The 7 Keys To High Payback Meetings

Whatever it means for financial markets this week, 5 August will be remembered as the day when US hegemony was lost. All this is terrible news for Barack Obama.

Enterprise Sales: 47 Experts Share their Top Tips for Winning at Complex Sales

He has not delivered economic recovery. The US is drowning in negative equity and foreclosed homes. No president since Roosevelt has won an election with unemployment as high as it is today. Fiscal policy will be tightened over the coming months as tax breaks expire and public spending is cut. The Federal Reserve only has the blunt instrument of QE with which to stimulate the economy, and will only be able to deploy it after a softening up process for the markets that will take several months.

On top of that, Obama will now be branded as the president who presided over the national humiliation of a debt downgrade. Not that the Europeans should get too smug about this, because what we are witnessing is not just the decline of the US but the decline of the west. One response to last week's meltdown was the announcement of talks between the G7 — the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Japan — but while this would have been appropriate 20 years ago it is not going to calm markets today.

Holding a G7 meeting without China today is like expecting the League of Nations without the US to tackle totalitarianism in the s. There is no happy ending to this story. At best there will be a long period of weak growth and high unemployment as individuals and banks pay down the excessive levels of debt accumulated in the bubble years. At worst, the global economy will be plunged back into recession next year as the US goes backwards and the euro comes apart at the seams. The second, gloomier scenario, looks a lot more likely now than it did a week ago. Because there is no international co-operation.

There are plans for austerity but no plans for growth. How to position your offering for maximum impact 6. How to know who you are competing with for the deal 7. How to do better than your competitors 8. How to objectively assess if the deal is going in your favour or not 9. How to manage a sales team focused on enterprise prospects And a lot more…. All quotes given exclusively for the Knowlarity blog.

Steve Andersen Performance Methods. Irene Becker Just Coach It. Steve Benson Badger Maps.

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Jeb Brooks The Brooks Group. Craig Elias Shift Selling. Peter Fillmore Smart Funnel. Joe Hart Dale Carnegie Training. Leanne Hoagland Smith Advanced Systems. Mark Hunter The Sales Hunter. Connie Kadansky Exceptional Sales Performance. Nick Kane Janek Performance Group.

Ron Karr Karr Associates. Craig Klein Sales Nexus. Mike Kunkle Transforming Sales Results. Michael Nick Technology Finance Partners. Erik Peterson Corporate Visions Inc. Aaron Ross Predictable Revenue. Jill Rowley Social Selling Strategist. Tom Searcy Hunt Big Sales. Kurt Shaver The Sales Foundry. Colleen Stanley SalesLeadership, Inc. Brian Sullivan Sandler Training. Craig Wortmann Sales Engine Inc. He is the author of Beyond the Sales Process: Steve lives in Alpharetta, GA. When we take score and separate the winners from the losers, several factors repeatedly stand tall again and again.

The most successful salespeople and account managers that we work with always seem to: Sure, it requires an investment of time, but the ROI will be a much higher win rate, and more repeat business within these accounts. He works with B2B companies who offer solutions that tend to be strategic purchases that have a lengthy and complex buying process involving multiple stakeholders.

There are more stakeholders involved some of them may be invisible to you , and their procurement and approval processes often derail otherwise promising opportunities. In many cases, your most significant competition is not other vendors, but the convoluted and often opaque decision making process itself.

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This can be particularly challenging when you have limited sales resources. In the last 2 years at cloudHQ, she increased user acquisition by a factor of 7. Her main focus is growth, obsessing over the process of growing startups to their profitability stage. She mentors other startups on growth, is a global keynote speaker, and blogs for the Huffington Post. As an active member of the UploadVR collective, her most current interests revolve around artificial intelligence and mixed reality.

Understand the process and track your time goals. Irene Becker is a thought leader is business whose accomplishments include being first CEO of a steel company in Canada, developing one of the first business mentorship programs in the country and first woman Rotarian in Canada. Enterprise buyers tend to be more risk adverse and will be looking for what is tried and true, for results that have been achieved with other enterprise clients. The average decision maker in enterprise-level organizations would want to minimize failure. Therefore, if you do not have a list of other enterprise customers, you would encounter difficulty in convincing them that you are the right fit for them.

While you might not be able to compete with other vendors in terms of an enterprise customer list, there are other things that you could do, to make a more convincing case: That will make the decision makers feel important. Your senior leaders will also be able to have far more convincing sales conversations. Relationships and credibility go hand in hand. He lives just outside Nashville. For example, the wheels may turn a bit slower than in a smaller company and it may take a bit more time for each step of your sales process the prospect controls.

