It’s tempting isn’t it? The thought of closing a deal with an enterprise customer?

You earn substantial revenues, which might run into millions of dollars. You also add a well-known company to your customer list and this reputation makes it easier for you to close other deals.

However, selling to enterprises is extremely complex and far more difficult than winning deals with mid-sized companies or startups.

What Makes Enterprise Sales Tougher?

Here are just a few challenges of enterprise sales:

You don’t just sell to one or two people. An enterprise deal will have several decision makers. Additionally, there will be several people who you might never meet, but who will have considerable influence over the decision.

You will have to speak to a dozen or more people from different departments, attend several meetings and deliver multiple presentations.

And all this will take time. It usually takes at least 3 months to close an enterprise deal and might even take a year – sometimes longer!

How can you successfully navigate all these complexities of the enterprise sale, and win the business?

Asking the World’s Leading Authorities on Sales

To find out, we asked 47 of the world’s best-known sales experts about their advice on how to win at enterprise selling.

Who are these experts?

Most of them are consultants, trainers and coaches who Fortune 500 companies go to when they want to learn about sales.

Many of these experts have been recognized by Forbes, TopSalesWorld and Salesforce as the world’s leading authorities in sales.

Many are bestselling authors in the field of sales

Some of them are in executive roles in Training Industry’s Top Sales Training Companies of 2017.

Others are CEOs and senior leaders of companies who have had years and even decades of experience in selling to enterprises.

What these Experts told Us

Our experts gave us several tips for the multiple aspects of enterprise sales

1. How to accurately identify the prospect company’s needs, even if they don’t explicitly tell you.

2. How to identify companies that would be most likely to buy

3. How to identify the right decision makers within a company to approach

4. How to build relationships with the decision makers

5. 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

10. And a lot more…

Here are our featured experts (in alphabetical order of last names)

47 Experts Share their Top Enterprise Sales Tips

(Note: All quotes given exclusively for the Knowlarity blog)