Monday, May 5, 2008

How Many Visits per $100K?

During a call with a prospect today, the idea surfaced that there appears to be a relationship between the number of customer visits (or virtual meetings) required to secure each $100K of an order.

For example, an order of $100K might typically require 2-3 visits, plus an additional customer visit for each additional $100K in the deal. A $1M order would thus consume 10-12 visits.

Comments?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In our experience working with startups there is a limit to how large an initial order you can get. And by going after the larger deal (e.g. corporate wide) you do have to have more meetings which inevitably involve more vendors. To the extent that you can find a department or group that's in a lot of pain and solve their problem you can normally get them to move faster. You don't preclude further orders later once your initial group is happy.

The second problem that happens with larger orders is that the rollout also takes much longer. Since the lag between placing the order and getting the benefit is a good proxy for the prospect's perception of risk in your solution, this increases their desire to work with more established and "safer" vendors. Again, startups are better served to pick a scope they can implement in 5-10 working days.