Step #2 – TRACTION
MOMENTUM
A habit-changing program to turn Feature-sellers into Value-communicators
A training & mentoring program to leverage your new positioning, generate quality demand and close deals faster with more confidence
Attract more of the right customers >> Shorten sales cycles >> Increase win rates and deal value.
After the first full quarter, the time-to-close has improved by 30%. YOY we nearly doubled the number of won deals and improved the average deal size by 42%
– Henk Jan Onstwedder - General Manager Legal & Regulatory - Wolters Kluwer
You got that initial burst of growth and then …
(Let me guess)
- The initial traction you had is fading out
- Your sales team is wasting time on deals that seem to never close.
- Your demos aren’t landing with prospects
- Every quarter it’s getting harder and harder to meet your target
- The confidence and belief of your sales crew isn’t as strong as it used to be
- What used to be a healthy pipeline – 3x, 4x, possibly even 5x of what your target was – appears to be a bunch of tire-kickers
- You’re losing too many deals to mediocre but better-known competitors
- Discounting is starting to feel like your only weapon
- Numbers are under pressure…
What if you could break free and … ?
- Become a well-oiled engine that gets the right leads
- Know how to hit the right nerve in all of your communications
- Get to the core of your customer’s problem
- Comfortably communicate what makes you remarkable
- Connect the big picture and create a sense of urgency
- Uniquely position yourself so you can stop competing on price
- Surprise your competitors
- Lead the shortlist in the right deals
- Tune your pitch, demo, and final offer to win the deal
- Inspire your customers to pay a premium
- 2x your win rates at 42% higher deal value
- Become immune to upcoming growth plateaus
- Create a flywheel that fuels 2,3, or even 4 years of runway
- Get to a situation where you don’t have to do marketing anymore
- Arrive in a situation where you can go to investors not because you need to but because you can
- Grow faster at favorable conditions
Ton has a vast amount of product marketing experience and knowledge, particularly around the crowded ERP space, who challenged us, removed our blind spots and brought out the best in both our marketing, presales, and sales teams. This proved invaluable.
Long story, short: Ton’s input helped us execute our business plan and achieve the company sale and reinvestment of £2 billion.
– Roy Wood - Chief Sales Officer Advanced
After our workshop, my conversion rates went from 5%, i.e., 1 in 20 deals, to 35-40%, possibly even closer to 50%. Compared to last year, today I’m at double the revenue. I’m on a sixth-quarter streak achieving my target.
– Niels Verspui, Market Head South / East Africa, RoomRaccoon
Ton’s program has had a huge impact. It’s enabled us to see better results individually and collectively. It’s also helped us shape and improve our processes. For me, that’s the holy trinity of what I want to happen.
– Adam Clarke - Chief Sales Officer - Roomraccoon
Let’s Build Momentum
When your business has traction momentum, it demonstrates short deal cycles and high win rates with customers that not only buy more and more often, but also act as their best sales team.
If you don’t have those things, you don’t have momentum, which means you’re spinning your wheels in quicksand and digging yourself deeper and deeper and deeper.
Someone once said, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Let me help you gain remarkable traction momentum using a proven framework that has been battle tested for more than a decade.
Ton’s program is exactly what it says on the label – Inspirational.
– Stevie Reffin - Head of Partnerships - Roomraccoon
Benefits of a Momentum-Building Program
- Know how to leverage your new positioning to generate quality demand
- Attract customers willing to pay a premium
- Start to win more
- Increase deal value
- Be the company that doesn’t need to discount
- Close deals faster with more confidence
- Enable marketing and sales to put your best story into practice
- Qualify “in or out” prospects efficiently
- Start to find repeatability in sales and marketing
- Paint the right picture in the mind of your customer so they get the “aha”
and training and mentoring on marketing and sales tactics like…
Creating quality demand (marketing)
- Narrative design
- Point of View development
- Testimonial stories that underpin your new value proposition
- Content strategy, website and campaign tuning
- Lead magnet development
Closing deals faster with more confidence (sales)
- Transforming feature sellers into value sellers
- Leveraging your new Traction Foundation to perfection in connection to actual deals
- Empowering sales to claim pole position in the sales process
- Getting better at both the discovery and qualification of leads
- Developing a library of deal-closing demos
- Writing winning proposals
Ton had a tremendous impact in the way I manage sales nowadays. Life changing program.
