Source: Wikipedia

Recently in my B2B Sales course, I received this question from a student:

Hi Dan,

I’m about halfway through the course and it has been great so far. You mentioned that at your previous role at IdeaRocket, you were able to sell into large Fortune 500 companies.

It seems like IdeaRocket was a relatively new company while you were there and I was wondering if you could elaborate on any differences there were in getting business from these larger accounts and the smaller ones.

Were there any specific challenges that applied to one over the other? Was there a certain level of credibility that was needed to graduate into getting larger deals w/ larger organizations?

Thank you!

Eric

Eric’s challenge made me recall my preconceived notions about selling to large companies. I once assumed that closing the big fish would be a herculean feat. Over time, I found that’s far from the reality.

Whether your buyers work for a conglomerate or the artisanal cheese shop down the street, the way they make decisions probably is not worlds apart. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to sell to the big dogs, you just have to shift your emphases.

Here’s what I learned in the process of closing 16 Fortune 500s, and observing others do the same.

Most purchases start the same way

Many marketers and salespeople I talk to are skeptical about using Adwords, blogging and SEO, Facebook ads, or other paid media to go after high-level decision makers in large companies. They assume that they have to break into an elite vendor network, or some shadowy masked gala in the Hamptons. Sure, that might have to happen occasionally, but more often a Google search or a social share from a friend is the starting point. Whether it’s a local business seeking a party caterer or a Fortune 500 getting quotes on a gigantic website, the browser is where our brains take us first.

Be persistent: more touch points pay off

In The Sales Acceleration Formula, Hubspot CRO Mark Roberge analyzed 50,000 leads to answer this question: What is the right balance between calling more frequently and managing the time invested per lead?

Here’s what he found (the emphasis is mine):

The optimal number of times to call a small business lead is five. For mid-market leads, the optimal number of call attempts is eight. For enterprise companies, the optimal number of call attempts is twelve.¹

Although the results are somewhat anecdotal, this agrees with my experience. Big game hunting is about timing and consistency. This means keeping in touch in order to provide value. You want to focus on the materials that come before case studies and other self-promotional stuff.

To come up with ideas, use this heuristic: What will be useful, regardless of whether or not they ever speak with you again?

The buying situation is dynamic

If the decision making process in a small company is a curvy path, in a large organization it’s a shifting sea. A small company conversation will unveil that your marketing contact will present her findings about you and your competitors to the founder for a yay or nay. The process is relatively static and straightforward.

Source: Flickr

In large companies, there are many stakeholders and priorities, and your buyer will be in the unenviable position of juggling them. To build a new website, your VP of Marketing must keep her CIO happy when it comes to data integration, her CFO happy when it comes to upfront and continuing costs, her marketing underlings happy when it comes to churning out uninterrupted content, and her CEO happy about all of these needs combined. It’s unlikely that she will go out of her way to inform you about all of these obligations.

Going further, new stakeholders enter the picture and priorities change. The CTO leaves the company, and his second in command gets promoted. The CEO’s paid media campaign is a hit, and he commands that the new site encompass specific landing pages.

To sail the shifting sea, it helps to establish a foundation of understanding from the start. Your learning must be justified as helping your buyer. Here are some sample questions you might ask:

“Who will be reviewing the results of this campaign?”

“Just wondering, who is your team most concerned about pleasing?”

“This might be a tough question, but what would a win look like? If the new site increased leads by 10% each month, would that be a success in your world?”

You can go adjust your sail to the shifting sea by focusing on this question:

What can I do to make life easier for my prospect?

Maybe that sounds cliched, but in my experience, it’s a winning mantra. Might the CIO want to learn how the new site will hook up into everything else? Send a short and specific document detailing this, and preemptively schedule a time to talk through it. Maybe the bean counters will worry about longterm website expenses? Clarify the costs involved. This isn’t about selling or persuading as much as it’s about setting expectations early on. If there is a roadblock, you want to suss it out before you invest weeks or months on uninformed calls, meetings, and proposals.

Prep for the long-haul

Big organizations move slower. They take longer to make decisions. This represents a challenge and an opportunity. On one hand, you have to invest more time and energy. On the other, you can often uncover new groups, events, campaigns, and other outlets for continuing business.

It’s tempting to chalk opportunities up to a loss if they take weeks or months to gain traction. Instead, build your prospecting machine for a marathon instead of a sprint. Consider tools like email automation, or auto-reply apps like Sidekick by Hubspot. Make sure you’re using a reliable CRM. Leverage timing, signals, and events to follow up at the right time. Above all, be top of mind when needs arise. When the big fish move, they move fast.

Build comfort

The thought process of startup and SMB buyers is entrepreneurial, and therefor experimental. These buyers might oversee numerous projects at once. Everyone is throwing ideas (and money) at the wall to see what sticks. The overall success and career longevity of an employee or owner is based on many projects.

Big companies are different. The weight of the success or failure of your solution will be squarely placed on the shoulders of your main buyer. While the small company’s concern is, “Will this be successful?”, the big company buyer is wondering, “Will this vendor get me fired?”

So how do you allay this fear?

Get validated

This probably isn’t groundbreaking advice. You have probably seen plenty of logo pages on company sites at this point. Those little icons work wonders.

Source: IdeaRocketAnimation.com

But if you’re reading this, you probably don’t have the luxury of an impressive client roster. It’s time to get creative. Without boldfaced lying, play up your experience. What companies have you and your team worked with in previous lives? Can you emphasize a millennium of combined experience?

Clarify process and outcomes

Regardless of experience, you can build comfort by letting your buyer know what to expect and when. Use clean-looking graphical tools whenever possible. For service businesses, timelines are clutch. Other ideas might include ROI calculators and support documents.

Case studies

Testimonials are great for the top of the funnel, but case studies close deals. There is legwork involved in creating them, but the payoff can be huge.

Take steps to systematize case study creation. Build result measurement into your normal back and forth with a customer. Here’s what that process might look like:

Schedule a debrief call at the end of every engagement Understand how success will be measured Demonstrate that the case study will be mutually beneficial in terms of promotional benefits Get a date on the calendar to discuss and collect KPI-grounded results Compile your case study Venue it on your site, or as a downloadable PDF

Focusing studies on premier companies is ideal once you’ve landed them, but you can start with whoever you’ve had success with.

Sweat the small stuff

The nitty gritty logistical details that might seem inconsequential matter to the big fish. Can you accept credit card payments? If so, your buyer can skip the red tape and added work of creating a purchase order. Is there a payment schedule that might better fit your buyer’s budgetary needs without hurting your cash flow? Propose it as an option. Can you put the details you confirmed over email into a professional-looking proposal? That might just seal the deal because your buyer will be able to fully explain your offer with ease to a big and disparate group.² When it’s between you and a comparably-priced competitor, these things determine the winner.

What’s been your biggest challenge about breaking into large companies? Any big wins you want to gloat about? It’s all good. Let us know in the comments.

—

¹ Roberge, Mark (2015-02-03). The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million (p. 154). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

² Not everyone deserves a proposal; create them when your buyer is qualified and the timing is right.

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