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Sales

With Customer Success owning the customer after signature, the sales role becomes winning new customers. It has no post-signature role, and ownership of the account in the CRM transfers at signature.

Rules for sales

  • Sell only from the Portfolio. Sales knows exactly what it can sell, the scope of each offering and how it is priced, because all of this has already been agreed by delivery, Customer Success, finance, legal and compliance.
  • Request additions rather than improvise. When customers keep asking for something the Portfolio does not include, sales raises a Portfolio request. See Non-standard requests.
  • Do not sell pure fixed price where AI carries variable cost. Proposals use the three-layer pricing model.
  • Feed the Portfolio. Sales brings back market intelligence: competitor offers, prospect demand and pricing pressure.

How a proposal is built

The proposal follows the three layers: a fixed-price MVP specification, a monthly retainer with the scope of ongoing monitoring, optimisation and tuning, and pricing for hosting and inference consumption including margin.

If the forecast consumption sits inside the risk bands defined in the Portfolio, sales presents the proposal without further finance review. If it sits outside, the proposal goes back to finance for sign-off before it is presented.

Handover

To make the handover at signature clean, the Customer Success Manager meets the customer during the sale. A representative from the relevant Centre of Excellence attends any meeting likely to involve technical detail.

Evidence status

Evaluated against an illustrative scenario. Not yet tested in a live organisation.