– Carlos Vázquez de Castro Payá - Country Manager & Senior Account Executive - RoomRaccoon
The Big Picture
TL;DR—You will have total access to me throughout our time together so that you can close deals and gain the remarkable traction you deserve.
The program includes:
- On the Marketing side:
-
- Bi-weekly office hour video calls to accelerate progress on top priority initiatives to attract more and higher-value leads. Precondition: having done the Traction Foundation Pressure Cooker program
- Ongoing feedback on the plan and deliverables created by the team via Slack / Google Docs
- On the Sales side:
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- 1.5-day Sales Transformation Workshop (onsite) or a multi-week workstream online
- Bi-weekly office hour video calls for reinforcement to ensure sales cycles shorten, more strategic deals are won, and deal value increases
- Ongoing feedback on the plan and deliverables created by the team via Slack / Google Docs
Kickoff Meeting Agenda
- Creation of your private online Workstream environment on my collaborative platform (Mighty Networks)
- Identify who on your team needs to participate in the workstream
- Invite them into the Slack channel / Mighty Networks environment
- Agree on the right time + dates for the onsite Sales workshop or online workstream
- Agree on the schema for the bi-weekly marketing office-hour calls
- Agree on the schema for the bi-weekly office hour calls and introduction mail
Workshops (sales)
- Workshops take place via a 1.5-day onsite session or a multi-week online workstream via Zoom (whatever works best for your situation)
- They’re designed for changing the habits required to run highly-effective discovery, claim pole position in the 1st meeting, and leverage demos as proof-of-value so they accelerate your process.
- We focus on actual opportunities in your pipeline.
Every workshop is prompt-led and combines reflection and hands-on practice around the following areas:
- The art of influencing everyone
- Driving a remarkable Discovery process
- Getting to the essence and sharpening the arguments to progress the deal
- The art of changing perception
- Creating a narrative and structuring your story for impact (which is showcased via a live Pitch Battle)
- The art of storytelling with your product: transforming demos into proof of value
- Creating a dream proposal
You get access to me throughout the full process so that maximum traction momentum is created with your marketing and sales efforts.
The Fine Print
- I will never publish any of your communications, publicly or privately. Anything you share with me will be kept in the strictest confidence.
- You are free to record any call for future reference without asking me first.
- You are free to share any of my communications however you like without asking me first.
- You are welcome to call me any time without an appointment, but you’ll probably get my voicemail (I’m on Zoom a lot). Leave a message and I’ll get back to you ASAP.
- If we need to talk real-time, we can schedule a mutually convenient time via a special Calendly link.
- If you have a truly urgent question, you can text me on my personal cell number.
- Payment is due 100% in advance to begin the program,
- If you’re not happy with our first week for any reason, you can ask for your money back. After that, no refunds under any circumstances.
- You can pause the clock in the event of a family emergency or something of similar seriousness, but not for vacation or because you “got busy.”
The Pitch Battles were both fun and challenging. We walked away with a first class presentation focused on the client and one that separated us, our company and our solution from the crowd. I would love to work with Ton again in the future.
– Ben Gordon - Business Development Manager - Unit4
Pricing
My Traction Momentum is a six-month coaching program. It is only available to companies that have completed the Traction Foundation Pressure Cooker program.
The investment is €30,000 or 6x €9.500 if in combo with Traction Foundation
It’s not uncommon for my clients to recoup their entire investment before they complete the program.
You can apply using the button below but before you do, let me first say this…
The Traction Momentum program is not for everyone. We go deep. You need to be prepared to change habits, routines, and processes that you’ve been addicted to for years.
Change can be scary. It’s hard for everyone. If you’re ready to end the stress of not enough traction, you have to change something. If you think you’re ready, here’s the link to apply:
I can say without a doubt that the process that I learned from Ton has taught me a way of thinking about the materials that I am presenting to my clients in a way that has changed my career.
