Closing big deals for corporations

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big deals that's we're gonna be talking to you about today how do you start them how are they different how do you get your manager bought into them why should you do them versus the transactional deals I love big deals that's where you pretty much make your big money in b2b sales that's the value that we add in big sales getting into new accounts making deals bigger and faster than they would be otherwise it's it's an art form it's part science takes lots of practice takes confidence takes determination because the nature is that our customers will buy as little and as slowly as possible and give us as little money and value in exchange for what we bring to them what we have to do is convince them about why doing the bigger deal makes sense doing it all at once versus piecemeal for years and years and we're gonna dig all into this today before we do I want to make sure you're checking out Co video video email is the Icebreaker of today it is really what's getting people through getting into new accounts it's super helpful Co video is the product to use it's got a chrome plug-in super easy to use and it's a great way to connect up with the clients that you want to get into because big deals start with small conversations and at the end I'll sum this up for you let's get into the interview hey Jamal thanks for joining us today is a way getting started tell us about yourself hey Bryan thanks for having me well I guess you could say I'm a career enterprise sales guy I've been at it for about 18 years been selling stuff since I was in college and I guess I grew up with it and and got into enterprise sales and kind of worked my way through the ranks and became fairly good at it and I think if I was ever going to say there was anything I did in the enterprise sales world it would be doing really large deals and that's what I do it's all I think about and you know they get in the shower and eat and breakfast and I just think okay how can I get another large deal now those smaller deals are so much easier why do you overlook them well it's funny because even even when I go for yeah I don't get every big deal I go for and and some of those turn into small deals that's how you make a number and it's not the small deals that I don't like but I guess I long time I've kind of figured out that I don't really like traditional selling I don't like making a hundred calls a day I don't like the place isn't it yeah that's what we're taught yeah that's uh it's a whole you know it's the whole world of training out there and and belief about everything is about numbers and there's some truth to it when you're kind of in the gut of the bell curve but if you're really trying to get somewhere more significant or larger or maybe more impactful III found that the rules seem to be a little bit different so that it's more fun there now there's a lot of issues with big deals both and doing them and managing your manager while you do them and I always used to see that reps would have what I call though the white elephant strategy where that their head would be on the chopping block but they had this white elephant out there that if you only gave them nine more months in closed there's multi seven-figure deal why don't we start by defining what's a big deal in your world well that's a that's a great question and I gotta say it's gonna be different in everybody's world and it's it's not always been what it is now for me it wasn't always that so you know coming up a big deal for me when I started I started selling books door-to-door and a big deal for me was selling like three hundred dollars with the books that's now when I got into enterprise sales when I started a big deal for me was a million but now a big deal for me is over 50 million Wow now contrast that to your quota that's quoted 70 million Minh I first started so I've been working with the same company in the same business unit for a long time yeah and when I started doing this the first one that I did I had a fairly small quota and got a really large deal in the denominations that I had just mentioned and so I was many many times over but I've done three in the past seven years and the second one you know the management team kind of caught on to what I was doing and kind of placed their bets that it would actually go through it so they really raised the quota yeah and in the third one they even did it more so even though I did a you know what is it six eight eight and mid eight figure deal my my quota was high seven figures yeah and that becomes that's kind of in the stratosphere for most people I mean you work for a big company so it's possible clearly possible it's huge company and I've been in in software is that true obviously correct yeah right and so you're selling to big companies that's right yeah and give us a sense of how long those deals take they've really varied the first one was the shortest one and it just it was the Bluebird it was the one that I learned how to do this and I take almost zero credit for it because that was kind of my it was where I was mentored and that one took nine months and the way that it came together it was in an account that had kind of a rolling contract like a three-year renewal that took place and it was up for a renewal but it was at a much lower level financially and so many things changed in that negotiation that it just shot up to be I don't know four or five times what it was in the previous contract and so that's what yeah that's you ask me how long does it take to do something like that the first time it was about that's six months the rest of them can be years yeah well let's take something that's kind of that wasn't started already that you kind