How to Run a Perfect Proof of Concept | Deren Rehr-Davis

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1. 4:07

   very just solution-oriented product that's complex, trying to identify who is going to make the decision from a technical perspective, oftentimes that might be your super admin or your administrator, someone that will own the project and implementing the project and maintaining it. “But also, you need to identify who's actually going to sign the check.” If you don't have both of those personas identified, then it can be really difficult where your deal starts to get longer or drag on, or maybe it doesn't close when it should, despite having alignment from a technical perspective. Technical sign-off is the champion who wants your solution, sees value, making sure you're

   In Economic buyer identification

2. 15:26

   How do you handle that situation? When you think about the outcomes that you're trying to drive, this is where not only understanding your business, your solution, and your product is important, but also understanding the actual businesses that you're selling to become so important. “Because if you can dive in and say, in that exact scenario, hey, I know I'm going to be able to do those recall blitzes and I'm going to double the amount of calls that you're making, but are you calling the same exact type of prospects or are you adding new lists to this POC?” Because if you can start asking questions like that, then you can start to figure out or try and identify, look, do you have certain conversion rates? Are those conversion rates going to stay steady?

   In Prospect list coverage

3. 18:42

   And again, it ends up leading to a lot more yeses. I know that's sometimes hard to conceptualize, but when you can go down that path and say, hey, we do need some sort of trade-off. I'm not just going to say yes to everyone. Or make sure your qualification criteria is just rock solid. “You're only offering your POC criteria to the tippy top of your pipeline anyway.” If you can do one of those two things, you're going to set yourself up to be successful. I remember when I tried to run a POC when I was the director of sales over at Carta. I bypassed my IT and security review and I just installed that thing for my entire SDR org.

   In Market-entry offer design

4. 27:13

   Now, there's some tricks and tips that we can use specific to our business On how to get around those or speed them up at times for the right use case But that's during that first three or four days Are we integrated with your platform or your CRM, your help desk, your ticketing tool, whatever it might be “And then are your numbers registered and have we tested them?” And that way you can go and start actually testing the platform yourself confidently Pro tip here, use meetings as milestone deadlines I will oftentimes set that first integration meeting and say At this meeting, we will review all of your integrations to make sure that you've set them up the right way

   In Phone number validation

5. 29:29

   The best time to me to really start getting into the meat of that pricing, start to work on legal procurements depending on the size of the deal Would be right in the middle of that POC with peak excitement Hey, I'm making calls, this is working Go talk about the business then when they're seeing a ton of value and they're excited about your solution “And that's when I typically would recommend start to multi-thread and keep them separate” But start to multi-thread and go, hey, our champion is going to go and speak the world of us right now Let's go start making sure by the end of this POC we can get this deal signed Really, really smart You move to vendor review in the middle of the POC You don't wait until it's finished You say, great, this thing's working There's a ton of excitement

   In Multi-threaded prospecting

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