– Christopher Brewer - Strategic Industry Architect - Unit4
100% Money-Back Guarantee
It’s free to apply and there’s no risk or obligation. If you are accepted into my Traction Momentum program, I offer a 100% money-back guarantee. I don’t want your money if we’re not a good fit. If you’re not happy for any reason at any moment during our first week, just let me know and I’ll refund your money in full.
But don’t take my word for it…
Check out these long-form testimonials from past and present clients:
Testimonial from Adam Clarke:
I’d highly recommend it. Our experience was overwhelmingly positive. In pure measurables, we can see improvement, not just in sales numbers, but in broader metrics. Even in things that are slightly harder to track around people’s attitudes and their conversations.
Ton’s program has had a huge impact. It’s enabled us to see better results individually and collectively. It’s also helped us shape and improve our processes. For me, that’s the holy trinity of what I want to happen.
For me, this was an opportunity to really climb inside our business a little bit more and really challenge ourselves.
Rather than sort of generic repurposed sales content, we talked about our problems, our challenges, our successes every day. That’s why this was such a success for us.
My sales team received the biggest benefit. It gave them the extra 10% of confidence they needed to fly.
We just needed some outside help getting certain team members to move from the back of the pack to our kind of leaders.
You just see their confidence is now sky-high and manifests itself in a really nice way.
– Adam Clarke - Chief Sales Officer - Roomraccoon
Testimonial from Roy Wood, Chief Sales Officer at Advanced:
When we began looking into getting outside help for our pitches and propositions, three things struck me as relevant in Ton’s CV:His market background experience in ERP. The fact that he had a diversity of experience through the go-to-market value chain, so he wouldn’t just be coming at it from a narrow lens. And thirdly, there’s just the “can we work with this person? Does he see something? Is there a connection? And would he fit in culturally?” And the answer was a resounding yes.
And while Ton checked all the boxes, so to speak, he also had the ability to challenge us, which is always something we have to embrace when working with a third party.
Today, there is clearly a shift in the way that we see pitches. I still remember how Ton taught us to stand out from the crowd in the way he put together our proposition.
We now have a scoring system that we do internally. And that’s based on a lot of the questions he asked and from him helping us with our playbook and methodology. It’s now part of our own advanced DNA.
Ton also gave us a lot of structure which we were able to take and make an advanced playbook and even more so build a legacy from, which was invaluable.
Ratios in so many of the products we were working on have gotten better. He allowed us to start measuring our win rates which have since moved up 5% across the board over the last two years.
In certain product lines, we’ve seen a shift from 10-15% But we’ve got 45 product lines, so when you average it all out 5% is actually huge if you think about it.
That all starts back from evaluating the proposition and executing the roadmap to make modifications.
We’ve gotten up to speed with productivity. It’s now part of our onboarding and ramp time and even our cross-sell awareness.
As far as Ton’s in-person charisma and presence and willingness to be flexible and work with us, that turned out to be a no-brainer.
And while he always maintained an outsider’s perspective, he made himself a part of Advanced. We felt like there was nothing we couldn’t share. That manifested most overtly in the feedback he was able to give us. No one ever took his feedback personally – certainly credit to our team for that but also to Ton for the way he delivered it so that we could take it on board and implement it.
He delivered a winning ratio, professionalism and a methodology to what we do.
I refer Ton to people in my network because I’m confident he can see what’s not working with your company, that he can do the data research, and the space research, even if it’s in a different timezone and geography. He “gets” the market.
His direct experience in the ERP space allows him to add context where with his past experiences he can anecdotally deliver the insights he’s gleaned from other businesses, which I think brings a sense of credibility to it, then someone else that wouldn’t be in the marketplace.
– Roy Wood - Chief Sales Officer - Advanced
Testimonial from Johanna van der Lee
One of the things that I learned from Ton is that asking questions and being truly interested in the whys does not only belong to customer and product research but also to value-driven Sales.
