Make it POP
Partnership Onboarding Plans can improve your sales cycles
Regardless of stage, prospects always fear their usage of your product at scale due to costs – they create hypotheticals, press you to give them “ballpark” pricing on what happens in a scenario where your company is wildly successful, yet the first contract hasn’t even been signed yet.
The most effective way we’ve seen to quell customer concerns after years of sales cycles is the use of a Partnership Onboarding Plan.
The Partnership Onboarding Plan helps you scope what is “Currently” being evaluated, “Validated In-scope, but not now,” and “Future State” (likely not yet approved or aspirational).
This also gives you the opportunity accomplish the following during your sales cycles:
When the customer creates hypotheticals about “scale” or future state, and it is *not in scope* for this current contract, you can refer to the Plan you mutually agreed upon and respond with “last time we built a plan together, you mentioned that this was out of scope. Has something changed where we should address this now instead of in the future after we start the partnership?” It anchors the conversation on what you’re selling and what they’re buying *now*.
You now know what the customer’s desired future state is with your product if you’re successful on the *first* use cases. It lays the groundwork for an upsell in the near future and/or a multi-year agreement based on the validated demand.
You avoid over forecasting pipeline and deals that started at $100k+ and leave you gravely disappointed that the prospect started smaller. ELSE, you may put yourself in a position where there is an opportunity to convert a big deal now that the customer has given you visibility on what’s required to make that happen.
Here’s the template to get started – I want Founders and GTM teams to be excellent, so how do you do this better or differently to make this resource even better? If you use it, let us know how it goes. There’s a lot of upfront work to get to this phase in the sales cycle…!