The Physics of Enterprise Sales

Big deals, big problems

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder. This is my weekly newsletter developing the “physics” of startups. We record a companion podcast on Spotify/YouTube.

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Enterprise sales - selling big contracts to big companies - feels like a mystical art. Like an 18-24 month dance with some ungodly number of steps and schmoozing techniques, requiring these pants:

Source

I once felt this way, and so in preparation for the biggest deal of my life, I read the Challenger Sale to try to figure out this dark art. The result was a sales call that went so poorly, the potential customer took our presentation, gave it to another company, and paid them to build a clone of our product.

I probably didn’t apply the Challenger Sale correctly, but the point is: I was thinking about sales backwards (as I outlined in the original Physics of Sales), and I was therefore thinking about enterprise sales SUPER backwards.

Since then, I’ve learned quite a bit about enterprise sales and I can confidently say they are not that complicated. In fact, they follow the exact same physics of any other sale.

Here’s what you should know about enterprise sales. This has led, as a particularly fun example, to two ~20-year-old college dropouts selling a $100k+ contract to a massive publicly-listed media company as their first customer, from cold LinkedIn outbound, before they built a product or even had a product idea.

The physics

Enterprises are large companies with lots of people. But enterprises do not buy things - companies literally can’t buy things! A person within the enterprise buys.

That person will buy your product for the same reason anyone would buy it: they have PULL! Specifically, they are prioritizing something right now that they can’t do with their available options - and you offer them something that helps them get their priority done.

This person with PULL is the champion. The deal happens so that they can get their priority done. Their priority causes the purchase.

Your job is to sell to this person. And then you help them go through the process of buying it, which is often frustrating for all involved because of the enterprise’s buying process. Which, by the way, is why PULL is so important in enterprise: If a buyer has to jump through 37 hoops to buy, they need to have a damn good reason to do so!

Here is the standard enterprise sales process I recommend that will keep all parties sane.

The process

Here is the core process, which has three steps:

1. Call 1: A 1:1 call with the person you believe has PULL

   1. Do they have PULL?

   2. Does our product fit?

   3. What else do they need to know to decide whether they want to bring this into their organization right now?

2. Call 2: A 1:1 call with the same person from call 1

   1. Answer questions from 1c

   2. Confirm they want to bring this into their organization

   3. Plan out how they will bring this into their organization, using their timeline for getting their priority done as a forcing function to drive urgent action

3. Execute the plan

   1. E.g., group demos, legal review, POCs, procurement processes, etc.

After step 2B, your champion is “sold”, and you’re just helping them buy. I think of the tush push in football: Your champion has the ball, and you are pushing them over the goal line. They push internally, and you push them.

You get into a lot of trouble when you fight against these physics. Beyond the original sins outlined in Physics of Sales, here are common error modes in enterprise sales:

• Trying to sell to groups of people (and never finding a champion, and also winding up trying to make your product appeal to everybody, making it too big to be purchased by anybody)

• Doing group demos too early, before you have a champion (= lunch and learn)

• Making your champion look bad because you try to take the ball and run with it (e.g.,: you try to sell to their peers rather than helping them sell to their peers)

• Adding steps because you think enterprise sales requires the step, rather than figuring out what is actually necessary (e.g., proposing pilots, business cases, etc.)

I increasingly believe there are only two problems: “Demand” problems and “shooting self in the foot” problems. Sales in general, and enterprise sales in particular, is a very common place for those “shooting self in foot” problems to kill what otherwise would be a fast-growing company.