Getting the Most from
Enterprise Sales Training
with Free Templates, Tools & Guides
What are Enterprise Sales?
Enterprise Sales are sales to large organisations that normally have long sales cycles, (minimum 6 months) and involve a complex sales process which includes multiple decision-makers, (usually 5-9 people) from different divisions within the buying organisation. They are high-value contracts that would normally go through a formal ITT (Invitation to Tender) and RFP (Request for Proposal) buying
What is an Enterprise Organisation?
Whilst there is no definitive guide to what is an Enterprise Organisation they usually share the following traits:
1. They operate Internationally and have offices at a National Level in the majority of countries.
2. They have multiple divisions some of which may be diversified from the core business of the organisation.
3. They have thousands of employees and use either a flat, horizontal, divisional or matrix management structure.
4. They invest heavily in Research and Development to develop both new and existing products.
5. They are most likely to be technology, telecoms, software and pharmaceutical companies, however, we class any company listed on any of the major stock exchanges as an enterprise organisation.
What is a Complex Sale?
A complex sale is one that includes multiple decision makers, each of which may have competing priorities. Complex sales are frequent when selling to Enterprise organisations and in most cases the additional number of decision makers elongates the sales cycle.
According to research, the average number of decision-makers is 8 and the average sales cycle is 9 months. Each of these decision makers or buyers have their own needs, wants and desires so any form of generic value proposition is unlikely to resonate with any of them.
Due to the number of buyers involved, there are invariably many times that buyers have conflicting internal priorities that they have to try and balance throughout the process. These competing priorities can create conflict over “political” or “power” grabs, which then makes navigating through the sale even more difficult.
In addition, what makes the sale complex is research from Gartner shows that up to 80% of the buying groups revisit each stage of their purchasing process at least once.
1. The Enterprise Selling Process
We believe the most productive way to sell to Enterprise Organisations is to sell to them, in the way that they want to buy. This is because they are usually either unwilling or unable to change their buying process to one that will match your own sales process. So rather than try to force them down a path they won’t take and remain out of sync with the buying team, it makes more sense to align your sales process with their buying process.
With 67% of the buying journey and process is being done online and more and more companies using are using a “Scout” to retrieve information while they stay in the background. This can make it very difficult to influence the early stage of the buying process. This is critical, as up to 57% of purchasing decisions are made before the customer contacts the supplier. In cases where this does happen buyers may simply be undertaking due process and require three bids.
What Sales Reps can do is kick start the buyer journey and guide them through the process, ensuring they have easy access to all the information they require at each stage.
2. Enterprise Sales Framework
In our Sales Training we use a simple 5 step sales framework that is aligned with the typical Enterprise Buying Process.
Unfortunately, although this is represented as a linear sales process, in reality, the buying groups are moving back and forth checking, verifying and rechecking information, most of which is done digitally, not with the Salesperson.
The buying groups are typically made up of people from different departments who have been brought together internally to solve a problem. This is very different than selling to smaller companies where often the Managing Director is the sole decision maker.
That’s not to say that the salespersons role is marginal, rather their main role now is to act as a guide, using their knowledge and sales skills to provide the right information to the buyers at each stage of the buying process.
The most successful Salespeople as they guide the buyers through the process will be building E.A.T (Expertise, Authority & Trust) with the buyers and shaping the specification requirements to match the customers’ needs with their own offering.
You can use the evaluation sheet above to map your own sales process, content and collateral to the buyers expectations. Creating and making this content available helps reduce the friction in the sales process and speed up enterprise deals going through your pipeline.
3. Enterprise Sales Training Topics
In most cases our Enterprise Sales Training is bespoke to our clients’ needs, however, the most common topics we cover are:
B2B Sales Training Topics
- Territory Management
The structured process to maximise revenue from a given sales territory whilst maintaining or reducing costs.
- Selling Business Solutions vs Technical Solution
The methodology of selling business solutions that solve business problems vs selling technology that has little or no connections to the prospects business pains.
- Opportunity Qualification
An objective process of measuring the likely hood of winning a deal before committing time money and resources.
- Managing Sales Performance
Maximising and maintaining the performance of the sales team.
- Corporate Sales Negotiation
The successful negotiation of sales and contracts.
- SaaS Sales Training
The sale of Software as a Service products.
- Managing the Enterprise Sales Cycle
How to control & manage complex sales cycles
Workshop Topics
- New Product or Service Launch
Creation of Sales Messaging & Sales Campaigns
- Launch a New Business Quarter
Re-energise and invigorate the teams sales performance in the next quarter
- New Sales Campaign
Kickstart a sales campaign to reinforce messaging
- Support a New Sales Strategy
Support Sales Reps as they adjust to a new Sales Strategy.
- Support a Sales Conference Theme
Reinforce a Conference theme with sales workshops & training
- Targeted Sales Support
Provide targeted support around specific sales challenges holding the team back
4. Training Methodology
When designing enterprise training sessions it’s important to consider the attendees and the context. The majority of Enterprise Sales People are high performers with lots of experience and any training should respect and leverage that.
Our training utilises a “workshop” style approach that is designed to engage participants and when combined with our expert facilitators we guide the Salespeople to create their own solutions.
