Dear SaaStr: What Skills Do I Have to Learn To Get Good At Enterprise Sales?
If you haven’t done enterprise sales yourself before, the biggest thing to understand: you can do it. But, you’re going to have to hustle. Really, really hustle.
Many founders who haven’t done sales before want the customers and leads and users to come to them. They want to focus then on the funnel, A/B testing, optimization, SEO, SEM, etc. etc. I get it. Stuff you can do just typing at a computer.
That’s all great, and for self-service business, that’s most of it.
But for enterprise sales, you’re going to have to get your arse out of your Aeron and go close some real live human beings:
- Listen, often in person. That often includes flying somewhere. It may include flying a lot of places, in fact, that you don’t really want to go.
- Learn your prospects’ business processes in detail, and how your product enhances them. If this is boring to you, you will fail.
- Learn how your potential customers will excel in their companies through your product. How can you help the person buying your product’s career? It’s not just about your fabulous UI/UX.
- Make, or don’t make, commitments to future development and features to meet their needs. Your product will always be deficient in some fashion in the enterprise. Always and forever. Get used to this, and saying Yes when it pulls your roadmap ahead opportunistically Not just No because it wasn’t what you planned.
- You’re going to have to learn how to not take no for an answer, how to beg for a meeting, and how to ask for money and a check. This is really, really hard if you haven’t done this before.
- You’re going to have to learn how to map out and sell to multiple stakeholders. The person you first talk to at a prospect is rarely 100% in charge of the buying decision. This is not a skill that is natural to most. Most of us just want to talk to whomever inbounds to talk to us.
- And internally, you are going to have to manage and hire sales people. Some will be great, some though won’t and will just take your money and will prove extremely expensive. You’re going to have to invest A LOT of time here. You can’t just hire some magic “VP of Sales” with 4 years of experience and have him/her scale the business. Instead, if you do that, you’ll actually end up with less sales than before.
