Fulfillment and Post-Sell

1Session at a glance

2Open (0:00, 4 minutes)

• Write the five headings on the board now and leave them up: pains, budget, decision, the agreement, what happens next. The concept block fills them in.
• Say what it buys on Monday: for the two selling seats, a presentation that is shorter and closes more often. For everyone else, a script for the first month of an onboarding, so the friction in it is expected instead of survived.

3Concept (0:04, 22 minutes)

What a presentation is for (4 min)

• Start with the definition, because the room has the opposite one: the fulfillment step is the delivery of an agreement that has already been reached. The persuading, if any was needed, happened in the steps before it.
• Say the consequence plainly, since it is the whole session in one line: if the earlier steps were done properly there is very little left to do here. If they were not, nothing you put on a slide fixes it.
• Name the agreement that makes this true, and restate it rather than pointing at an earlier session. Before the presentation is booked, both sides agree what it will cover, how long it runs, who is in the room, and that a yes or a no comes at the end of it rather than a week later. Sandler's name for that particular agreement is the ultimate contract. Use the term once and then call it the agreement that a decision follows the presentation.
• Point at the second failure from the open: waiting until the presentation to do the selling puts pressure on the client and on the person presenting, and both of them feel it. Everything earlier in the arc exists to take that pressure out of this meeting.

The three tests a presentation has to pass (4 min)

• Give the three as tests to run before the meeting is booked, not as advice. It addresses the problems the client actually named. It can be delivered for the money they named. It fits the decision process they described, which means the right people are in the room, in the format they said they wanted, at the length they said they had.
• Work the third one, because it is the one the room will not have thought about: a client who said the owner and the office manager decide together, and who gets a presentation with only the owner in the room, has not been given a decision they can make. The meeting was wasted before it started.
• Say what a failed test means: you do not book the presentation. You go back and finish the step that cannot answer its test. That is a cheaper day than presenting into a gap.
• Answer the obvious objection out loud. Yes, the client is asking for the proposal now. Producing one you cannot pass three tests on is how an opportunity turns into three weeks of silence.

The four elements of the fulfillment step (6 min)

• Walk the four in order from section 4 of the Learner Guide, one at a time, and make the room say what each one is doing before you say it.
• Review. Open by saying back what the earlier steps established: the problems they named, the money they named, how the decision gets made, and the agreement that a decision follows this meeting. Then ask if anything has changed. This costs about two minutes and it is the most valuable two minutes in the meeting, because anything that has changed surfaces here instead of at the end.
• Present only to the problems they raised. Spend real time here. Put the PandaDoc proposal on screen and name out loud two things in it that a given client never asked about, and cut them. Say why: every item nobody asked for is a new thing to price, to question, or to be unsure about, and it moves the meeting off the problems they own and onto ours.
• Check whether they are ready. Ask where they are on going ahead, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 means they want to proceed today. Anything under 10 tells you something about what is still open. Ask what would make it a 10 and present to that piece only. Do not restart the presentation.
• Confirm. When they are at 10, ask what they would like us to do now, and then stop talking. Do not ask for the order. Say why this matters: asking for the order makes the next move ours and invites a stall. Asking what they want us to do makes them say the next action out loud, in their own words, which is what an actual decision sounds like.

Why a sale is lost at this point (4 min)

• Give the three reasons, then do the tracing, which is the teaching point: we were given inaccurate information about their problems or their situation; circumstances changed and we did not know; the client was not straight with us.
• Trace each one back out loud to the step that was rushed. Inaccurate information means the pain step took the first answer. Changed circumstances means nothing was reviewed at the top of the meeting. A client who was not straight with us usually means they were never comfortable enough to be, which is rapport, or that we never asked the question that would have made it awkward to dodge.
• Then the mistakes in section 6 of the Learner Guide, quickly, and name what they have in common: not agreeing up front that a decision follows the presentation, not restating that agreement before starting, rushing the pain step, leaving a money question unresolved, and never pinning down who decides and how. Every one of them happened before this meeting.
• Close the block plainly: a lost presentation usually points back to something missed at an earlier step, so look there rather than at the deck.

The post-sell step and the first month (4 min)

• Define the step: the post-sell is the conversation that happens after the decision, while everyone is still in the room, and it has three parts. Keeping the decision from coming apart. Setting the ground rules for what happens next. Opening the subject of future work and referrals.
• Name the two ways a decision comes apart: second thoughts once the reasons for deciding are no longer in front of the person, which is what buyer's remorse means, and a call from the provider they are replacing, who is about to lose the account and has every reason to make one.
• Make it concrete for this room, because this is the point of the session for the non-selling seats. Agreement signed, onboarding starts, their staff feel the disruption, the old provider is still in contact, and the person who signed starts to wonder. Nothing has gone wrong technically at that point.
• Give the fix in one move: name out loud, before onboarding starts, what is going to be difficult in the first month. Who will complain, about what, in roughly which week, and when it settles. A difficulty that was named in advance is evidence we knew what we were doing. The identical difficulty arriving unannounced is evidence we did not.
• Then the ground rules and the referral part, briefly: what happens next and by when, who they call, what we do if the old provider contacts them, a date in the calendar to review it, and the question about who else they know with the same problem, asked while they are certain about the decision rather than six months later.

