Close Enterprise Deals Quicker - How to Land Bigger Fish Faster

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:07

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to ‘The Sales Scoop’. This is a weekly live show for the founders of technology based businesses who want to improve how they sell. My name is Alastair Cole. I have a degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and two decades experience in sales and marketing. And I'm delighted to introduce today my co-host and co-founder, Kiran Gill. Hello, Kiran.

Kiran Gill 0:39

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Kiran Gill. I have 25 years of experience in sales, in sales enablement, Sales Operations, Business Development, so I've covered all across the spectrum. And I love doing complex selling. So it's great to be here today.

Alastair Cole 0:57

Thanks, Kiran. And that is a big aspect of what we're talking about today, complex selling. We're talking about closing enterprise deals faster, easier said than done. We'll be taking comments and questions on LinkedIn live and feed them through to the show so far away, if you've got something you'd like to ask us, like I said, today's show is about closing enterprise deals quicker. Which you know, every business dreams of landing bigger deals, landing bigger fish, don't they? My friend, how easy or difficult is that?

Kiran Gill 1:37

It's really difficult, but it's one of those things I think most businesses inspire to do, because it's, it's the same, you feel like it's the same amount of work that you have to put into a small deal as you have to do to a big deal. However, you know, it's never that easy. I've worked in selling enterprise size deals for the majority of my career, and it's, it is, it isn't for the paint hearted, it can take a long time. Deals can slip very easy. There's so many things at play at the same time. So a little bit more challenging when it comes to selling intent to price size clients than it is into smaller businesses.

Alastair Cole 2:14

Yeah. And you know, if you're struggling to progress deals in your pipeline right now, then this is definitely the show for you. You know, closing enterprise size deals is the dream of many businesses, and it can have a phenomenal impact beyond revenue in terms of confidence, momentum, and investment that can be landed. So it has an enormous positive impact on businesses, but it can only really be accelerated if you've got the right pieces in place, and you've had the right pieces in place for a while. You know, if you've got something in the media pipeline now, you might be able to accelerate it with some of the stuff we're going to cover, but a lot of this is going to be about prep work in to ensure that you are ready to go to market and hunt down and find and close those those enterprise deals. And so we've, we've boiled it down to five big levers that you can pull right, massive levers that you can pull that will accelerate those enterprise deals. And the first one is about being ready with enterprise grade collateral. And for me, Kiran, this is, this is really about kind of the intention a business will make about, you know, what we're going to, you know, level up. We're going to look to close larger deals than we did last year. We're going to change our business. We're going to go after those big fish. And there's a real psychology to that, you know, it's about making a decision and getting everybody on board together and being ready. And when I think about the kind of readiness of collateral, you know, I immediately think about the website and social media profiles. But beyond that, it's about undertaking an assessment of where your collateral is right now. Where is it punching? Where does it need to be better? And so running through an audit, right? Doing an audit of your sales collateral, I think, is absolutely critical, because you've got to know where you are. And then it's the development of that content, right? Those different content pieces, whether it's a website or a two pager. All these assets are needed. You know, when you're going out to market to close enterprise deals, my friend, What? What? What? What assets do you want to have that are ready to go out? What would you want in your armory?

Kiran Gill 4:36

It's more about having it bespoke and understanding who you're selling to in the buying process, in the buying process. So you're going to have a decision making group that are people that you're trying to engage with. Each of these people will have their own kind of KPIs, their own understanding, their own value prop. So it's not just one piece of generic content that will hit everybody perfectly. Exactly, and God, if that happened, that would be amazing. Unfortunately, a CFO probably wants things more to do with ROI. Somebody who's in tech probably wants to know more about implementation. So every piece of content that you have has to be tailored and made for that specific person that you're going to be sending, because if it isn't, it's not going to hit that site. Also, from your website point of view, your website might be tailored to bring in the sea level. However, it might be people at a lower level who are first researching your company to see whether you are a right fit for them. Yeah. So you might speak at the sea level level and say, Oh, we want to talk to, you know, the sea levels of these companies with all these problems. However, the first person who looks at your website is probably going to be somebody who is a lot lower down in the pecking order, and those messages might not resonate with them. You might be, well, okay, these guys don't do what you do what we need. So you can miss things. So there's lots of things to keep in mind.