Ton is an outstanding trainer. His training was perfectly planned and included next-level theoretical background and a lot of conversations and exercises. I liked that he asked a lot of questions to each of us which made the training really customized and kept everybody on board.
I enjoyed the training immensely and can highly recommend it to everybody who wants to make a difference.
– Johanna van der Lee - Senior consultant Legal Software - Wolters Kluwer
Testimonial from Henk-Jan Onstwedder
With the help of Ton, we’ve revamped our sales approach, from product-driven to value-driven. After the first full quarter, our time-to-close has improved by 30%. YOY we nearly doubled the number of won deals and improved the average deal size by 42%. That’s great sales productivity improvement.
When I joined Wolters Kluwer, we were working with a team who was somewhat of a one-trick pony team. They were fairly good at selling one product line, until suddenly, they had to sell two. Which put us in a quandary of which solution we should position with the client.
Needless to say, the team struggled.
Ordinarily, we’d show a product and all its features hoping there would be something in it for the client, and, if so, we’d see if we could make the deal. But with two products, that didn’t work as well anymore. It called for a completely different discussion, and it was fairly obvious that the team was not used to having those discussions.
The magnitude of all that made us realize that we needed to start a new initiative. To start a transition from where we were to where we wanted to be. We also came to the realization that if we continued the way we were working, we would no longer be successful.
At the beginning of the transition, we were looking at win rates of roughly 20% in both opportunity numbers and opportunity value. Looking at it from a glass half-empty situation, we were also losing 80% of the deals.
The other thing we noticed was that it took a really long time to close opportunities – both the ones we were winning, but especially the ones we were losing, which is an equally important metric. The whole process, from top to bottom, was inefficient and ineffective.
Even more so because the products we were selling weren’t that complex. Or expensive! So there was really no excuse for long sales cycles.
Suffice it to say that working with Ton has been transformational for the entire team.
When I first called him, I was looking for a coach. Someone who could help us with our product demos, but also with an understanding that, at some point, we had to start thinking about how we could better understand what our clients really need.
What Ton suggested was broader than I had originally anticipated. But it was the right thing for the team to do because it focused on where we were, product driven, to where we wanted to be, which was client driven – understanding the ultimate needs of the client.
It was a true game-changer for everybody on the team. To date, we still talk about it, and we still apply the lessons that we all learned together.
The biggest win came when we realized there was no opportunity that we HAD to accept before the discovery call. We now understand that the beginning of the sales cycle is actually meant to disqualify – rather than qualify – as quickly as possible.
It’s a complete 180º where we now say, “Let’s assume that this is NOT going to be our client.” As a consequence – and a fairly dramatic one at that – we now work on much fewer opportunities – almost half compared to what we did two years ago!
On the flip side, the stuff that we are working on is much more likely to go in our direction.
Bottom line: we went from win rates that were in the low 20% to over 40% – yes, our win rate doubled.
Even if you look at the value of the opportunities we were winning, we were in the low 20s. As opposed to where we’re at now in the 50% range. So we’re winning more higher value opportunities as well.
All the while, our average deal size has tripled over the last two years.
And we’re no longer losing against direct competitors. We still lose every now and again because there’s a no-decision, but we don’t lose to our competitors. Compared to two years ago, that is a massive, massive change.
One thing to add: Turnover has reduced drastically.
Ton’s process has helped us get internal recognition from the team, which has led to other parts of the business becoming interested in the change process that we’ve been going through.
Obviously, I would definitely recommend Ton, but to get the outcome you’re hoping for, there has to be a willingness to change.
If you truly, truly, truly believe that it’s not about selling products, but rather, how you sell instead of what you sell, then I think it’s the right program.
– Henk Jan Onstwedder - General Manager Legal & Regulatory - Wolters Kluwer
Still have questions?
Q: How do I know if I’m a good fit for the Traction Momentum coaching approach?
We schedule a 30-minute exploration call to ensure that the program will solve the challenges you’re facing. If not – I’ll tell you.
Q: What do I have to do to qualify?
Schedule a 30-minute exploration call where I’ll ask questions about your SaaS business, your aspirations and the challenges you want to overcome.
