Optimize Your Business Sales Process for Enterprises

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the days of the cheesy salesperson and that you know cliche of the car salesman those days are over in Enterprise sales those days are over in really any kind of Technology sale people still buy from people people still listen to people that really are thought leaders like your people should really be looked at as credible and thought leaders whether they're salese sales Engineers product people right what I do is I put together all the different personas we're going to sell sell them and I have columns say things like what do they care about right what what would what do they care about our offering what are the things that our offering can do that they would care about what are the types of questions that are thought-provoking for them so again the detail for Enterprise you know it's it gets down to that level it's like you really need to think out each of these things because if if I only you're if you're this CTO for example I only have one chance to get in front of you I better have done my research on you and what you care about specifically to my offering and I better hit those points really fast and really clear right so it doesn't happen ad hoc it's not I'm just going to wing it type of thing if I'm preparing to meet with prip then I'm going to prepare my presentation and my value proposition specifically for you welcome to Everyday leadership we have an episode that's everyone has been asking me for quite some time and that's about Enterprise sales and a lot of the B2B Founders really struggle with where to start like whether to start with small businesses and then move up the ladder to Enterprise or start with Enterprises or come down and if you they were to cherry pick and choose one particular segment what sort of tactics really help with the sales and how should they really approach the early sales so all of these questions are common across a lot of the B2B Founders and we'll try to cover all those questions and to do that we have a very very well-known guest in the enterprise spes Enterprise sales and that's wnce wince why don't we start with a quick introduction of yourself to sort of give us help us understand who you are and how how did you end up where you are today absolutely thanks thanks for having me on the show pretty I appreciate that so yeah Vince Beezy I've been in the startup world for the last 26 years so I I guess that makes me a veteran uh some commonality during that period of time is I I've typically joined a really early stage companies from no Revenue to you know a few customers to tens of tens of millions so I've had the whole Spectrum but uh at the end of the day I really like building organizations and building processes to create a repeatable sales process I have U sold to SB in midmarket but like you've mentioned most of my career most of my Foundation has been based on Enterprise sales and uh fast forward to today I do two things I run a sales consultancy called sales at scale and we help early stage Founders scale their sales go from founder Le sales to sales Le sales in addition I recently announced the opening of sales HQ which is actually an environment for co-selling so it's think of we work but for sales people and sales teams and we're going to have our first location here where I'm based in the Raleigh North Carolina area so pretty busy these days but it's all things Enterprise it's all things sales it's all things GTM awesome and can you help us understand a bit of the jargon around sales like talk about you know explain us what are these different markets and how do we really segment them and help us understand a bit of sales terminology who are account Executives and head of accounts and account managers and all of w that's a lot I I think the first important kind of acronym that we probably a lot is ICP ideal customer profile and I bring up that one prep because that honestly when you're going to Market when you're going to sell your product Your solution whatever it is you got to know your audience and if you haven't sold to a specific audience or you don't have customers yet you as the founder you as the entrepreneur really need to put a lot of thought onto what problem are you trying to solve and who's going to benefit most from that what companies are going to benefit most from that what people at these companies are going to benefit most for that and that's to me the fundamentals of getting start is what problem do you solve and who does that benefit so to me that's that's table Stakes 101 right because that's where Founders are going to start they're going to build a product they're going to try to solve a problem and then you have to Target that that audience and you have to listen to what they're saying how they're obviously responding to your solution to solving their problem so that's number one you know so you probably hear a lot about sales Playbook too and what does that mean it can be as simple as complex as you want to but when you're going from again founder Le sales to sales Le sales you're trying to take the fundamental knowledge that the founder has when they go to market the passion how they deliver all that fun stuff you're trying to make a repeatable process so when you hire AES account Executives or senior AES these are quota carrying sales reps that actually go out and do full cycle sale from lead to close that's an account executive they have something that they can go by they have a process that they know how to how to to work to again take something from a lead to a so the sales Playbook I think is another fundamental uh part of what they need and then you hear a lot about sales process what does that actually mean it's very simple it's it is what it is it's literally uh choreographing from when someone hits your website fills out a form that step all the way to closed one how do you take them through the process what are the steps you need to do to do that so again ICP ideal customer profile or sometimes called ideal Prospect profile that's important sales Playbook is another Avenue and there's a whole bunch of things inside that and then and lastly the entire sales process and what that entails there's a lot of detail right when you're going after big accounts and that's one of the big difference between going after SMB and Enterprise you still follow a process the steps might be less the timing might be less the dollar amounts might be less the deal might be less complex and the people you're reaching out to might be fewer than Enterprise but sales is sales it's just how you go about it is