A Guided Tour of Atomic’s Sales Process

Many first-time Atomic clients are also first-time custom software buyers. To those first-time buyers, I can imagine that Atomic’s sales process is pretty disorienting. We sell our services in a non-standard, custom way.

If you are experienced in software buying, you might also be interested in a high-level understanding of our sales process. We are atypical in our approach, and our process might be confusing. With this blog post, I hope to give you a guide to our process, step by step, from beginning to end.

In each section, I’m going to share a calendar time estimate of how long each stage will take. As with custom software, there are a lot of variables, so I’ll share the estimates as ranges.

1. Initial Contact

TIME ESTIMATE: 1 BUSINESS DAY

Most folks reach out via the form on our website Contact page. Rest assured, it asks for only the bare minimum of information we need to start the process. This isn’t the time to describe your custom software needs in great detail; that will come in during Triage. Fill it out, and we’ll be in touch within a business day.

Alternate methods of getting in touch include emailing contact@atomicobject.com or giving us a call.

2. Scheduling

TIME ESTIMATE: 1-2 WEEKS

An Atom will review your request, make sure we have the information we need to help you, and confirm that Atomic does the kind of work you’re looking for. If everything looks good, they'll work with you to schedule a meeting with a Managing Partner.

The more flexibility you have in your schedule and the more responsive you are to emails about scheduling, the quicker you'll get access to free consulting from an expert Managing Partner.

3. Triage

TIME ESTIMATE: 30 MINUTES – 1 HOUR

Triage consists of a 30-to-60-minute call between you and one of Atomic’s Managing Partners. Our Managing Partners are a rare mix of software crafting expertise and entrepreneurial spirit. We all have between 10 and 20 years' of experience in our respective software domains, and we are some of Atomic’s longest-tenured employees.

We won’t spend much time talking about Atomic. Instead, we’ll ask questions and do a lot of listening. We’re interested in learning what you want to accomplish with custom software and what kind of relationship you want with Atomic.

Atomic’s Managing Partners aren’t salespeople; our goal isn’t to up-sell you. We don’t have quotas to meet. Our aim in this conversation is to understand whether your current needs are a good fit for our services. If we think we can help, we’ll move you along to the next stage in the process.

If we don’t think we can help, we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction. We’ve been in business for more than 20 years, and we likely know someone at an organization that can help you. We’re happy to serve by making introductions.

4. Discovery

TIME ESTIMATE: 1-4 WEEKS

This phase involves one or more meetings with Managing Partners, where we take a deeper dive into your project, product, and business. The more information you can provide, the more depth we’ll be able to provide in our budgeting, estimating, and proposal process.

In person or over a video call, we'll share a bit about Atomic, our history, and our approach to customs software services. We’ll also show you a few past projects similar to yours; we can provide as much or little of this information as you like.

Once we feel confident that we have enough information to put together a budget model for you, we’ll move on to the next stage.

5. Project Alignment

TIME ESTIMATE: 1-4 WEEKS

During this stage, we look to align with our clients around budget and preliminary scope. This is the most crucial stage of the process. A project isn’t set up for success if its budget and scope aren’t adequately sized.

This stage is one of the features our clients most appreciate about Atomic’s sales process. Some firms play an unethical game at this stage—counting on the fact that once a client has invested $100,000 of an initial project quote, they aren’t going to stop spending until it's completed.

We don’t see an advantage in entering into a proposition that won’t result in a win for all parties. Atomic strives to be transparent and honest about the cost and value of custom software. We refuse to offer a proposal if we don’t think the budget will be sufficient.

To arrive at a responsible budget, one of Atomic’s Managing Partner pairs puts together what we call a “ballpark estimate.” Take a moment to read about what one of these estimates entails:

• How to Set a Budget for Your Custom Software Project
• Get Better Software Estimates by Combining Different Perspectives

These ballpark estimates take our Managing Partner teams between 3 and 24 hours to put together at no cost to you. We’re happy to make this investment in new client relationships! (If you’re curious about the cost of custom software, I encourage you to spend some time with the costing widget on our homepage. It represents real data from the past several years' of client work.)

We ask for a face-to-face meeting with key stakeholders to present this estimate. After that meeting, we’ll share the full budgeting spreadsheet with you. You can make tweaks to the scope and see how that affects your prospective budget.

If you need to get sign-off and approval from many parties within your organization, this stage may take longer than a month. A competitive bidding process may also take longer, as you look for estimates to arrive from multiple vendors.

If we can align around a responsible budget, we move on to the next phase.

6. Nurture

TIME ESTIMATE: 0 – INFINITY

Our typical engagement budget starts at $10,000 and can go as high as $3 million. It can take a while for a project of this size to work its way through your approval process. We understand and will stay connected, nurturing our new relationship through in the procurement process.

It’s completely up to you how long you hang out in this stage. Approve a budget with Atomic, and we’ll move to the next stage as quickly as possible. As long as you remain responsive and let us know what’s going on within your organization regarding a prospective project, we’ll keep you in this stage.

7. Closing

The way Atomic engages legally is straightforward and client friendly:

• We don’t want to own your intellectual property.
• We charge hourly for our time and expertise; this arrangement keeps things simple.
• We prefer to execute a Master Services Agreement to govern the legal relationship between our organizations and a Statement of Work that defines the specific project and budget.

When the paperwork is fully executed, we assign a team and schedule the project start.

8. Handoff to Project Team

Once we have a team assigned and a kickoff date, we hand off the scope to a project team, giving them access to all documents from the sales process. We’ll make introductions via email to a project lead, who will become your main point of contact.

The team will manage scope and budget with you going forward. They will also introduce you to some form of product development process, most likely Agile.

If you are ready to jump into this process, you know what to do.

We look forward to speaking with you soon!