Brian LaManna recounts closing a six-figure deal in Q4 with a public bank — the company’s first public-bank customer — and shares two key lessons: dig beyond surface objections to find root causes, and address those with targeted evidence (security walkthroughs and relevant case studies).
A six-figure deal in Q4 of the past year.
Yes — it was the first public bank the company closed.
I closed a six figure deal in Q4 of this past year with a public bank. At the time, our company had never yet closed a public bank and it was the first one that we got to bring on board as banks were considered more non ICP for us. ICP stands for ideal customer profile, meaning this opened up the avenue for more potential companies that look like them down the road. They what was really interesting during the cycle was that this bank had the exact same very concern and the fact that they mentioned, hey, we're concerned that we don't necessarily have customers that look like us. And what they wanted to understand was they wanted to speak to a reference that was also a public bank. Now the key for me was not just taking that at face value because we wouldn't have had a solution for them, but to really dig deeper. So what I did was I asked and I seek to understand the objection of why that was so important for them. It was actually incorrect in my assumption of why that was important. And it really came down to two different things. One, banks have very high data security. Number two is that their use case was pretty unique in terms of their cross sell initiative and they wanted to make sure that similar customers had the outcomes that they were also hoping to achieve. Now that I knew the root cause of this objection, quote unquote, I was able to overcome it in a much easier fashion. Right? Number one for data security. Our data security is of the utmost importance to us and I was able to actually loop in our chief information security officer along with their team and we set up live meetings between our company and theirs to walk through our security architecture and get a thumbs up from their legal and their security team. The second one was more around the outcomes that they were hoping to achieve. We actually had a lot of different case studies around other customers that found great success with things like our cross sell initiative. So I was able to just share a couple case study links on customers that saw the same value and saw the same benefit and they were over the top enthused from seeing the types of results that we were able to uncover. Really important lesson here with any type of deal cycle or even if it's a prospect on a cold call, don't just take an objection at surface level, dig deeper, ask another question, seek to not overcome it, but to understand it first and it'll help both sides in the long run.
"We're happy with our current vendor" #saas #sales #techsales #objectionhandling
