[yread]

It seems that so many of these resources focus on getting from "hello" to "yes". But I'm having major difficulties getting from a "yes" to paid invoices.

Anybody has good resources that would help with getting through legal, it, procurement, privacy reviews? How to help my customers get that new budget approved? How to efficiently find out what is the next problem that needs to be solved?

[technics256]

In my experience, this always comes with vetting the customer and asking the right questions. It's important to ask things like "what's your buying process like" or "what's the procurement process like?" for enterprise type deals.

If the direct customer doesn't know, ask for introductions to the people who might. This gets you ahead of any type of issues that could possibly pop up in these types of situations.

In the end, always start by listening to the customers needs and asking the right questions to understand everything you need to qualify the deal.

[louisswiss]

This is a really common problem!

The easiest way to overcome it is to reframe the problem.

Instead of asking "how do I go from yes to paid invoices", ask yourself "how do I change the default outcome from they don't buy my product to they buy my product".

This involves setting up a shared success plan with the customer.

Mark Fershteyn talks about how to do this in depth on a podcast episode we recorded last year: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to-close-y...

[yread]

Thanks, this is interesting (although Mark was pushing his startup a bit too hard), making a plan for them sounds like a good idea, I'm actually already doing that, I'll start calling it shared success plan.

My problem is that my customers don't know themselves what the process for buying is (oh yeah it's probably over our budget so we have to talk to someone from procurement... last time we talked to Joe but that was 3 years ago and he doesn't work here anymore, I'll have to check with the procurement head). They just don't buy SaaS very often. So, I have to tell them you'll probably need this review and that agreement.