For example, if you are waiting for the prospect to respond with data or information, it tends to take them longer to gather it and clear it for release. Understand it just takes a little more time and red tape to clear on your way to the sale. Every guy thinks she has a date Friday night—and she sits home alone because no one called. Deals usually take a minimum of three months to close and might take up to a year or more, depending on the nature of the industry and your product.

Therefore, one of the biggest challenges of enterprise selling is to assess the performance of your sales activities. A far longer sales cycle makes it necessary for you to apply completely different benchmarks to determine how well you are doing.

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These revised benchmarks are important for both the sales manager as well as the sales reps. Sales reps would want to determine how well things are going. How is a particular opportunity progressing compared to other opportunities in the pipeline? How are the sales reps performing?

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Do they need any coaching on how to address a specific situation? Do they need any help from other departments like the product team to understand how to position the offering? Is a particular opportunity worth pursuing, or would it be a better idea to invest time and resources on others that look more promising.

Having the right metrics and benchmarks in place make it far easier for you to answer these questions. You should also define the different stages of the sales cycle and make them easy to identify. These stages should ideally be reflected in your CRM and should not necessarily be the stages that you have defined for opportunities with smaller organizations.

You should also clearly define the indicators of progress from one stage to another. You can define an advancement in terms of events such as a meeting with a key decision maker, a demo, an integration test with their engineering team, etc. Make sure that these definitions are adhered to when you determine your progress. The more accurate your assessment is about the opportunity, the more easily you will be able to take a decision to invest more or less resources behind it, and therefore increase your overall conversion rates.

She is an evangelist for Social Selling, both internally and externally to SAP, speaking at events, writing blogs. Social selling has several aspects to it. Successful salespeople know the importance of listening very carefully to what their buyers say.

Social listening is the contemporary version of paying attention to your buyers so that you can understand them better. It can be used to gather invaluable insights about the current issues a particular company is facing and what sort of solutions they are looking for. Going through social media accounts of the key decision makers of a company will help you understand what matters to them — professionally and personally. You can use this information to frame your pitches in the context of issues that are topmost on their mind and in sync with their beliefs and expectations.

Here are a couple of examples in which social listening can be used to gather valuable information, position your offering and build key relationships. In one instance, our salespeople used social media to identify the decision makers in a target account. They found out that one of the key decision makers was unfavorably disposed towards SAP. However, they also discovered that this person was a huge sports fan.

They knew that they would need to win him over to get the deal.

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They decided to include a lot of sports analogies in their sales presentations in order to build rapport and help him relate better with the offering. That certainly had the intended impact and they were able to win the account. In another instance, Freddie Borsellino, one of our Success Factors account executives, used social selling to win a significantly large deal. Through social listening, he was able to learn that they were looking for another solution in addition to what SAP was pitching to them, and that they were already evaluating vendors for that solution.

That solution also happened to be something that SAP offers. Freddie took the opportunity and approached them with a proposition to evaluate the SAP solution as well. Without social listening, he would not even have been aware that they were looking for a solution. Social selling has played a key role in our enterprise selling at SAP. We have trained more than 7, sales and marketing professionals in social selling techniques across the company.

We have developed a training program internally and have more than trainers who are certified in the SAP approach to social sales. It works, and therefore, we continue to invest in it! Real success goes beyond making a one-time sale, to developing a long-term partnership and business strategy with your clients and prospects. To become a strategic resource capable of driving change, salespeople need the skills to position themselves as experts. Sure, buying committees are larger than ever before.

Procurement is playing a more strategic role. Bill Carmody is a contributing writer for Inc and the CEO of Trepoint, a digital marketing agency that solves problems and creates break through marketing that is as powerful as the clients they serve. The biggest mistake most sales people make is targeting only one of those decision makers. Today, you need to be at least moderately versed at social selling in order to identify all the key decision makers. Hey, why not go to the source, right? You can read the output of my interviews in the following two Inc articles on the subject: While there are several free ways to to leverage LinkedIn, the pros eventually break down and purchase a monthly subscription to Sales Navigator.

Rather than sending a bulk generic invitation to all of them, you need to spend time on their profiles. Everything you need to know about how to sell to them is right there for the taking if you just take the time to do a little homework. Most people will not only share their career path, but also keen interests. As a bonus, head on over the Facebook and do some Google searches to see what else you can find out about each of your prospects. From there, look for ways to add value first. GIVE before you ever ask for something. Instead, look for authentic ways you can be helpful and just do it.