fundamentally different from SMB midmarket to large Enterprise awesome and and what is SMB uh wi like you know what what what sort of companies classify into smbs in in midmarket it's a great question I think a lot of um a lot of technology company SAS companies bucket them differently but it's typically based on number of employees at that company right it's all over the map um you know SMB tends to be one to you know people something like that midm market could be greater than to 500 a thousand again all depends and Enterprise can be greater than I've seen those ranges all over the map and it's obviously has to map back to your product and who you're going after in the market everyone's Market is different but it's some range based on employees another way to do it I've seen it is based on the company's revenues right so how much revenue does that company generate and then bucket it that way as well so that's how people typically break the SMB midmarket and Enterprise down I see that makes sense could we Al you know talk about selling to smbs like from your experience just help us understand now how do we sell to smbs really and if you have any examples specifically interesting stories around smbs please share them with us as well well the advantage of selling to SNB number one is you can it's more transactional you tend to be able to close a lot faster and you tend to get to the decision makers a lot faster literally the in most cases the owner of the business or most the person with the most clout at that company right and that's why why you can turn things around fast but smbs right when you're an SMB you don't have a lot of resources so your product has to be self-sufficient so if you're going to go after SM SMB make sure your website and your product is self-sufficient they can learn about it they can sign up for a trial they can start they can test it out and then they put their credit card and they're Off to the Races some cases never even speaking to a human being or a salesperson maybe they're chatting with you maybe they're sharing emails back and forth obviously the great example of this is how HubSpot first started they nailed this this model model probably better than any other SAS company and once they nailed SMB they continued to move up market now they serve you know SMB up to Enterprise for sure but that's the main thing I think the biggest thing is the product the product in selling to SMB is different than the product that you're selling for Enterprise self-service self-sufficient self-help SMB As you move up to midmarket and Enterprise now you're talking about implementation and Professional Services it's a little bit more complex requires more integration and so on and so forth right that's why you have to go fromb and potentially not speaking to sales people or people in general and as you move the food chain because it's a little bit more complex your needs are a little bit more deep requirements from integration and so on and so forth nice and yeah I always wonder how HubSpot went up against companies like Salesforce especially in the CRM market like whereas the number of features are always saturated right so how do you really differentiate and it's a very interesting story and yeah but remember they didn't start start off competing with sales for the CRM wasn't didn't even come in until later down the path they started in one thing which was in the marketing side you know generating leads and then they continue to build product I mean they're just what they've done is incredible right they went from one product to multiple products up to three different markets they went after so they're unusual but most Founders and entrepreneur you need to choose your Market you're going to go after and I think one of the things you said in the beginning is which one should you choose it depends on your product offering right your product offering might be geared specifically for consumers or for small businesses and that's what you should go after obviously if you're going after Enterprise your development cycle is going to take a lot longer and your marketing dollars is going to have to be a lot higher to get your brand out there and awareness and so on and so forth but you know I'm biased what I love about Enterprise sales is like one deal could literally make your company right you could close a $10 million annual deal and it gets you on the map you close one big logo in a specific vertical and then you will be able to get others right so that's the great thing about Enterprise longer development time to get your product to Market harder to get in front of people but the payoff and the margins tend to be a lot greater than S&B S&B on another hand quicker time the market quicker usage understanding the value proposition what's not and making those changes right so both are great and anything in the middle is also great but like the payoff in one customer and Enterprise and the other thing about Enterprises the customers tend to don't churn as often right churn isn't as big of a problem of course as SB SB you got to constantly replenish as people come in and leave as well no that's totally makes sense and you know let's let's also talk about midmarket a little bit it looks like is it like a Enterprise or could you just help us understand what's midmarket and what is what are some ways to approach it yeah it's it's I mean it's it's kind of a hybrid between SMB and Enterprise right still has to be feature Rich and solve a problem no doubt most mid-market type of products are still probably there's a light implementation that may need assistance from the company you're purchasing the product from so there might be a little bit of handholding and training done there so it's just kind of think of it as a lighter weight Enterprise and a heavier weight SMB right um it should also explained is your sales organization Personnel is going to change so let's talk about acronyms again so in SMB you're going to hear the term SDR sales development rep that is your key employee within the organization depending on your structure the R might do lead followup they might actually do outbound and they might actually close as well right they might do everything full cycle sales an account executive also could be in um an account executive typically tied to a specific quota that they're carrying midm Market probably has a hybrid of that they might have sdrs just for outbound lead generation and inbound followup and then the account executive midm Market is solely focused on building pipe but also following up from lead to a created opportunity and then going up up the next level uh to