of initiated and instead of taking down you know a couple hundred K you built it into several million how did you do that well there's there's stages and if there's not an obvious pain or opportunity that the customers already identified then it's a bit of a longer haul most of the time and what that starts with at least in my mind it really starts with visioning it's like okay there's a there's a big deal in here somewhere you know this happened why can't it is a phony in here somewhere there's a pony in here somewhere right and so I start by just saying okay if there was going to be a big deal what would it be in this account why would they do it how would it help them how would it help them more than a small deal would help them and I start to just think through it and then work backwards it's like okay if I wanted a deal of this impact or this importance or this level or this deal size what would it look like why what would have to happen who'd have to be in on it whose blessing would we have to have and then you just work backwards and that's where I start and then you start working from relationships and work your way up do you look for a champion or do you become the champion that's another great question so I think most well I should only speak for myself but I think it's a fairly common attitude that most of us salespeople think what can I do I'm just a salesperson yeah I'm gonna take what is kind of obvious in front of me because that's either what I can do or that's what I deserve but one thing that I've learned is how to find leverage and one of the biggest places that I find leverage is in my own executives they've got the title they've got the experience they got the gray hair I got the rolodex and if I can get my executive to come along and I say hey mrs. executive I smell smoke over in this account let's go make a fire you know and you can attract them into that pursuit things go faster and they get higher very very quickly so so you become the champion that's what I heard I think you almost have to in that case so I believe the leadership can happen at any level and if if I do anything I might show leadership a vision and then bring people who who might have more gunpowder than I do so if that's being a champion then yeah then I got to be the champion well I mean usually and most deals certainly in the bigger deals there's somebody within the account that gets this huge personal win by doing this deal that this transformation this automation of something is gonna have a huge impact on both the business but also their career and that person becomes the catalyst work they may not know how to get it done within the account and then you kind of get this partner in crime report going with them where I mean you know how a big company makes a purchase decision but you don't maybe have the rapport and the relationships and the trust through that whole decision chain and they have more of that because they work there absolutely I mean those those partnerships have definitely come about in in the in the deals that I've done and as you said they have a lot to gain and in one case somebody who I've been working with it has been promoted you know they used to be a director now they're a VP and you can tie a lot of that back to the work that we've done together and how complicated I mean do you sell the whole portfolio or do you sell a particular the product know that that's sometimes a luxury of working at a really large company there there is a big bag you know you carry a big bag with a lot of products in it so I do carry I have a portfolio it's not everything that my company sells it's thousands of products but you know I've got about six or seven major products and sometimes it's a sale of one and sometimes it's a bundle and I assume you guys pretty much said you know put all the big three are all organized pretty identically in a matrix where there's named account managers and then there's business unit managers where do you fit in what is that accurate or is that different there yeah within my organization yeah yeah no it's definitely like that there are layers and layers of management no I I cut into one of those big three through an acquisition so I was used to being a cowboy all on my own and then all of a sudden I had to work within the matrix and you know that certainly your company was a little bit more modern ours was the accountmanager knew everybody in procurement and that was it and those people are great if you already got the decision made how did you find working within that complexity it's kind of Game of Thrones you know the whole world is made up of a number of smaller kingdoms you know each one of them have their own set of rules or cultures and you got to learn how to navigate all of it if you're ever gonna make your way up to the you know the big iron throne and so it's definitely a journey and it can be overwhelming and it certainly was overwhelming in the beginning but one of the biggest lessons that I learned from working from in a really big company with really big customers is that the larger you get you get more and more rule-based right there's just more rules you got to have them to maintain order but when there are so many rules it becomes relatively ineffective if you follow every rule if you to the team so if you're ever gonna get anywhere you have to learn either how to bend the rules or to get exceptions and once you learn how to do that everything just kind of changes it's kind of like you you know at first you're kind of running around in a maze you know like a mouse in a maze but then as soon as you learn how to either bend or get exceptions to rules it's like you elevate above the maze you can look around and float and it's like holy cow it's a whole new world I have all