Mid-Market Evaluation, Pilot, and Onboarding

Mid-Market Evaluation, Pilot, & Onboarding Playbook

Guide your champion at a mid-market organization through the evaluation, pilot, and implementation of a SaaS product.

For deals that take several weeks or months, it’s critical to ensure a smooth transition between each stage. Serena Haddad, Account Executive at Accord, uses this MM Evaluation, Pilot & Onboarding playbook to differentiate himself from other vendors and keep everything on track.

Why should I use this playbook?

When engaging a mid-market buying team, you’re competing against other priorities, tools, and your champion’s attention. By introducing a shared playbook in Accord early in the evaluation, you’re able to uncover roadblocks and identify key stakeholders while differentiating yourself from other vendors.

What’s in this playbook?

This playbook covers the entire mid-market buying process from evaluation to continued success, through several stages:

1. Initial Scoping
2. Evaluation
3. Pilot
4. Partnership Formalization
5. Onboarding
6. Team Launch
7. Success on Accord
   

Who is this playbook for?

This playbook is for B2B SaaS sales teams selling to mid-market organizations (200-1000 employees or $10M+ in annual revenue). Typical deal size is above $20k, and deal duration can be anywhere from 2-6 months.

How should I use this playbook?

Serena's advice for getting the most out of this playbook:

• Clearly define success criteria for the pilot
  

Align on the pilot’s success criteria and outline it on your playbook’s summary page. Once you enter the pilot, the evaluation should be over, and you should simply be proving you can do what you said you can do.

• Add a step for your executive sponsor to approve the pilot success criteria

If your executive sponsor is not part of your pilot planning meeting, add a step for them to approve the success criteria. You don’t want to run a pilot that doesn’t answer the questions the executive DM needs to approve the purchase.

• Kick off the formalization process early

If your pilot is going really well, you should start the formalization process as soon as possible. Don’t wait for the pilot to end to talk about compliance or legal. Add value by kicking off later steps early to keep momentum going.

Make sure your champion and main stakeholders have a full view of the timeline. Talk about the go-live timeframe to understand when the best time is to launch the tool – then when you’re planning deadlines for each step, everyone can see how it affects the go-live date. The more the process is integrated with your customer’s business, the more you’ll look like a partner and maximize the success of the evaluation.