Shortening Sales Cycles with POCs
In today’s technology industry landscape, companies are continually investigating new products and services to maximize productivity while lowering operational overhead. However, before committing to an implementation, businesses often face the challenge of ensuring that new technology solutions will meet their needs and solve real-world problems. This is where the Proof of Concept (POC) comes into play.
The rigor and art required to convert pipeline to incremental revenue is top of mind for every sales and business development leader. Adding a POC to the sales cycle is often seen as a time-sucking exercise that increases deal risk and delays company progress, but when conducted effectively, the POC can be a powerful tool to accelerate early stage deals to a win.
Today, we'll share how SZNS Solutions uses POCs as an advantage to rapidly accelerate a prospective deal to a win.
The Proof of the Concept
Many POCs fail to move a deal forward because they don’t address a real-world issue. These POCs are born from good intentions, but without specificity and evidence your customer can use to evaluate future impact, they’re nothing more than science experiments that paint a very broad picture of the “art of the possible.” That phrase gets used a lot, but the art lies in demonstrating what is possible for a specific customer, not all of them.
Let’s review an actual customer example.
A prospective client shared a document management workflow they needed to automate in order to reduce the number of human hours required to perform the tasks. To better understand the use case, our engineering team built a tightly scoped POC of the workflow and demonstrated it to the prospect. By investing 8-16 hours of engineering time, we bypassed the technical stakeholders requirements discussion, the infrastructure setup review, business and technical executive briefings, and numerous sales meetings.
The outcome - our engineering team was able to show a measurable time savings that equated to a massive productivity increase of 71,000% This resulted in a signed statement of work (SOW) to begin implementation within 4 weeks of the first conversation vs the typical 3 months or more. Two more SOWs for that same client have since been executed.
We earned their trust by listening carefully to their specific challenges. By building a scaled down version of the solution they specified, we demonstrated our willingness to invest in understanding their needs while showing them how the solution would actually look, and produced quantifiable numbers for improved productivity.
The Math
When I discuss this with my peers, I get a lot of criticism around how hard it is to scale this kind of pre-sales effort, and how resource-intensive it is. They’re not wrong. POCs are often avoided because of the demand it places on pre-sales and engineering teams that should be focused on delivering existing projects to realize revenue.
For us, it was a math equation where we optimized the parameters of cost, number of resources, and (most importantly) the time it would take to go from first discussion to deal close.
Let’s also look at some high level numbers for the effort.
If we compare our method to what we’ve typically seen in most technology sales cycles, the choice was obvious.
Conclusion
On paper, the table above doesn’t look like the 66% reduction in time to deal close that I claimed, but keep in mind that the meetings we had were also much more interactive and actionable, placing accountability on both us and our prospective client. The meetings also happened in rapid succession with clear outcomes for the next steps.
One could also argue that not all efforts lead to a win, which is very true. However, I would argue that it’s much better to fail fast and move on, while investing less time overall to come to the same conclusion.
For us, this approach has been quite effective and efficient even though it requires our engineering team to be involved in the pre-sales process. There are many benefits to having engineering work closely with sales, but I’ll save that for another article.
I hope you found this post informative and insightful. At SZNS Solutions, we’re always open to feedback, discussions, and helping solve challenging business problems, so please free to contact us - we’d love to hear from you!
About SZNS Solutions
SZNS Solutions (pronounced "seasons") is a certified Google Cloud Partner and technology consulting firm based in Reston, VA with deep expertise on data engineering and cloud-native application development. For more information, visit us at https://szns.solutions or email info@szns.solutions.