Enterprise you might have varying levels of experience in the account executive position and the SDR position as well right because in Enterprise you might even you might even um divide up who you're going after by vertical by different tiers within Enterprise like okay employees and greater okay these account executive and these sdrs are going to go after so it's a little bit more fine-tuned but the commonality is the SDR sales development rep the count executive and then levels of experience and management above them right so in every one of those scenarios you're going to have leaders that are there to help remove roadblocks and educate and train the Salesforce and Mentor them along as well nice yeah that sort of makes sense and now moving on to Enterprise I know these Enterprise sales is like you said it's it's a very long and drawn process with multiple steps involved could you help us understand those steps sort of give us a sense of what goes behind the scenes when it comes to an Enterprise deal a typical Enterprise deal yeah again the steps vary based on who you're selling to and what you're selling the level of complexity one of the things I think it's important for your listeners to remember in Enterprise sales it's vital that you're multi-threaded do you know what multi-threaded means so you're going to go after a company let's call it I'm making up a name Exxon and so when you do your research on Exxon you need to determine what are the personas within Exxon that you want to go after are they by and within those personas do you also want to go by certain levels my point is there's multiple roles you're going to go after an Enterprise account that are important to the sales process right it's not one person that you're talking to or communicating with that's going to get the deal done internally at these Enterprises it's not a one-person decision it's typically obviously three to six people are involved in Greater are involved in the decision process so it's important in sales and in your process that you're mapping out the personas that are important to get involved into the sales process and to me you're involving these people from the first step which is typically Al a discovery process figuring out if there's a solution fit right do we solve a problem and is this the problem that we can solve for them and do we have the use cases to demonstrate to them and then Gathering the needs what they need to be able to fulfill that solution and solve their problem and then defining when you're doing your product demos who needs to be invited to that I will tell you for anybody out there like multi-threaded and making sure early in your sales process from Discovery on the more people you can get to get involved in these meetings the higher chance you have at closing these deals I can't tell you how many times I've seen a salesperson stay single-threaded through a process only to get to the end near the closing and because they didn't bring in the other people that needed to be involved the economic buyer the you know executive decision maker all those different roles and it comes to the end and like guess what their Champion didn't have the authority these other people didn't weigh in they didn't know anything about your solution and who you are and your company is and then they left it to the end and guess what it's too late decisions already either put on pause or hold so the importance of an Enterprise sales process is to stay multi-threaded from step one all the way through the process and when you say multi-threaded are you suggesting that we should have some kind of connection from outside with these folks within the Enterprise who can really CH means two things multiple people at that account and then multiple ways you're communicating with them email obviously is going to be one LinkedIn is another Avenue medium that we're going to use SMS or text messaging WhatsApp for international clients so multiple people multiple ways cute the key is anytime you can get into a messaging thread with one of your contacts or multiple contacts you've now established a relationship because texting or Whatsapp messaging is outside of your typical work framework right so what does that mean it means deep if you and I are communicating you're probably going to share more with me in messaging than my work email or other work channels so that's an example of taking multi-threading to the next level when you become I guess a trusted Source a trusted resource for them they will begin to communicate with you that way it's not meant at day one you hit them with text messages it's once you've established a relationship so it's a constant progression of adding more people that you need to speak to and in more ways to speak to them right yeah and and generally if a Founder wants to sell his software to Enterprise would he be starting with who are the right people generally who are the right contacts in a typical let's say SAS case you're trying to sell a SAS to and Enterprise should you be starting with the CEO or who are the who are the right product champions in these cases I mean if I'm a Founder right because founder generates a certain amount of respect right when you're a Founder you're entrepreneur or co-founder you get a certain amount of respect so i' always I would always air on the side at the highest level of the Persona you're going after so if you're selling a product to the GTM side so marketing and sales I'm going to the highest leader in sales or the highest leaders in marketing it's maybe a smaller is company maybe not large large Enterprise I might be going down I might be going up to the sea level so the title you go after is also going to depend on the size of the company if I'm going after a company that's employees well of course I'm not going after the C Level I might be going after the VP level or director level of that business because they're so big and it's harder to get in touch with those higher ups so it all depends on the company but go as high as you think you can right because they will always take you in and make the introductions to the other people you get acquainted with within the organization right and let's say you know we we got the contact but then would you be preparing pitches for all kinds of people let's say if a Founder wants to aim at the Enterprise but you know wants to build a platform or you know create all the material required or whatnot so what suggestion do you have for someone like yeah I mean think about it this way if you're going to do your pitch you need to think about who's going to be in the room on the other side and that pitch