this freedom and flexibility to do stuff that's biggest thing I learned from from from big organizations and so take us through your strategy you know because most people in these portfolio companies I had like a three year urn out in one you basically you know you try and find where you have the best fit where you have love leverage and and try and work the system yeah so what sorry you want to finish well what what is your strategy I guess because there's a lot of reps listening that don't work for a portfolio company that are trying to do big deals what is the big deal hunter do differently than the transactional guy - I love analogies I'm already using them a lot even on this on this episode but it's kind of like the difference between fishing and whale hunting yeah if you're gonna go fishing you're gonna take a fishing rod and it's a light thing you can carry it to work and go go on your lunch hour if you're close to a river or the coast but if you're gonna go whale hunting if a fishing rod just doesn't work you know you need to you need big boats and equipment and lots of people and it's just different and so guys who are trying to get to their first big deal who talked to me you know is how do you do it I say well you got to throw away your fishing rod just throw it away you got it you got to stop talking to the lowest most accessible person within your customer hoping to latch on just to show activity within the account you got a you got to completely stop that and you got to start from as high a place as possible and by doing so you prevent a bunch of people from blocking your way in getting up there if you just start as close to the top or you know you don't want to go to you don't want to overreach and and and become irrelevant because you're too far in the ethers but the higher you start from the beginning everything else gets easier because if you get kicked down from somebody higher you come with kind of borrowed Authority right that senior person said oh this is not bad it's good idea go talk to this person and when you referred internally by an executive to a mid-level person and they got to do something with you so that's the first part I think the first part of the strategy is throw away your your fishing rod and start thinking about how to hunt whales and when you're hunting whales you're talking to higher-level people what is your what do you talk about I mean you could talk about the product you could talk about the problem you could talk about the opportunity you could talk about their personal wins it reminds me of a conversation I had with somebody else who is my the person that got me thinking about big deals in the first place her name's Marci Akers and she was a veteran even when I was started at the company I worked at now and where everybody else is doing one in two million dollars a year she was doing 10 and 14 like back-to-back years and I was just thinking you know how do you do what's the pixie dust that you sprinkle on your customers to make them just throw money at you and I caught up with her not too long ago and one of the things she said was I never use the word software when I'm talking to my customers yeah and if I ever refer to it I just call it the asset and I'm always just talking about what you can do with this asset what it will get you or what it will help you avoid and put it in big big terms and just just paste it to the most important numbers that that company cares about and that that gets them interested yeah but you know when it takes nine months to a year and a half to get the transaction done how do you keep the momentum going so in the ideal situation you get your executive and you match them up with a customer executive and they have a conversation whether you're there or not and that conversation you you you you you prepared you coach your own executive to say look here's what I want to achieve and this is the kind of value we think that we can bring invite them to go check it out and by checking it out it turns into a mini project like an analysis so it starts with the executive you'd pique their interest and if they're interested enough they'll put some resources on it and then it becomes an investigation or a mini project and the momentum is continued because you ask your executive upfront to say hey let's have a look at this let's see if it would work for your company and by the end you and I'll meet again and either you know we'll work together or we'll just part friends but it would have been a really good effort to look at something that might you know move your company forward and so you you you have an endpoint that brings the executives back together at the end to give you a good shot at closing and I got to assume that you have an ocean of competitors or alternatives at least yeah how do you keep them at bay well they probably have to look at other things right just to justify such a large purchase yeah I think I I look at it in two different ways either you can go for a complete black and whites and it you know you paint a black and white scenario and it's kind of like you're a vehicle right so you want to throw rocks at their vehicle and you want to promote your vehicle in the eyes of the customer but I don't really use the custody the you don't really ever use the names of the competitors but you you can describe them in a way that they know that you're talking about the other one is more of a near-miss strategy which is when you you're in the soup with the competitors it's a it's a competitive situation you know they're there and you message in a way that the difference between you might be a little bit small but the way that you characterize and the way that you characterize the competition and run your investigation to the level of value