Alastair Cole 5:55

Yeah, I think that's that's a great shout, because, you know, you need to have your, you know, home page and your website geared up for enterprise across all the pages, you're also going to need dedicated landing pages for individuals from within that complex buying group, because there are many of them, and they have different needs. And like you just said, Kiran, you know that the kind of tailored content, the collateral that's going to be sent out as part of outreach campaigns or nurturing messages that all need to be super high quality enterprise grade templates that then can be bespoke and tailored for individuals. And I think you know, as well as going out with those kinds of more marketing and kind of creative collateral being enterprise really is also about playing at a higher level. So understanding that data accuracy is important, compliance is important at these levels. You know you need, you need to think, you're thinking about compliance on one page, product specification, assets, and then using, you know, serious, serious usage of tools like CRM and integrations there so that you're able to handle more people and the bigger amount of information that comes with enterprise deals. So fantastic. Thank you. I feel like we've that kind of covered being ready, which for me, is more of a mindset, really, than anything else, but there's a lot of work to be done in assets and externally to be ready. The second big lever, right? Once, once you're kind of made that decision as a business, it is about your strategic choices, and this is about targeted account strategy, right? I know this is a big area, a big area of preference for you. Talk to us about what is targeted account strategy here, and how can we use

Kiran Gill 7:42

it? Okay, so there are two typical types of deals that you're looking at when you're in sales. There's ones that land on your desk, and especially at enterprise level, and there's ones that you go out there. There's a great saying that you have in Africa where they say, Did you cook the deal, or where you served the deal? Now the difference there, what they are trying to say is, if you're cooking it, that means you've had something to do with the RFP that's landed on your desk. You've been able to manipulate that, maybe even trigger that RFP, because you're the one who instigated that enterprise level client. Now, if you're the one who's been served the deal and you suddenly get this RFP and it hits your desk and it's like, whoa. We didn't even have to do any sales, and we've been asked to do this proposal, the chances are you're going to lose that deal because somebody else has instigated that deal. And that's why I love that saying in Africa, you need to cook the deal. So targeted account strategy means that you're out there actively looking at accounts and triggering that conversation for your service or your piece of you know, your technical, whatever you're selling, whether it's the IT platform, whatever it is, you're the one that triggered that. The chances are, at enterprise level, they're not going to purchase your product straight off you. What they're going to do is say, Okay, let's have a look at some of the competition out there. Is this the right one? However, if you've started that conversation in the right places, then you'll be able to trigger that conversation and make sure that you're ahead of the curve where everybody else is then filling out the proposal document thinking they've got a chance. You're the one who's already gone in there and made this perfect for yourself. So having that strategy makes sure that you trigger the right people. So you might have 10 or 15 companies that you're interested in targeting. All of these companies will be at different levels, at points when you can go in there, and different people will be in different places, and you need to, and that's about being targeted. It is all about a lot of work. The cost of acquisition on this kind of doing this is high. However, the win rates are a lot higher. So there's two ways of doing it. You can either go down the referral process, where you're the last to the race, or you can do a targeted account or cost higher but the effort normally pays off. Up,

Alastair Cole 10:01

yeah, and I think that that targeted approach, right? Targeted account strategy approach, you've outlined, it kind of is exactly what enterprise deal hunting is all about. It's about saying, you know, I can't wait for people to come. I'm going to have to go out and take the lead. Yeah, sure. It's more effort to go and look for a company and search out the buying group and do that research. Yeah, it takes more time. But the prize is much bigger. And B, everybody else is going to be there too. So you've got to, you've got to be, you know, you've got to, you've got to bring the insights. And I think that is another big area, you know, enterprise deals, much less self service, much more kind of like sales teams, and so you've got to bring the insights, right? You've got to bring, like we talked about in that first point, it was about enterprise grade collateral. Now you have to bring that collateral, those insights, right to the right to the right people. So, you know, what's your view on how you would prioritize, right? If you've got different companies you're looking at, or different individuals, how would you prioritize, you know, your high value targets, and how do you choose who to go out to first?

