Cheaper Deals Move Faster

Cheaper deals move faster.

But government innovation is expensive. By design.

Governments stabilize society. We pay taxes so our governments can protect us from disasters, violence, and poverty.

Being the stabilizers, of course they will build processes to maintain internal stability too. Or in other words, make disruption painfully expensive. They add RFPs, consent agendas, and budget justifications to minimize the risk of change.

So, while software can cost over a million dollars, innovation in govtech can be exponentially more expensive in the other, invisible currencies they need to spend alongside money:

• Time

• Effort

• Risk

• Political capital

• Opportunity cost

Expensive deals move slowly.

Companies approach me when they have already figured some things out: maybe they have an excellent product, or boast raving customer reviews and retention. But they can’t quite figure out sales.

They do a demo, get great feedback, then the deal…just…fizzles out. Or they keep losing RFPs to the same crummy incumbent over and over again. Or they get told their budget request got turned down because they couldn’t justify the cost.

Startups face a paradox: Financial currencies have an inverse relationship with invisible currencies.

A startup’s product may be lightweight in both engineering and financial terms. But if it requires three departments to change how they work and nobody is good at managing that change, it becomes incredibly costly in terms of risk and political capital.

The reverse is true: if the product fits right into an existing workflow and leadership is already bought in, the product is much cheaper.

And cheaper deals move faster.

Salespeople have little control over how much they can charge their buyers in dollars. But they have complete authority over how much they charge their buyers in invisible currencies.

Once this clicked for me, I obsessed about making every one of my deals as dirt cheap as possible in invisible currencies. In practice, it felt like a cheat code.

I always admired the technologists who dedicated their careers to making things cheaper. Every new technology was once prohibitively expensive. Years in the lab trying to fit more processing power into the same size chip, or more photovoltaic capacity in solar panels. They obsess over the sourcing and efficacy of every material inside their product. Invention brought the product to life but innovation made it accessible to the masses.

We can apply the same principles to our work as revenue leaders. We can obsess over every friction point, every bottleneck, every capacity challenge - that keeps us from closing deals and raises the invisible prices of our solutions. We do this because we feel an obligation to do right by our buyers, and cheaper deals delight our buyers. Cheaper deals undercut incumbents.

And cheaper deals move faster.