The Forgotten Secrets Of The Enterprise Giants

There's certainly innovation taking place in enterprise sales, but don't discard the "old school" just because it isn't new. Many of the largest companies you can think of are "old school". Traditional enterprise sales is high touch relationship building with millions of dollars at stake. And it isn't the cold call BS boiler room stuff that people think of when they think of enterprise sales.

The best enterprise salespeople become great friends with their potential clients. They know what schools their clients' kids are going to, where they went on vacation, and who they need to introduce them to. They know when a client's birthday is and which restaurant she's eating at to call and pick up the tab. They know how a client takes their coffee and what their favorite drink is. They show up with hard to get theater or game tickets. They're sincerely invested in the success of the client. The client isn't a "mark" to them. Clients are friends and you'd never do anything to hurt your friend. In many ways, a great enterprise salesperson becomes the advocate for your customers inside your company, pushing you to create a better product because they never want to let their friends down. Great enterprise salespeople know how to ask for money because they understand the value they're delivering and also when to comp something. They know how to say sorry and they know how to keep a valuable customer.

The fact is that this kind of selling is hard to scale. However, it's worth it at less scale because the account sizes are usually quite large. Your best enterprise salesperson is like a Zappos account rep on steroids. Clients feel great and they give you the chance to build a product that they love and recommend to other large account holders.

This isn't for everyone. You should probably be in a market where you can make $100,000 per year from a client (you'll probably be making the client $500k+ per year and you'll need a product that lots of clients need) to employ an "old school" strategy. And it should be said that there are bad enterprise sales people. They'll abuse your clients, make you develop the wrong features, and some won't sell a damn thing because they're better at selling themselves than they are at serving clients.

Great old school enterprise salespeople combined with a top-notch product is a killer combo. If you find a few techniques that help you sell more, that's great. Just don't be in a hurry to avoid building a real relationship with valuable enterprise clients. If you're easy to switch to, you're easy to switch from.

The only disruption that I see in Enterprise sales is that consolidation of functions and growth in the big enterprise software suites is wiping out whole categories of product.

Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this. How can you justify buying Altiris when you own SCCM via the Core CAL? Ditto for AV, although the MS solution is not that great. How do you justify some enterprise monitoring suite for some wacky prcice when you license system center for $2k per VM host?

People who think they are disrupting spending in the enterprise on on crack. You're in an era of belt-tightening, and the belt gets tighter every time there's a "fiscal cliff" or some other looming nightmare. My director circa 2003 could drop $500k with a few days notice. Now, the procurement people watch any purchase like a hawk -- some places want ROI calculations on toner!

Salesforce is a another great example. I met them last week, they very much looked and sounded like enterprise sales folk. The only thing "radical" about them is that they are competing against other software vendors AND your incumbent hardware and data center / network providers. If you buy Siebel, you need to deal with Oracle's bullshit for the software and the services to make it work, AND you need to land infrastructure to run it at full capacity on day 1.

These changes are radical in that they make procuring and getting value easier, and lower the probability of seven figure shelf ware. But they don't change the sales process... You still have a salesperson and supporting team.

I think the author of this article is mistaken between what pivoting is and what sales is.

Pivoting is what owners and senior stakeholders do to a company, to change it's future direction. The Concur example is a good example of this. Sure it may have happened after being enlightened by a sales call and competitive situation, but it was primarily a one-off change. You can't enable your sales reps to "pivot" during each sales opportunity, it impacts too many systems.

In enterprise, the role of ISV reps has been created to try to do this within a defined scope - ie get ISV partners to add new capabilities that help you reach a different vertical.

Enterprise sales is pretty close to what Roman Stanek's article the author linked to. It's not fun or sexy, it's about finding real problems in companies, convincing their stakeholders you're the lowest risk and highest return option, then working hard to identify and hold them to a compelling event to move the discussion along from concept to signature to implementation.

Just my 2c.

>Enterprise sales is undergoing the most radical shakeup since the turn of the century, and today’s experiments will be tomorrow’s best practices

Ok, so what are some examples of this radical shaking?

The author gives plenty of examples of the old guys "new ways" - back when they were new - but I am not seeing the new radical-ness described the article or the one linked.