Kiran Gill 11:13

I think you need to have an understanding of who's going to use your tool and who's got that pain point for, for, you know, for whatever you're selling, and who's going to be influenced by that. Now, there might be people within the buying process, and we'll get on to that in a bit. We'll have a pull on what decision will be made, but they might not be using the tool. So initially it might be that you're targeting the users or the line of business managers of those users to say, hey, we can make that. We can make your team's life so much easier if you use our software and from there, but the decision is not going to lie with those people. The decision then gets pushed out. So you might start at a smaller level, or you might go top down. You might go after the C level of the CEO, who's sitting there on their private jet, and then suddenly gets an article that you've now put into some magazine, and they read it, and they go, Wow, this sounds amazing. This, this, this case study from this other company that's made millions implementing this software. We need to get this too, and that's another way of doing it. So the thing is, enterprise selling, and this is something I wanted to bring up when we were talking before was enterprise, selling is really a team game from your side as well. You going in there with a one person sales strategy where you're trying to cover everybody is so difficult when, when I've sold into enterprise, we were normally a team of four or five of us working on one account. Now everybody has, you might have a person who's the spearhead, who's going to be the person who's orchestrating this, and this is why you need a CRM system that does this for you, but you're going to have other people who are solution experts, pre sales, marketing experts, making content for you. It's a team game. And when you land an Enterprise Client, the chances are there's probably four or five of you being involved trying to land this big whale. You can't do it on your own.

Alastair Cole 13:08

And I think that also underlines your focus on targeted account strategy, right? You need everybody in that team on the right bus going in the same direction, you know, all pulling together. So you know that that makes perfect sense. Let's move on to the third area. So you've got your organization and your assets ready. Everybody is aligned. You've picked out your ideal customer profiles and the individuals in the complex buying group, and you've mapped that all out through your targeted account strategy, and now you're, you're underway. Now it's absolutely critical that you're able to align really early with the right people, you know, the right individuals at the buyer's end. And you know, we talk about champions quite a lot, and finding them early. Who else do you know? How would, how would you refer to Kiran to those individuals that are the most, the most senior executives. What are they called? And how do you go and get them early,

Kiran Gill 14:15

right, selling into enterprise? The chances are, and this is new data coming out from Gartner and HubSpot and places like that. It used to be that five or six people were involved in an enterprise buying process. They're saying it's now 11 or 12 that potentially but just like an iceberg, the chances are you're probably not going to see eight of them, so you're probably only going to be selling to four people actively in front of you, but there's eight people behind you making sure who are going to be involved in that process of making the decision on whether that tool or service is going to be put into their company. So this is basically making it harder for you guys to sell. So when you are building collateral, you've got to understand or give. Collateral, the chances are that that champion or the person you're selling to is going to then pass that collateral on to other people within the company. So that collateral that you give them is pretty much marketing material for them to market you internally to people that you don't see. So that's why it's so important that you pick the right person when you're going after them. So if you're selling financial software, you're probably going to go after the financial department, and you're probably going to go after the CEO, the financial officer. If you're selling HR software, you're probably going after the HR team. And it's quite easy for who you should be. The people you won't see are legal, procurement, you know, operational, potentially, all these people in the background that are part of the buying process have massive say on whether they're going to bring your tool in or not, and suddenly you don't know why your tool hasn't been chosen. You think, Well, I spoke to them and they loved it. However, what happens is the people who are making the real decision procurement are saying, Hold on, we've already got a vendor on our list that does this. Let's use them instead and not use this one.

