BRX Pro Tip: Enterprise Sales
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tip. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, we’ve been at this a while and we’ve had the opportunity to serve different levels of customers from a variety of industries. But one thing I’ve come to learn, enterprise sales is different.
Lee Kantor: Yeah. If you’re in professional services and you’re dealing with solopreneurs or entrepreneurs or small firms, usually the owner makes a decision. It’s simple, it’s fast. You’re able to get a yes or no pretty quickly. But if you’re dealing with any type of B2B enterprise-level sale, then there’s going to be a lot of people involved. Sometimes as many as 5 to 10 people are involved in a buying decision.
Lee Kantor: And if you don’t have a marketing and sales process that really understands that and really identifies who the players are, who is the linchpin that can make the decision, who is the champion who really understands your value and will fight for you? Who is the potential saboteur who can derail the deal? What are all the – what are we doing to keep all of those lines of communication open? What are we going to do when one of them goes to us? What are we going to – what’s our fallback? How are we going to kind of open that door back up? What do we have to do to reignite this deal and get all of the stakeholders that you need to get the deal done? If you don’t understand that level of complexity, it’s going to be very difficult for you to close enterprise-level sales.
Lee Kantor: So, you have to understand that this has way more complexity than dealing with just one person. There is not one point of contact. There’s going to be multiple and you have to manage them all and nurture them all over time. And you have to sell each one of them slightly differently in order to make the deal go through.
Lee Kantor: Now, for some businesses, this is not worth the hassle. It’s too much of a hassle. It’s too much of a time waste. But if you can pull this off, this can be very meaningful in terms of revenue. And number two, if you can go through the gantlet to get your thing sold in, that same bureaucracy that it takes to close the deal is the same bureaucracy it takes to get rid of the deal once you’ve sold it in. So, these deals tend to last a lot longer than maybe some of the faster closing deals that you have with solopreneurs. So, it’s definitely worth it for some folks to do it but understand what you’re getting into. You cannot treat an enterprise-level sale like you do of selling to a small firm or an entrepreneur.
