The present state of affairs when selling large Enterprises day has dramatically changed from selling 10-15 years ago. That is a seemingly small amount of time especially when many of the companies wishing to be sold can be 50, 75 or even 100 years old. They move slowly within the Enterprise, but change is still inevitable.
Back then, if you were selling technology, you could easily see where the top20-25technology or “IT” initiatives where funded in a typical annual scenario. This may have been somewhatdue to the dissolute nature of corporate IT investment leadership management in that point of time. From those practices, there were millions, actually billions of dollars of solutions that were never successfully implemented and remain somewhere in the corporate graveyard of failed projects. Or worse, projects that never actually got off the ground.
By comparison, in the lighting fast foray of new technologies amid the Social media backwash, Enterprises now typically fund only their top 3 initiatives. They track the others but the money goes only to the strategic projects that will produce significant shareholder value, whether in expanded revenues or large cost takeout’s. Worse yet, if they are a favorite of the CIO.
Regardless of what you may be selling to the Enterprise, or a mid-sized company, it is every Reps desire to see that the deal they are trying to close be a part of one of those select approved projects. So taking a wider look at this, the challenges sales reps contend with(free “gifts of Knowledge”), mostly in technology, are immense and can be daunting as illustrated below:
- They have to position their solutions against in comparison to the other proposed IT projects to get in line as one of the corporations strategic and “must have” investments. In fact, even those projects can be delayed until the following year.
- Reps have to try and help avoid having the customer do fine with existing solutions or under-utilized solutions that can be modified to suit their needs now that the vendor amply educated them.
- They have to sell against existing in-house initiativesand IT building it themselves.
- Reps can be facedselling against similar, competitive vendors in their space even if they are the first ones on the scene.
- Conversely, Reps can get blindsided by vendors “out of the category’ claiming they can do the same thing. This can be devastating when an IBM or Oracle claim they have the same capabilities and will “literally” give it to the customer to keep the logo; whether it is not accurately portrayed.
Making matter worse, most deals over $25 -$100 need a CEO sign-off. So one solution to this conundrum is to have your customers meet with you and guide your Reps how they “sell on the inside”. Your customers will bring a fresh and extremely insightful perspective that will energize your Reps and help teach them to “think strategically, act tactically”. They will learn to better plan out their sales offensives, work deeper with their internal resources, and take ample time to first learn if what they are offering is at the right time to the right company to the right executives. You customers can help you tune up your value propositions and how to best “monetize” your differentiators as they are matched to your prospect’s pains. You can test your ROI’s or business cases for validity with them too! There are plenty of deals out there and this will help balance their pipelines.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.