- [Ray] Welcome to SRG Insights, where we answer your questions about sales,
sales management, and sales training. And today's question is…
- [woman] How do you become successful at enterprise sales? What are the biggest
challenges people are experiencing?
- Well, that's a great question and one that I think is really worth breaking down
into some of the components. Because I think even the idea of,
"Well, what do we mean by enterprise sales or a complex sale, and what are some of
the challenges we run into? How do we address those?" let's take a look at
several of those components. I think the first is, when we define a complex or
enterprise sale, it's typically...has a longer sales cycle.
There may be an RFP involved.
It really has a lot more complexity in how to go about it than a simple transaction,
or one that we might close in a single call with a single stakeholder.
The thing to think about is they're often much larger value.
They're longer-term relationships that we may be able to build with the client,
and the stakes are higher. So there are all sorts of reasons that we want to
pursue those, but there is some complexity that comes with that.
The second piece that I think we see often with an enterprise sale is that there are
more stakeholders involved, and there have been a lot of benchmarking done around
this topic, and the average sale I think typically has over five influencers,
five stakeholders involved. And I've seen recently, that's up to six or six and a
half stakeholders involved in a complex sale. What that means is, if we're only
talking to one or two people in that organization, we're missing a whole host
of people who have their own needs, their own concerns, and likely will influence
the outcome of that deal. So if we haven't taken the time to map the account,
understand who all those stakeholders are, understand what they care about,
and gain access to them, we're really leaving a lot of things up to chance.
So we really need to understand not just the individuals we're talking to,
but who else is going to have a vote in that decision-making, and ultimately
figure out creative ways of getting an introduction, getting a conversation,
inviting them into the presentation so that we can accommodate and account for
that in our final presentation or proposal. The third aspect I'd like to
cover is just in terms of the different types of business drivers and concerns
that the constituents may have. So in other words, if we have these multiple
stakeholders involved, they may care about very different things.
And we talk about an impact model as a way of understanding their problem and
understanding the impact of the solution that we're bringing, it may affect their
image, money, productivity in the account, maybe the competitive advantage,
also customer satisfaction, or even the total cost of ownership.
There are a number of different components that our solution may bring to help solve
problems. But the different constituents are going to care about very different
things. As we might imagine, the chief financial officer, caring about
different things than the chief marketing officer or the chief information officer.
We need to understand all of those stakeholders' needs, their priorities,
and how our solution can uniquely address those needs. Because again,
they may all be voting, but they may have a very different perspective and a
different requirement that they're trying to satisfy. So really understanding the
impact of their problem and the impact of the solution is critical to being able to
approach those enterprise sales. The final piece that I think makes enterprise sales
challenging is just that, it's a more sophisticated buyer. By definition,
they're making larger procurements, larger purchases, and they're probably much more
informed, much more knowledgeable about what's out there. And in fact,
they may have professional purchasing or procurement involved who are going to put
yet another set of requirements on getting that deal done. So I think we need to
understand what that purchase process looks like. What are all the stages that
are involved in working with that particular organization? And ultimately,
how can we successfully work with procurement to get the deal done,
even after the stakeholders that bought into our solution? So I think that really
breaks down to treating procurement as a stakeholder, as another influencer in that
deal, understanding what they're trying to accomplish to mitigate risk,
lower prices, improve the outcomes for the organization. How can we propose so that
we meet those solutions without having to lower our price or give a lot of
concessions in the final negotiations? So I think those are four aspects where
selling and enterprise sales can be more challenging, but can also yield very high
and very great benefits to the organization and to the sales
professional. There's every reason to chase it. But hopefully,
these are some ideas that you can use to really respond and be prepared to go after
those enterprise sales and win them successfully.
♪ [music] ♪