The five questions a rep needs answered before he dials
The least glamorous document in an engagement is the one that decides it. A rep who has to say "I'll find out" four times has already lost the meeting.
A fortnight into an engagement selling drone-show software to event producers, our rep sent the client a list. Not a status update. A list of things he could not sell without.
If a producer asks us to run the show for them, what does that cost, and what is the smallest swarm worth flying. What does a normal package contain: software, drones, training, or some combination. Is the software a licence or a subscription. If we fly a show for someone, where do the drones travel from, given that Latvia to the Gulf is a long and expensive journey. And what happens to a customer after the training, when something goes wrong at nine at night with a client's audience in the seats.
He finished with the reason: decision makers need to know all of this before they will give any time to a meeting.
That document is the most useful thing produced in the first month of that engagement, and a version of it now goes into every onboarding we run.
The five, generalised
Price shape. Not a price list. The shape: is this a licence, a subscription, a project, or a percentage of something. A rep cannot qualify a budget conversation without knowing which of those he is in.
Minimum viable purchase. The smallest thing a customer can buy that works. Every buyer asks it and it is astonishing how often the vendor has never articulated it.
What is included. Where the boundary sits between product, implementation, training and support, because the buyer's first objection is almost always about the gap between those.
Logistics. Who arrives, from where, how long it takes, and what the customer must provide. In this region, where much of what is sold is delivered by somebody flying in, this question is not administrative. It is often the deal.
Support. What happens after go-live, in local hours, in the customer's time zone, when it breaks. Answering this badly loses deals that were otherwise won.
Why outbound teams fail quietly without it
Nothing dramatic happens when these answers are missing. There is no error message.
Reps improvise. Each of them improvises differently, so three versions of the price shape are now circulating in the market. Meetings get booked with people who agreed to an idea rather than an offer, and the second meeting goes badly for reasons the client attributes to lead quality.
The client, meanwhile, has no idea this is happening, because the questions never reached them. Reps do not like asking; it feels like admitting they have not understood the product.
Make it a deliverable
We now put it in the onboarding as a document the client has to complete, alongside the ideal customer profile and the target list. Nobody dials until it is answered.
Two side effects worth knowing about. It is frequently the first time a client has written those five answers down anywhere, which occasionally starts an internal argument we are glad to have caused. And it converts a nervous rep's private uncertainty into a legitimate professional request, which is a small thing that changes how a new person behaves in their first fortnight.
The document takes an hour. Not having it costs a month.