it's so unique to you that it's kind of like okay they can both do fairly the same thing but that other one it's just a little bit off right if it was a bullet it would have just missed me and that as the two basic approaches that I usually take either either we're super super super different and it's plain as day and it's black and white us in the competition or we're really kind of close but there's just something off about that competitor and then you blow that up in their minds and it is it typically functionality or is it company value is a geography is it service or whatever works how to make the differences plain yeah no it's it's usually it's never really features your functions at least not where I've been successful it's always been why it just isn't right for the company okay the whole package right it's just off and either it's off because it's not a good fit for the rest of the ecosystem within the company alright it from a technical perspective it's not going to fit in well or culturally the two companies are so different we're a better match than they are it's always something bigger than just features and functions and how do you prevent what I've seen so much throughout my career is that they try and do the smallest possible thing to mitigate risk as up to start yeah instead of like doing the fifty million dollar deal they want to do the 50k deal and you know all will do the 50 million won next year after you get quota for it so I try to limit the options too I try to make two options look good do the big deal right now or do a very small pilot that'll only last three months and then it becomes the big all within the same fiscal yeah because you know there were there budgets right and this is what when I was at portfolio company all ran into it it was all getting you know the annual budget and trying to get your part of that budget and you knew when theirs was and they knew when yours was and it was at least a three month process to get on that list yeah I mean I don't do big deals every year yeah and sometimes it just takes those couple of years now you you said something earlier Brian that is really true you might your management team might give you a little bit of leash you know nine months or 15 months or something like that but if you don't start producing at some point it's usually not not great for you I happen to be fortunate enough to have done one big deal and then B have been given enough leash to go get the next one the next one took three years I had a couple of okay years between them yeah one of them I didn't make my number the other one I barely made got there and then the third year was a was another really big year but I was fortunate enough to have a management team that would give me enough you know rope to run to do that yeah that's a lot of rope and that's certainly in today's market not that common because that they've you you know the big whale hunters as you know they're blowing smoke until you get the piojo yep oh and you're like and it's not a very comfortable feeling to be the rep because the Commission checks are goose eggs for quite a while well as I said earlier it's not at least in my experience a cuz I'll shoot for a big deal and either it gets delayed or it gets turned into a smaller deal yeah so you can still easily and it's not like like it's not like the only thing that I will touch is a big deal you know there are there are smaller opportunities that simply come up but in in terms of the overall goal you always got to be pushing the big rock forward even if you're you know you're harvesting the smaller opportunities along the way if the only thing that you did was work on this one deal and you lived and died by it that's it's not a great strategy but as a primary driver within three or four opportunities that you're working on in any given year I think that that's sustainable yeah because I early in my career I sat down with my manager and he's he was telling me or I was asking him what his secret was and he goes well you know there's Fred over and San Jose and what Fred does he does one deal a quarter and it's usually a big deal comes in the last day of the quarter and sometimes it doesn't and then there's this guy in Chicago he'll do anything he the fishing-rod guy and he might make his number he works 80 hours a week and he goes my secret is I do a little bit of both and that's stuck with me my whole career you know I had done some big deals and it depends but I did mostly startups and it startups you really can't do just big deals there's a company starves not only you start but the company does and you know when you have a third of the country so they're just it's just not possible to concentrate so much of your time on it now looking at your career moving forward is this what you'd solely like to do because there are you know major account managers or certain roles within the company that would allow for that and I've had roles like that so I've been a what was called a key count director which is kind of basically it's a like an uber rep on top of other reps and the other reps don't report to you but you you set the strategy and they generally go along with you know the overall strategy that you set in conjunction with the customer executives so yeah I've had roles like that and they're great roles and as you go as you move along the career path of an individual contributor sales / and that's a it's a wonderful if you ever get the shot to be in have an experience like that it's a it's a it's a real eye-opener it's kind of like being an executive individual contributor and I like this because you know I have clients that sell like private jets and they might sell one jet a year and but I think certainly in the technology space there's there's a lot more