4Show (0:26, 10 minutes)

1. Put the facts on the board. From the Nutshell record, read out the client's named problems, the figure they gave for money, and how they said the decision gets made. Use their words. Where the record is silent, write "we do not know" and leave it up.
2. Run the review. Say all of it back to the volunteer client in under a minute, finish with the agreement that a yes or no comes at the end of this meeting, and ask whether anything has changed since they said it.
3. Present to the named problems only. One point per problem, no more. Say out loud, to the room, two things you are deliberately leaving out and why they are out.
4. Ask the readiness question. On a scale of 1 to 10, where are they. The briefed volunteer answers 7. Ask what would make it a 10, get the answer, and present to that one piece only.
5. Confirm. Ask what they would like us to do now, and then stay silent until the volunteer answers. Let the silence run, because the room needs to see that it works.
6. Run the post-sell in front of them. What happens next and by when, who they call, the three things that will be hard in the first month and roughly when each one lands, what to do if their old provider calls, and the date of the review meeting. Then ask who else they know with the same problem.
7. Debrief against the four elements. Ask the room which of review, present, check and confirm they saw, and where the meeting would have gone if step two had turned up a change.

5Do (0:36, 13 minutes)

1. Pair off, and everybody picks one. A live opportunity, or a client who is onboarding now or about to. Nobody sits this out.
2. Write the facts. The problems that client named, in their words. What they said about money. How the decision gets made or was made. Write "do not know" where that is the truth.
3. Run the review both ways. One minute each. The partner playing the client says at the end whether they heard their own words come back or ours.
4. Cut something. The partner names one thing that got presented that the client never raised. It comes out. Everyone does this at least once.
5. Write the post-sell. Six lines kept by the person who wrote them: three things that will be difficult in the first month and roughly when, who is most likely to complain and about what, what we say if their previous provider contacts them, and a date for the review meeting.
6. Two people read the difficult-in-the-first-month list out. Presenter picks, and at least one of the two should be a technical seat, because theirs will be the specific one.

6Check (0:49, 7 minutes)

1. A client sits through the whole presentation, says it looks good, and asks for a week to think it over. Which step was not finished, and what specifically was missing from it?

   Answer

   The decision step. What was missing is the agreement, made before the presentation was booked, that a yes or a no would come at the end of it rather than afterwards. Without that agreement there is nothing improper about asking for a week, so the client asks for one. A presentation delivered without it is a presentation you cannot get an answer from.

2. Name the three reasons a sale is lost at this point, and for each one name the earlier step that was rushed.

   Answer

   We were given inaccurate information, which traces back to a pain step that accepted the first answer and never established what the problem was actually costing. Circumstances changed and we did not know, which traces back to not reviewing at the top of the meeting and asking whether anything had changed. The client was not straight with us, which traces back to rapport, or to a question about money or decision makers that was never asked because asking it felt awkward.

3. Why does presenting three capabilities the client never asked about make the sale less likely rather than more likely?

   Answer

   Each one is a new item to price, to question or to be unsure about, and none of them is attached to a problem the client owns. They also move the meeting away from the client's situation and onto ours, which is the point at which it starts to feel like being sold to. The things we are proudest of are the usual candidates, which is why the cut has to be deliberate.

4. An agreement is signed on Friday. Three weeks into onboarding the client calls and asks to pause, because their staff are frustrated and their old provider has told them this is not normal. What is the fix, and what is the obvious answer that is wrong?

   Answer

   The fix is the post-sell conversation, held now because it was not held before onboarding started, and held properly with the next client. Name what is difficult, say which of it was expected and when it settles, and put a review date in the calendar.

   The obvious answer is that onboarding is going badly and needs more technicians on it. That is usually wrong, and it is worth naming because it is expensive. The technical work is often exactly on plan. What is missing is that nobody told the client the second and third weeks would feel like this, so ordinary friction reads to them as a mistake, and the provider they are replacing is standing right there offering to confirm it.

5. The confirmation question is what they would like us to do now, rather than whether they are ready to get started. What does asking it that way get you that asking for the order does not?

   Answer

   It makes the client state the next action in their own words, which is what a decision they will hold to sounds like. Asking for the order makes the next move ours and gives them something to defer rather than something to decide. If they are not ready, the open question returns the reason, which you can still work on in the room, where a yes-or-no question would have returned a stall.

6. A technician is on site in week two of an onboarding and a staff member complains loudly that the new sign-in is slowing them down. What does the post-sell step say to do, and who needs to hear about it?

   Answer

   Acknowledge it rather than defending it, say that this week was expected to feel like this and when it settles, and show them the fastest way to do the thing they are trying to do. Then log it in Syncro and make sure the person who signed the agreement hears it from us before they hear it from their staff, along with what we did about it. The complaint itself is normal. The signer learning about it from somebody else is what turns it into a cancelled agreement.

7Close (0:56, 4 minutes)

Work before the next session

• The practice steps in section 9 of the Learner Guide: the six-line post-sell script written for one real client, and used if that client is onboarding now.
• The four elements of the fulfillment step in order, from memory, and the three reasons a sale is lost at this point.
• Chapter 8 of the Sandler Foundations workbook, in the reference folder, for anyone who wants the source.

Next session

09 - Behavior, Attitude and Technique. The three things that produce a result, which of them you control directly on a given Tuesday, and how the weekly activity numbers are worked out backwards from what the year has to produce.

Open items to settle

• Whether the first-month expectations conversation becomes a required step in client onboarding, and whether it is written into the onboarding SOP in Notion.
• Who runs the post-sell when the selling seat hands the client to service delivery, and at what moment the handover happens.
• Whether the review date agreed in the post-sell gets created as a task in Nutshell or a scheduled ticket in Syncro at signing, so it exists before anyone has time to forget it.

8Sources

• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations, chapter 8, Closing the Sale (Fulfillment and Post-Sell): chapter PDF.
• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations: full workbook PDF.

The seven steps, the fulfillment and post-sell steps, the four elements, the three reasons a sale is lost, and the terms up-front contract, ultimate contract and buyer's remorse are Sandler's. The worked examples, the onboarding material and everything about how this applies at Hermetic are ours.

9After the session