Alastair Cole 16:06

Yeah, and that's a great example of why you do need to be aligning with senior executives early to work out to get this information as quickly as possible. You don't want to get too far down the line and realize the deal is not going to go anywhere or you're missing a key piece of information. And I think getting them to those senior executives, obviously, you need to identify them first, but then they need to be treated in a very bespoke way. You know, value propositions need to be shared, like you've said, with them, the insights need to be funneled to them that are right for them and their role. You know, you might need to reach out and try and schedule, you know, introductory meetings, to spend a little time with key senior stakeholders. You know that that's very important, but you've got to find out who they are, get close to them, understand their personal challenges, as well as their company mission, in order that the deal is accelerated. I think this is one of the biggest areas right we see so often where this bit hasn't been done, and so the deal just stalls. Forget going any quicker. It just is dead in the water because individual X hasn't been connected with their very important view and has not been sought. So the challenge is that it's difficult to know what you don't know, so you've got to use your intuition, ask lots of questions, and speak to everyone else in the buying group in order to work out who the champions and the senior stakeholders are. Let's keep going, my friend, we covered off the importance of early alignment with senior executives. Our fourth area, as the deal is progressing, you've aligned with them, you're in the right company. Now, it's about prioritizing which deal is next and qualifying your deals properly. Talk to us about that. Why? Why is Cole How is qualifying deals going to accelerate closing enterprise deals. Kiran,

Kiran Gill 18:04

Top sellers and top performers qualify their deals. As simple as that, I've worked with too many people. I've done it myself. If you qualify a deal, you understand where you are, you understand what needs to be done, and you know where to prioritize. If you don't qualify, your ad hoc You're making it up on the way. And the chances are you might get lucky and you might close it, the chances are you probably won't, because you don't understand what's happening in the deal. So that's why a qualification metric or qualification methodology is a great thing to implement into your buying process. And if you're doing targeted account strategy, you will have to have a fuel qualification methodology that underpins that, together with a sales methodology that will probably help you sell into it. So these things are all pillars, a part of trying to make sure that you are able to close into enterprise clients. Because going back one step and saying, Well, we've got maybe six or seven people we're selling into you need to help an understanding of where the six or seven people are in the deal. You know, does John from finance have the same need as Rachel from marketing? And what is their level compared to their level? Once you start looking at the deal in as a whole, you suddenly then realize, hold on, I haven't seen Frank from it, and they're at a lower state, and they're going to be a serious decision maker now, only then, once you've started qualifying the deal at that kind of level, then you suddenly understand that where you are with the whole deal. And the great thing is, and one thing we didn't pick up on in the lab with the great thing with tools now, with Sales Navigator or Apollo AI, you can actually do stakeholder analysis, where you can get a great understanding of all the people within the buying group, even though that you don't speak to them. And you can start thinking about how I am going to qualify? How do I make sure that they have the right information, they have the right need and we have all the right collateral. To make sure that we can push these people further down the qualification process, so that when you get to a point when the decision has to be made and your business case has to be written, that you guys understand exactly what needs to be done.

Alastair Cole 20:14

Yeah, and that is that scoring right is really important, and there's different ways you can do it. There's band and Medic and lots of different scoring frameworks for deal qualification. And we've got a band Plus model for our revenue. Coach.ai platform. That is a large component of that is deal scoring and deal qualification and revenue coach.ai it's a sales, sales coach, for the price of a coffee, it automatically scores your deals and gives you next best action. So if you're interested in deal qualification as a tool, you can check out revenue coach.ai and in there we've got our kind of nine drop downs, right? We're looking at needing authority, you know, the engagement you've got with a buyer, and six other things that we use to score a deal. And I find that very easy, because that tells me exactly what the next deal is and the next move I should be making. So, you know, in terms of, in terms of qualifying the deals properly. How regularly is that something that people should be doing, or businesses should be doing here? And if they want to close enterprise deals, how often should they be qualifying the deals?

