“I’d like to import 100,000 records as test”

By Scott Sambucci | January 2, 2012

You know this lead – his budget is tight, however he’s been forthcoming about this in your conversations so far, so you constructed a purchase program that works for his budget. He’s verbally acknowledged that he can make it work. But, he went a little cold and quiet, only to re-emerge all of the sudden to request this test as part of his evaluation.

Why do you send a contract before agreeing to the test?

1. It determines if he really is serious or not. If the prospect is serious, he’ll respond to this proactive project management with – “Wow – that’s a great idea!  This will save us time to get things implemented once the test is finished.”
2. Smokes out any underlying objections. If they resist – “Oh no, we’re not ready to sign the contract quite yet.” – then this opens the opportunity to ask – “Okay, what other questions do you have? Let’s make sure we have them all answered before we avalanche you with these sample files.”

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Here’s more detail on the actual case:

This all went down on Friday just before Christmas.

The next steps? The prospect wanted to run a “quick test” to make sure the output is exactly what he needed.  Sounds reasonable, so the sales rep reached out to him twice in the week between Christmas and New Years.  Crickets. Until Friday afternoon, December 30th as everyone was packing up for the weekend. The prospect’s assistant emailed to request the test input. She expected to run this before the end of the day.

Ahhhhh…. Now we see where this might be going. Here’s where we are:

1. First, you’re not enabling a file size that big as a test without a clear path to contract.
2. Processing a file that big takes a couple of days anyway.
3. You’d be willing to do that if the purchase order/contract was squared away.

The action to take?

“That’s sounds great – we’re excited that you’re ready to go with the test. Here’s what we can do:

1. We’ll set up the sample account that you’d like to see for your test.  It’ll take the weekend to process so we can kick that off today and have that ready on Jan 2.

2. So that we can save time on implementation, I’ll send over a contract to you with the terms that we’ve discussed.  Let’s get that signed and done.  That way, if the test is successful, we can roll immediately into providing you the updated data files right away.”