NOTE: If you are still desperately seeking product market fit, my Traction Momentum coaching program probably wouldn’t be a good investment. I can advise you about other options though.
Q: May I speak with a couple of references about their time with you?
If you find a testimonial you relate to, feel free to email me (ton.dobbe@valueinspiration.com) and I’d be happy to connect you to them.
Q: What is the average ROI peer B2B SaaS companies are experiencing after completing the Traction Momentum program with you?
The bottom line ROI depends greatly on the client and how the deliverables from the program are implemented. I do offer a program that bundles Traction Foundation, Traction Momentum and Traction Resilience that includes a remarkable traction guarantee.
At the high end, I’ve had clients exceed their revenue aspirations. Some have seen their sales cycles decline by months, doubled their win rates and increased average deal size grow in the high double digits.
At the low end, I’ve had people not commit to the implementation of the work after the completion of their program and get little direct financial ROI. But even those folks are happy with the educational aspect and sense of control they gain over their business.
Q: How long are the workshop sessions?
For Sales: 1.5 days if onsite, up to 9 weeks (1.5 hours a week) if online, followed by bi-weekly office hour calls
For Marketing: bi-weekly office hour calls
Q: Do we have to use Zoom for the accountability calls?
No. We can use any online Meeting platform that you have a strong preference for (f.ex Microsoft Teams, Google Meet,…).
Q: Can we use video for the workshop sessions?
Yes – but only at the beginning and end. For the biggest portion of the workshop, we’ll use online collaboration tools (I use Mural in combination with Google Suite) to work on the deliverables together.
Q: What happens after I commit to the program?
I’ll send you a contract and an invoice. Once you have paid the invoice I’ll send you a Calendly calendar link to schedule our kickoff call. At which time we will agree on a game plan, who in your team and which customers should participate, and set your first assignment.
Q: I still have questions!
Just shoot me an email and ask: ton.dobbe@valueinspiration.com
Who is this guy?
(And what makes him so remarkable?)
Ton, here. I was born in The Netherlands, one of the flattest countries in Europe – and the son of a tulip farmer.
Oddly enough, I learned a lot about entrepreneurship from spending my spare time working in the fields with my father.
As honorable and humble as his profession was, I aspired to something bigger. So in 1991, I switched to the software industry. In the years that followed, I rose through the ranks to becoming globally responsible for product marketing, product management, analyst relationships, and ultimately chief evangelist for an international enterprise software firm.
Throughout my career, I saw firsthand the impact that could be delivered when product marketing was applied in the right way. Everything simply became easier.
The second life lesson I was taught was about leverage, i.e., creating a 1+1=3 effect.
Today, this happens every time we align every aspect of our software business (from product development to marketing to sales to services, and support) around the change we seek to make in our market.
Having been immersed in the business of software for so long, I came to redefine what I thought of as success beyond the metric of size, and here’s what I mean by that:
There are thousands of business software companies that really are creating significant impact and doing remarkable things. However, they aren’t necessarily the ones that are getting the most venture capital funding or growing the fastest.
That’s why I founded Value Inspiration in September of 2017 with a mission to help tech entrepreneurs unleash the remarkable effect inside their business and get the recognition they deserve. Are you ready? Let’s do this 🙂
If you could change, you’d have done it by now
I think it was Tony Robbins who said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
Don’t waste another year suffering from win rates still hovering at 10% – and even the 10% feels like you still had to “buy your customers” through discounting.
When you’re ready to start surprising your customers, your investors, yourself, and even your competitors, apply for admittance.
Don’t worry, there’s no risk or obligation and it’s free to apply.
Act now. Seriously.
Availability is limited. I usually only take on a handful of new private coaching clients per year. If you are considering private coaching, apply now to start the process.
Working with Ton over the last few years has been a very productive experience.
Ton has assisted Advanced in our business transformation as one of the UK’s largest software businesses.
His clarity of thought, insight and market experience in ERP has been a real asset to us as we have re-shaped ourselves into a ‘remarkable business’.
– Roy Wood - Chief Sales Officer - Advanced