stronger and better on the other side of this, with the help of true customer-centricity.
