Alright, this one's an oldie but a goodie. The Trial Close

I still remember learning about this from my very first Sales Manager, and it blew my mind!

Over the years I've found different ways to execute it since it tends to look different for Enterprise deals.

At the highest level, the Trial Close is a way to gauge whether your prospect is ready to move forward with your solution.

The most basic way to do this is asking something like:
​"Assuming I've shown value and our proposal looks good, is this something you'd be ready to move forward with?"

That's it, the above will work for most deals.

But let's say you are working on an Enterprise deal with multiple personas and stakeholders. How do you pose the same question? How do you create that same level of friction?

Here's a great play I like to run to create friction and trial close an Enterprise prospect. In fact, I just did this on Friday morning.

This works best when negotiating pricing. Let's say your proposal is $200K and the prospect is asking to get costs down to $175K to fit within their budget. Here's what you do. You ask them to send you an email with all stakeholders cc'd stating that if you can get your costs to $175K then they will commit to selecting your solution and finalizing the paperwork by X date (BTW X date is one you define so it aligns with your quarterly targets).

Boom! Now you have something in writing from your Prospect with their team copied expressing intent to move forward in partnership by a specific date if there's alignment on pricing. Not only have you Trial Closed your deal, but you also have some leverage to lobby your VP of Sales or CFO for a $25K discount!

So there you have it, two approaches to nailing the trial close that you can start using in your deals next week.

Until next week.
-Jesse