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Time might not literally be money, but in the sales world, it comes pretty close. Accelerating the sales process is even more essential at the enterprise level because the deals, which often are worth millions of dollars, require alignment on multiple levels and can stall out or take a very long time if not properly managed. Fortunately, businesses can use three basic steps to speed up the enterprise sales process to improve profitability, velocity, and win rates.
1. Intentionally map relationships.
An enterprise sale requires connecting client-side individuals and groups such as executive leaders, supply chain management, and field operations to their respective counterparts within your sales team. Activating a deal team and deliberately connecting people at like authority levels is critical to establishing a strong foundation for enterprise sales. To prevent the sales process from getting stuck while waiting on approvals, it's important to work directly with the people or groups with authority to provide those sign-offs. Otherwise, the process may get held up while approvals work through a long chain of command.
Once these matches are established, the goal is to create and strengthen the bond by intentionally spending valuable time with the organization and its team. To do this, professionals might serve together on a panel for an industry event or attend an educational conference. When binding relationships are formed, it's common for the prospect to reveal challenges about their strategies, which allows the sales team to customize solutions that solve problems and create relevancy to a partnership. Intentional relationship matching also reduces negotiation time and friction; it can get everyone through rough patches because everyone trusts each other enough to tackle things head-on.
2. Understand your prospect's needs.
With bonds formed, the next step is to curate a vision of an improved future from the lens of the prospect. This can only be done after considerable discovery is completed and there's a deep understanding of the prospect's unmet and/or unacknowledged needs. The deal strategy must be also aligned with where the prospect is in the buying cycle, as this can directly affect the speed of the process. This can typically be categorized into three phases.
- Phase 1: The prospect is in exploratory mode, meaning they determine their needs and explore solutions without caring too much about pricing or risk.
- Phase 2: The prospect brings in stakeholders and considers alternatives.
- Phase 3: The prospect evaluates risk based on factors such as price, systems, and market conditions.
In phase one, the objective is to demonstrate how your offerings and customizations will improve the prospect's future. For example, if your key contacts reveal that they're struggling to achieve their sustainability objectives, you can apply a broader theme illustrating how your firm will help them solve that problem, perhaps by quantifying five distinct and impactful solutions.
During the second phase, your prospect will collaborate with numerous stakeholders while evaluating alternatives. Because enterprise deals can involve six to 10 stakeholders from different levels of the organization and forces like company bandwidth and policies can affect the sale speed, it's important to help the prospect align everyone through these steps. The more aligned they are, the easier it is for you to develop on-target solutions and pitch them in ways that resonate well.
One effective method for aligning your prospect internally and helping them expedite decisions is offering templates. Enterprise deals typically require a sourcing event, and category managers can't possibly know everything about the categories they're evaluating. These templates can guide internal alignment on scope, evaluation, criteria, weightings, and pricing classifications. Simply put, they can shortcut the sales process by weeks or even months, allowing sales professionals to understand their prospect's needs, get in front of the RFP and other sourcing protocols and enable sourcing leaders to run a rapid and successful event.
Once you get everyone on the same page, you'll be able to leverage the relationships you've built and accommodate the prospect's process in several ways:
- Pull a category ahead of its typical scheduled cadence.
- Influence the weightings and priority of evaluation criteria.
- Through "pre-positioning activities," affect the scoring model and how your firm's distinctive competencies are favored.
- Establish a deep understanding of what the RFP process is internally, including who ultimately holds the decision authority.
3. Set realistic expectations and ask for an issues list.
Once your prospect has expressed interest in doing business with you, it's common to still have a few nagging items everyone must come to an agreement on. Ask your prospect to indicate what's required to finalize and secure internal approvals. Then, create an action plan complete with assigned owners (both internal and external), target deadlines and go/no-go criteria so you can systematically work to clear them. Utilize weekly or daily huddles with your deal team to ensure that you're quickly burning down action items.
At this point, you'll likely need to bring in legal and/or finance counsel. Keep the business and legal tracks separate but continue working them in parallel. Get the business team to outline the terms in plain language. For the tricky items, take the time to have the stakeholders verify their agreement by circulating a basic document and confirming that it's directionally correct. Then, hand the terms over to your general counsel so they can translate quickly into legal terms. This way, one team doesn't waste time sorting out issues that should be handled by the other.
Close faster with higher win rates.
Enterprise sales drive upmarket success and help companies achieve accelerated growth. These deals have a multiplier effect, producing enterprise value that's both quantified (in terms of deal profitability) and unquantified (e.g., diversification of revenue and increased stickiness with clients). However, a typical enterprise sale can take months or even years, depending on the complexity, level, and degree of preparedness a firm has for your offering. Long negotiation periods and bottlenecked stages can be costly, but investing time and energy into accelerating the enterprise sales process is a worthy investment that can ultimately result in large contract value wins.