Large Enterprise sales take time. The average sales cycle is between 3 to 6 months.

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5. 47 Experts Share their Top Enterprise Sales Tips.
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This sales process is a marathon, not a sprint, so be prepared to invest heavily to land the business. Jim Cathcart, Founder of Cathcart. He has written 18 books and delivered over 3, speeches worldwide. ALL sales are to individuals within the enterprise. They must see you as a more appealing solution source than others. A big part of this will be in showing how much you understand them and what matters to them.

Know their systems too, discover how they make decisions like this. Be easy to say Yes to. Care for that person well, and keep in mind that career paths change and so does corporate leadership. Connect well with as many people as you can, not just one clique or team. Davis is president of TopLine Leadership, Inc. Kevin has more than 30 years of experience in every aspect of sales, sales management, and sales training. He is the author of three books: It makes a huge difference.

Acknowledge that, and ask about the earlier stages of their buying process. Start locally by developing a relationship with the nearest regional or district manager and reduce the risk they take on buying something from you by selling something them small that compliments what they have instead of trying to replace something they already use.

Make sure that sale delivers real results and then upsell that person while you cross sell to other locations of the same division. Once you have multiple locations as customers work your way to a national contact for a national contract. Only then can you take your track record to sell to other divisions or other countries. All of what I just said goes out the window if there is a change in the national decision maker. Now go straight to them AND do it as soon after they get the job as possible. Essentially, people who are newly appointed to a role and are dissatisfied with the status quo have the highest likelihood of making a purchase.

Conversely, the data also shows that if you try to approach a decision maker beyond this window, your likelihood of closing the deal falls dramatically. After a career in sales leadership, John has held a variety of CEO roles in the performance improvement industry since During this time, his work has focused on helping leaders grow revenues and enhance operating margins through excellence in leadership, strategy and sales execution in the Americas, EMEA and Asia.

What we know is that, to be successful, there are some things you need to do well here that are unique, and others that frankly apply to almost any sale you try to make, irrespective of how large your buying organization might be. To be successful, sellers always need to build trust, demonstrate credibility, and create differentiated value in the moments that matter most — the time in front of buyers. Trust ranks as the most important factor in influencing buying decisions and the seller can earn or erode this essential element by the way he interacts with a prospective buyer. What makes selling to large, complex organizations uniquely challenging is that you must deal with multiple stakeholders, often championing competing or misaligned business goals and then navigate frustratingly opaque procurement practices.

Sometimes it is a miracle that buying decisions ever get made. The opportunity is to recognize that this complexity exists both for the buyer as well as the seller. Sellers that see their role as educators throughout the buying cycle, who ask thoughtful questions and share insights from their experiences along the way, help shape unanticipated solutions that create real lasting value and ultimately win the deal. Best practices to keep in mind: Specifically, we feel like we've lost that sense of work-life balance. We know we may have been putting in too many hour weeks in a row, and we can feel the side effects of making that kind of commitment.

The crucial question then becomes: What are we going to do about it? I've found that the best CEOs are always striving to find balance in their lives. That's what makes them great leaders and good people. And certainly we all need to put ourselves out of balance for a time, when, for example, we're in the middle of buying or selling a business. You know heading into that transaction that you're going to go out of balance. But the trick is to be conscious about that and know what you are sacrificing in the bargain.

Then, once the deal is done, you should have a plan to get back into balance as quickly as possible. So what are the secrets great CEOs use to live a balanced life? They measure themselves on seven key elements, where they give themselves a score from 1 way out of balance to 10 Zen-like harmony to see where they stand.

I'm not sure I have ever met anyone who has scored a 10 on all seven elements, so a more reasonable goal might be to find balance with at least half of these parts of your life. Whether you are a CEO or just a go-getter at work, it's easy to let things like exercise and diet go by the wayside once things get busy in the office.

But that's the only body you're going to get and it needs to carry you until the end of the game. That's why it's critical to continue to keep your body strong and healthy enough to enable you to do the things that excite you-whether that's traveling for business or visiting your grandkids. The key here is to be fit enough that you don't have to say "no" to anything you want to do. Give yourself a score-be honest-and see what you think. Could you do more to improve that number as a way to begin leading the kind of balanced life you're seeking?

How balanced do you feel with your family time?