Kiran Gill 21:32

I think realistically, you need to be qualifying continuously. Now, whether that's once a week or once every two weeks, depending on your deal cycle. Now, if you're doing a deal that's going to span over a year, you might have need in the first three or four weeks, but that need might slip down as you go down. So you know, we're talking about selling deals quicker. So the great thing is, you should continuously qualify. Now, some of these qualification metrics, even though you might say they've got a high need for it. That might be a high need today, but come three months down the line, suddenly other things are priority, and suddenly the need for this solution or this problem they had has slipped down the pecking order, and now they've been told something else is a better need. So you might be still saying, yes, the needs are there, but however the needs have gone by, then all the values might have even changed . You know, your tool hasn't got AI implemented in it, and suddenly a new competitor comes along. So the value of your tool now has come down. So no longer, three months ago, you were number one in position. Now suddenly you're number two,

Alastair Cole 22:36

yeah, and those things are really important to regularly, like you say weekly or fortnight, you've got a longer deal. So weekly checking in is still high? Is it VAT? Is the value that we are, we've demonstrated, still understood by the people in the buying group? Because sometimes that changes. But then other things, like what you talked about, timeline, competition, authority, if you use a presentation, negotiation, closing, all these things need to be scored to give a proper deal. Qualification, overview, revenue. Coach.ai, does that. Let's move on to the fifth area. Right the fifth big lever you can pull to accelerate closing enterprise deals. And it's about the proposals, the business cases that you make need to be led by the impact that that your solution is going to deliver. And this is a big area that we see where at the end of the deal, or everybody's in line, and the business case is too fluffy, if it's not specific enough about the benefit that it's going to deliver, the impact, the outcomes that it's going to deliver. And you know, for me, it's about really, in order to build that, that great business case, you've got to fully understand the business challenges and the key performance metrics of the buyer, which hopefully you've got as part of your targeted account strategy. We've got to understand their challenges and then your solutions have to be 100% tailored to that, with ROI calculations and, you know, customized proposal templates and value propositions for individuals. So there's a lot that needs to go into that, but ultimately, it's about reviewing it across the team, because, like you say, closing enterprise deals is a team game. You need lots of people to do it, so everybody needs to add their contribution, their value, to that business case. In order that it's absolutely sensational. You've written a few business cases in your time. My friend, can you think of any areas that you would want to add in, or areas that are lacking in that business case that would help accelerate closing enterprise deals?

Kiran Gill 24:50

Definitely, I think it's something that you've also touched on and taught me another time, and something I've used all the ways, is there has to be a storyline. There has to be a. Thread that goes through your business case, and that's what you're doing. You're presenting your proposition to the customer. You're taking them on a journey of where they've been and what they're currently you know, probably they're facing at this moment, the challenges. And then what you're doing is showing you how your solution, potentially, in a demo, how your solution is going to take them from where they are to where they're going to go. What is going to be the best place ever? And that simple business case comes from all of the things that we've been talking about today. Having a great understanding of what the client is doing, what their problems are. You've done all your homework with your attack, targeted account strategy, and your deal qualification actually brings the whole point of a deal. Qualification is that we're bringing all that information out for your business case. What is their need? You know? What is the problem with right? What? What are the problems that Rachel in marketing has, and how can our great new martech solution help her do all these things, and also, what about joining finance? If she's able to do this work quicker. That means she's going to make more money for the company that helps join in finance, and it's really easy to implement. And Jake, we won't have a problem, because it's going to implement straight in with your ERP system, and you're ticking off all these people in your business case. Yeah,