better speak to them what the value is for them in their world right CEO right looks at the solution a little bit different than the VP at a specific division would right so what does COO care coo cares about two things saving money or making more money so you better be able to demonstrate that your solution does one of those two things right what does the person at the kind of division level care about solving that problem that you started the conversation with right what does the CFO care about money straight up right what are the business terms and how much money am I making or how much money am I going to save so you really need to think about your audience and who you're selling to that's in those and speak to them of how this solution is going to solve their problem so one of the things I do in my sales Playbook is I create something mapping the personas and what I do is I put together all the different personas we're going to sell and I have columns say things like what do they care about right what do they care about our offering what are the things that our offering can do that they would care about what are the types of questions that are thought-provoking for them so again the detail for Enterprise it gets down to that level it's like you really need to think out each of these things because if if vient if you're this CTO for example I better have done my research on you and what you care about specifically to my offering and I better hit those points really fast and really clear right so it doesn't happen at hoc it's not I'm just going to wing it type of thing if I'm preparing to meet with PR deep then I'm going to prepare my presentation and my value proposition specifically for you I see yeah that totally makes sense and when someone's navigating this are there any do not do sort of stuff here like can we start with SMB and then go up to Enterprise and see similarly can we start with Enterprise and come down to smbs let's say the ICP here's Universal whether you're SMB midmarket or Enterprise the number one thing I see all the time is undefined ISP let's go back to that and unclear messaging like for example I love to do two things go when I go to trade shows I want to go to people's booths and want to see what they say on their banner and if I read what they say on their banner I don't understand what is they do then that's a missed opportunity means her messaging is not clear we over think our messaging we make it overly complicated so again whether you're SMB midmarket or Enterprise in addition to defining your ICP your messaging needs to be clear and concise and so a nine-year-old could understand what you do and again regardless how complex your product is even more reason to keep it concise and I'll say this that if you're going to spend marketing dollars that's the area you really need to make sure you have nailed down because imagine having bad messaging and you spent all these dollars on advertising or promotion and it's just not reson with people so go test out your messaging too right on your friend group or your colleagues or whatever it is to see if it's res people that don't know anything about your business if you explained it to them do they understand what it is and I can't tell you how many times I first start engagement with a Founder on a Consulting project like tell me what you do and it's like five minutes of blah blah blah I'm like no no no what is it that you do we helped we help bah blah companies do XY and they see these types of results oh I get it it's got to be that concise and everybody needs to say the same thing at the company I see yeah that that's makes sense yeah I think it's from the fundamentals it sort of makes sense and it is it is so fundamental and basic but it's so overlooked go to websites to just look at the we could look at 10 websites right now I guarantee only two of them would have that nailed yeah yeah and and uh one other question is like if if you're trying to operate in a very crowded Market when it came to Enterprise right so a lot of the other companies will compete with you and they have pretty much have those long list of features that you offer do you have any suggestions from your experience and how do you deal with crowded markets but you you're trying to sell I've never been I've never not been part of a crowded Market typically if you're not in a crowded Market you're either trying to break into a market right create a market right and I've only done that once so most times I've actually been in a crowded Market where it's been five or six you know top tier type of um Solutions within that and I think it's pretty simple it's again it's you have to have a differentiated product whatever you believe your product is and how it's differentiated don't worry about what the competition says they are you focus on what you're good at and what you can demonstrate and prove right so don't just say it you got to back it up with proof and actually your demo and however you show your product that's number one have a differentiate product and be clear again about why you're different and what problem you solve and that's number one number two is people people still buy from people people still listen to people that really are thought leaders like your people should really be looked at as credible and thought leaders whether they're salespeople sales Engineers product people right you're there to help the customer solve a problem and that's the way you're going to differentiate is you have better well-educated people that are professional and articulate how you're going to solve their problem for them the days of the cheesy salesperson and that you know cliche of the car salesman those days are over in Enterprise sales those days are over in really any kind of Technology sale people just don't put up with that because as you know 60% of the decision is already made by the time they reach out to you they've already researched your company your website some of the people there so now they're really looking for how are you going to help me right yeah completely and all those things that was said about even the way back in the day you know you can rise up in the SEO and then you'll get leads but it's so hard to rise up with the SEO space because a lot of the other companies are already doing it it's exhausting and that's that no longer works and they write content about it go to Reddit and talk about product and there is so much already written on Reddit no one really pays attention to what you're writing and a lot of these you know things just don't work anymore I think it's like you said it's always people to people it's