Allowing the salespeople to create the solutions means they develop a sense of ownership of the training outcomes and therefore are much more likely to implement and follow-through after the training.
Where possible we utilise our Work-Based Learning solutions that dramatically increase learning outcomes and post-training adoption.
This results in improved sales pipeline values with shorter sales cycles and increased win rates across the team.
5. Commercial (SMEs & SMBs) vs Enterprise Sales Process
| SME & SMB | vs | ENTERPRISE |
| Typically 0 – 3 months | SALES CYCLE | Minimum 9 months |
| New customer acquisition and scaling | PAIN POINTS | Sales Performance & Key Account Management |
| Generalists covering multiple bases | SALES MANAGEMENT | Data Driven Specialists |
| 1-3 Decision Makers | DECISION MAKING PROCESS | 7-10 Decision Makers |
| 1-3 Sales Meeting to close a deal | SALES MEETINGS | 3 Sales Meetings plus to close a deal |
| Ad hoc | ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT | Segmented & Structured |
| Marketing Led | LEAD GENERATION | Sales Led |
| Unstructured & ill-defined | SALES ENABLEMENT | Structured with Playbooks |
| Low with often only the CEO involved | COMPLEXITY | High with Multiple departments & stakeholders involved |
| Often Transactional Sales | METHODOLOGY | Consultative & Solution |
| Low | RISK | High |
| <£30,000 Average deal sizes | DEAL SIZE | >£50,000 Average deal sizes |
6. Enterprise Sales Management
Enterprise Sales Management can be very different from managing the Salesforce of an SME or Mid Market organisation. In most cases, the SME Sales Manager has to be a generalist as they can be responsible for marketing, lead generation, account management and sales tools, collateral, systems and processes, sales training and sales coaching.
The modern Enterprise Sales Manager has a support machine behind them of experts and systems, allowing them to focus in a more detailed and specific way. In general, they are much more specialised, data-driven and focused on objectives and outcomes, than an SME Sales Manager.
The Enterprise Sales Manager needs the skills to identify, co-ordinate and harness the resources of many different departments within the Enterprise, such as marketing, technical and support.
7. Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement is a relatively new but fast-growing function of the modern Enterprise Sales Department which is responsible for providing the content, tools, systems, process, training and coaching to support the modern Sales team.
Statistics show that:
Companies with best-in-class Sales Enablement strategies experience 13.7% annual increase in the contract value of enterprise deals – Aberdeen Research.
72% of companies that surpassed revenue targets had defined Sales Enablement functions. Forbes Insights
As the Sales Enablement function is more likely to be adopted by companies as they move towards the top of the Sales Maturity model it is much less likely to be adopted by SME’s who tend not to have a defined strategy and have a more disparate approach to providing support to their sales teams.
8. Bespoke Enterprise Sales Training
Many large enterprises create bespoke sales training programmes that are delivered In-house. We believe in practising what we preach, which means that every bespoke programme we deliver is built specifically around our own customers needs and business drivers. This simple approach is part of what we advocate for selling to Enterprise organisations. Always start with the customer needs and business drivers in mind. No need = no sale.
We often find that may sales professionals are already doing most things well. It therefore doesn’t make sense to always start afresh and we would help you capture and document existing best practice within your organisation, document it, and then replicate this through the wider team. Our own sales trainers and coaches also feed into your best practice model.
We can then blend this content with our own sales training courses to make sure you have a really powerful content that truly impacts your sales team.
If you would like to learn more about our bespoke training programmes for Enterprise organisations please contact us via the Contact Us page.
9. Team Selling
Team Selling is an essential part of the modern Enterprise Sale often due to :
the complexity of the solutions being sold.
the complexity of the customers’ decision-making process.
In fact, if you are trying to sell to an Enterprise organisation studies show that you may be 258% more likely to close the deal working as a team than if you were to sell on your own.
Customers have multiple stakeholders in their DMU (Decision-Making Units) who have different wants and needs and it’s normally not possible for one person to satisfy all their needs.
Equally important is the perception it gives when Enterprise buyers only ever meet and hear from the one person and given that Risk is one of the primary drivers when selecting a supplier, it’s unlikely (but not impossible) for an Enterprise organisation to award a contract to what they perceive is a one-person company.
In most cases as a minimum, the sales prfessional would work jointly on the deal with a Product Manager or Technical Specialist, but in many cases marketing should also become involved to nurture the lead through the sales process, with more senior stakeholders in the selling organisation being involved in the final negotiations.
10. Enterprise Training Reviews
“All the sales ‘Training’ I have had up to Klozers has been just that – ‘Training’. What Klozers offer is transferable from class-room to board-room is to develop an understanding of the business I work in and apply proven techniques that will work. I now refer to this as Sales Coaching, which for me is very different to training.
Nic Hood – Commercial Director, TechnoNICOL
“Klozers are the Sat Nav for sales success.”
Alan Wood – Business Manager, Microsoft
11. Online Support for Training
Our Enterprise Sales Training is fully supported via our Online Sales Training portal. We use this to engage with attendees before training to gather information, assessments, surveys and communicate information relevant to the upcoming training.
Post training we use our online training portal to deliver further coaching and reinforce the training to ensure our training sticks.