Alastair Cole 26:14

that's it. And so that's a great way that the targeted account strategy and deal qualification is directly feeding into that impact driven proposals, those business cases that are actually going to really make a big difference, right when, when it comes to assessing whether it is you, the buyer is going with you, or a different a different solution. So those are our five big levers that can be pulled. You know, obviously the earlier ones are about preparation, you know, being ready in the strategy. And then in the middle there you're talking about, you know, aligning with people this deal, qualification, matrix, process that needs to happen, and ensuring that business profile proposals are strong. The truth is that it isn't easy. It can't be done overnight. There's a lot of prep work that has to go into enterprise deals. And, you know, our magic number is 618, that's how many sales actions we perform on a weekly basis. The good news is that AI is here to help. This is Gartner proposing that, you know, AI can unlock an additional 27% additional bandwidth for sellers. And you know, it certainly feels like that, or more to me, that the AI tools that we've got are able to accelerate our closing of enterprise deals. When we look at our 360 degree sales diagnostic product that we use with all of our clients. When we look at the AI landscape against that, we make a calculation that like 83.6% of sales has been influenced or can be influenced by AI in three areas, either AI as a strategy partner for planning and ideation, as a kind of specialist power player for individual tasks, but also for everyday utility. And we're seeing our efficiency and profit rise as a result of using AI across the board, I touched there on the 360 sales diagnostic product that we have you, it's, it's a rapid assessment of the power of your sales function to close enterprise deals that comes with a full score and breakdown bespoke recommendations and a 12 month roadmap of incremental revenue you could close. You could read more about that on our website, at the uplift partnership.com, forward slash 360 and here you can see a couple of the screens of the output from that 360 product that we have. So look that brings us, really, to the end of the show, my friend, we do have a very exciting new piece of enterprise level collateral out ourselves. Our new white paper is just 12 pages short. You can get that at the uplift partnership.com, forward slash white paper, or you can scan the QR code that's squeezing in between me and my co-founder. Now, it's very good. Yes. Well, look, you know, it's not easy. Closing enterprise deals is not easy, my friend, is it? And it isn't hard. It takes a lot of effort. I'm hopeful that the things we've covered, you know, will help. Have you got any you know, like Final thoughts or words of encouragement? Maybe I don't know for for technology businesses who are trying to level up and go for that, that those bigger fish

Kiran Gill 29:57

be prepared. I would. A. It's long, it's hard. Yes, there is a pot of gold at the end of it that potentially you could get to, but it's all about preparation. And I think what happens is sometimes we get kind of the dollar signs in our eyes, and we kind of run away with ourselves. And going back to what we said in this show, it is a team game. You've got to bring other people in your company together to help you with landing a big fish. You can't just land that whale on your own, and it's lovely to think that you could, but sometimes you have to park your ego and say, You know what this is about the company. This is about all of us. If we sell 1000 seats to one client, that could really change what we're going to do going forward. So Park the ego. Get everybody else involved in your company, and think about whether this is the right thing for you guys to do or not, because it might not be. You know, enterprise isn't for everybody.

Alastair Cole 30:53

Unbelievably wise words like three or four, sound bites smooshed in there to that section you've taken care of our snippets of show there, my friend, and actually you kind of hark back to one of our previous shows. Are you ready for enterprise? And that is an important question to ask, because it does take some doing and actually talking about previous shows. You could go to the sales scoop.com and see previous episodes, including that one on Are you ready for enterprise? Whether you should go or not? You said it's not just about us. We have to park our ego, which is what we're doing a week today, parking our ego. We're going to be quiet. We're going to be hearing from Rebecca Warwick, who is the founder of prune software, a workflow automation platform that is growing fast in the UK landing new clients and streamlining working processes for a number of businesses. So looking forward to hearing Rebecca and her expertise in selling, which is not just in the SaaS space, but also in professional services, and she also has some experience of getting arts, landing arts projects, and getting them over the line. So Rebecca got a rich history and experience in sales, looking forward to speaking to her a week today. That's it. That's all for now. Thank you very much for your time. Kiran,

Kiran Gill 32:18

Thank you very much. Alastair,

Alastair Cole 32:21

Okay, goodbye, everybody, bye, bye, bye.