fluidity to it where I mean with them it's much more of a political cell a finance cell a security and lifestyle cell so there's no problem getting people interested the right album is how do you work it to justify it within the company and technology you have to a little bit more flexibility well what about it turns you on other than the big Commission checks impact you know question its impact so what I've seen happen through doing a few large deals is that when a when a customer does a really large deal it tends to be for something that's mission-critical either to avoid something really bad happening or to make something really good possible and likely and what I've seen happen through the work that I've done with my team and with our customers is we've been able to impact the lives of millions of people because of what our customers do their end users or their end customers or their end patients we've seen the impact on them from the work that we've done and it's an incredible feeling to say yeah the deal that we did turned into an operating model on some technology and it changed the way that the company worked and it helped them do something good faster or have a greater reach or have a deeper impact in the lives of everyday people and that's just that's just that's a feeling that you'll never get from a massive Commission check I can see that and how do you get them to be able to justify this internally I do some I do some coaching and one of the guys who I cook coach is working at a startup and his company has a value proposition that is kind of a ten to one right do it the old way and it'll cost you ten million dollars do it this new way with our widget or our technology and it'll cost you one tenth of that cost yeah but their deals are only like you know 100k or less and it's just the same argument on a larger scale there are there are several arguments you can use but in in principle in in concept the same kind of things that lead to the transactional deals can lead to the very very large deal so the justification that goes back to just what I mentioned earlier either you avoid something that's really really bad or stops the bleeding or it enables something that they need either to stay in business or to get a higher revenue greater margin or wider reach cool this has been a fun conversation where can people go to connect with you and learn more about your work you're welcome to hit me up on LinkedIn Jamaal rhymer J am al rhymer Ari imer and I've also recently started a LinkedIn group that's just for enterprise sales people it's it's called the the sales tribe and either you can just search for it in LinkedIn groups or you can just hit me up and I'd be happy to let you in if you're an enterprise sales I think all of us have to learn how to do big deals because the a players the real jobs that we're going to find and b2b sales are for people that can do one of two things get into new accounts or and/or do big deals everything else you know can be automated it's really service account management and all of that doesn't take as much talent takes a nice hard-working person what takes talent is getting into new accounts and closing big complex deals that's the two things that I focus on in the courses one start the conversation get the meeting get you into new accounts without cold emailing without cold calling using a scientifically proven way of engaging with people that can be systematized so that it scales so that you can outsource it so that you can automate it with technology but make it not feel like it's been automated with technology technology is great but it tends to enable us to do dumb things faster what I want to do is smart things faster to get you into the accounts that you want to get into to start the conversations to get away from the old pitching that everyone's been teaching you about that doesn't seem to work very well anymore so let's let's get started go to be to be revenue calm click on the training I'm holding the q1 prices till the end of March so you can get in you can do a one-time payment or a 12-month payment plan up to you I've got a sample email in the show notes that you can send to your manager to get them to pay for it but you're better off paying for it for yourself why because then you'll be committed to doing it you could be committed to investing in yourself this is not just an online course there's community with office hours twice a month for an hour each and you get unlimited sales coaching that's recorded and put into the course all we get on zoom' now we go through your deals we apply the course to those deals on how to make those deals bigger faster and to crush your number because that's all that matters right that's why we're here we're not here just to hear my funny voice we're here to learn about selling and how to make good money how to build your career how to get out of the crappy situation you might be in and get into a great situation to be the one that the headhunters are calling that you're fighting off people everybody wants to hire me that's it hey and make sure you check out the other podcasts sales questions b2b revenue they're all they're great ideas to help you I answer your questions connect up with me on LinkedIn if you see my content flying by on LinkedIn please give it a thumbs up give it a share maybe put a little comment let me know what you think tell me your podcast list there love to hear from you also you just can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you get those daily videos and I've also put them up on my youtube channel Brian burns sales on YouTube all individual words to see the show notes just page up or tap the artwork on your smartphone depending on which one you have and we'll see you next time thanks for listening