simple messaging you know I mean I believe in Automation and I believe in Ai and sales no doubt and it's the future and it's going to help sales people be better but there's nothing more frustrating than you have a person who lands on your website and they fill out a firm where they start a chat and it's clearly it's a bot and this person wants to speak to human beings and how fast do you get back to goes back to people again in process one of the ways you're going to differentiate if I hit your website and I'm chatting him you're clearly not answering my question will he better connect with me ASAP or if I send a foreman someone better be following up with me ASAP within minutes or hours at latest right and that's what really differentiates people too it's again that first Contact right they said I want to have a conversation and you've ignored them for 24 48 hours there's nothing more frustrating than that right so yeah that's you know I test that stuff out all the time and it's still shocking me today because everyone expects the bot to answer all the questions and it can be frustrating at times right yeah and and and couple of things that I've noticed with firsttime Founders is it's sort of common across many of them is they think that they can build a product and hire a salesperson and they'll do the sales for it they don't understand it's all founder L sales in the early part of company and and similarly with the growth I mean they can bring in a growth hacking person and they'll help you with the growth so that's and and they start looking for these folks before they even figured out their ICP and product Market fit and and hopefully whoever is listening is like w said at the very beginning it's all founder L sales and from there it moves on to sales LED sales number one the number one issue I see when I work with early stage Founders is hiring the wrong profile so completely what you said their early stage let's say they even have a few customers they go out and they hire the expensive sales leader profile making it up someone that came from Salesforce that managed a 20 million book of business right huge piece of business had a lot of success at Salesforce okay this person now has to jump into a company that's got less than a million in revenue and create a goto Market motion and execution and if they've never done that before they're going to fail miserably so my point is they fall in love with the profile they don't fall in love with their experience and is it relevant to where we are at this stage in our company and again to your point like yeah Founders have to close the first deals because who else is going to be able to have the passion to be ble to do that nobody but once you figured it out it doesn't have to be a repeatable process once you kind of figured out that okay I know what these people want I know what pain I'm solving and here's how we're going to do it that's when we translate again from founder-led sales to sales and maybe your first hire is a you know a go-getter someone who's a younger profile salesperson that wants to learn the business and you can mentor them along right maybe that's your first hire it's someone that you trust that can go to market and start selling and then you build up right I've also seen it where I've been the first GTM hire the cro where I've come in it was just founder selling and then I came in and I knew I'd have to sell so I was selling was building the process and then building the team so you can do it two ways you just got to be cognizant of hiring the right profile and that they can achieve what you need at the time where you are at the stage of a company yeah totally makes sense well uh with that we've arrived at the last section of this part and I have a series of questions more like a rapid fire questions uhoh then and let let's start with the first first one the first question is what is that one favorite book that you would recommend to other entrepreneurs or whoever is passionate about entrepreneurship in regards to sales it could be anything I mean I I love fiction first of all I love historical fiction number one but that's besides the point like any can follow it book read those I love those but when it comes to like an interesting book I read years ago in regards to sales which kind of really defined the different types of salespeople it's called selling the wheel and it's a really interesting book that again it walks you through the different types of sales people are and then you're going to figure out maybe which category of type of sales person are you so that was an interesting take on that I think sales of wheel is that what you said selling the wheel selling the wheel okay selling the wheel Y and then what what is who is your favorite entrepreneur I mean I'm sorry this is going to be cliche too I mean Steve Jobs just because man there was no one better standing on a soap box right I mean nobody I don't care who I mean he's the Pinnacle right I mean there's others I really admire and I've worked for but like if you're talking about top Echelon if we had to start a if I had to start a company I needed somebody to come in and do it Steve Jobs would be my guy for sure nice and and what is that one favorite life hack or life hacks that sort of helped you live a better life you're getting deep man gez I tend not to be a very patient person um I tend to react and sometimes could be emotional so one of the things I've always I've learned years ago is keep your emotions in check so for example um I like to sit on things now so if I got an email that I would normally react very fast to I say I'll read it let it sit there for 24 hours let it percolate and then come back to it Endor ideas and different things like that so for me because I'm not a patient person I've had to tell myself to just speed isn't my problem patience is my problem so for me the life hack is is just chill out wait 24 hours and if you still feel the same way about those things then that's when you respond and that's what you go about absolutely very well said and let's say if someone wants to reach out to you some founder wants to reach out to you how can they reach out to help us I think the easiest way is LinkedIn I also have my own website sales scale where I'm getting my new Endeavor sales HQ so those are the three ways you could reach out to me for sure awesome and and really appreciate your time here on the Pod today Vince and thank you for answering All Those Questions patiently and this was a great learning experience I'm sure for a lot of those firsttime aspiring Founders as well thank you thank you very much appreciate you having me