Enterprise sales are a widely sought target for both company owners and sales professionals. The earnings and sales commissions you would get from a single enterprise transaction are always worth a year or two of what you will earn dealing for smaller firms.
Enterprise sales involve the acquisition of large contracts. They usually include lengthy sales times, many decision-makers, and greater risk than conventional deals. However, the effort and risk required to be successful in SaaS sales are directly proportional to the rewards.
This article will walk you through what you need to know about finding enterprise sales leads, whether you want to develop a SaaS strategy from scratch or want to improve your sales tactics.
To start with, you need to make sure that all your ducks are in a row. So, let’s start with aligning your sales and marketing team (aka Smarketing).
Need of Smarketing When Targeting Enterprises
Marketing has the responsibility to create personalized marketing assets that direct prospects along the buyer’s journey. They aid in the provision of information and persuasive assets that lead to the closing of a deal. Frequent communication is needed with sales to make sure the materials are useful. They can be adjusted based on sales feedback and customer reactions.
These assets may include:
- Customized sales decks created to resolve unique prospect issues.
- Personalized one-pagers with details tailored to a particular prospect.
- Playbooks or marketing campaigns that are produced and launched with particular clients in mind.
- Sponsored activities that are precisely tailored to convince and impress prospects.
These are only a few options; however, needs can differ for every organization and prospect. Building a partnership between the business segments through check-in meetings is the best way to ensure that marketing and sales are on the same page and give each other what they need. Marketing and sales teams operating as individual entities are not appropriate in enterprise sales. While aligning their sales and marketing team is just one challenge for the businesses, there are other challenges while selling to the enterprises.
Challenges in Enterprise Sales
We have broken down the challenges into the top and middle funnel issues of the lead generation funnel.
1. Top-of-the-Funnel
Missing Qualified Leads: At this point, inbound leads are typically small in comparison to outbound leads. An outbound strategy usually consists of a combination of cold calls and referrals, with the former typically outweighing the latter. Sales reps usually show up and throw up. As a result, there’s a quantity to your outbound leads, but they lack quality. Overall, the outbound lead generation has lackluster results.
Lack of Prioritization Method: When there are so many potential leads at the top of the funnel, SDRs lack lead prioritization. The prioritization is often based on their judgment. They will pick what looks like a quick win regardless of what leads will have the actual best long-term results.
2. Middle-of-the-Funnel
The middle of the funnel challenges include:
- The lack of context for why they’re speaking with the prospect in the first place.
- Lacking listening capabilities.
- Reps rarely ask questions to learn more about the prospect’s issues in the first conversation.
- Rep is unable to detect purchasing signals.
- Poor story-telling abilities.
Although the severity of the issues varies for every business, all the above issues often cause significant leakage at this stage of the lead funnel.
3. Other Challenges
Seeking Appointments During Prospecting: This is one of the major challenges for sales reps during enterprise sales.
It is difficult to capture client attention and schedule meetings, particularly when targeting CEOs and other C-level executives in the business, who are often busy.
Their most precious asset is time. Internal goals vie for their attention. Not to mention the fact that corporate sales will include multiple decision-makers, each with their own set of goals and personal schedules.
Attempting to arrange an appointment or a joint sales meeting with the parties concerned involves complex schedule alignment.
Developing Value Insights in a Sales Conversation: Delivering ideas that resonate with customers during a sales discussion or meeting is becoming more difficult.
This is due to the sales professional’s or salesperson’s lack of experience, data, and comprehension of the customer’s market, and challenges.
Demonstrating Value and Profitability While Closing: Today, there are a plethora of choices and solutions available online. A similar company or business is selling the same product or service as you.
And, in most cases, they would be selling the good or service at a cheaper price than yours. Competing with low-cost providers has become a challenge.
Too many sales professionals struggle to justify their product or service price point while negotiating with a customer and, as a result, fail to retain the original price point and profitability.
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All these challenges boil down to one issue – lack of data. Enterprise sales require insight into who are the decision-makers, what they value, and why they should choose you. The last one you should already know, but the first two require collecting the right data and using it at the right stage of the enterprise sales process.
Using Data in Enterprise Sales
Data can help you master each stage of your enterprise sales process. You can reach out to your target decision-makers in several ways, nurture them, and walk them through the sales process. Whatever approach you take, data is at the core of the entire business sales cycle.
Understanding Your Audience
You must build an ideal customer profile (ICP) to generate higher-quality leads and speak more specifically to the prospects’ desires, needs, and expectations. However, reliable B2B data such as firmographic, technographic, and intent data is needed to ensure that the sales team is pursuing ideal prospects.
Better Prospecting
More than 40% of salespeople claim this is the most difficult aspect of the sales process. Prospecting is often dominated by the marketing team. A smart way to prospect is to supplement your outreach efforts with data intelligence tools that allow you to access a database of millions of prospects in just a few clicks. This allows you to spend less time researching your enterprise prospects and more time in conversation.
Increase Demos and Trials Form Submission
The majority of the marketing goals point towards increasing the demo and free trial form fill-ups. The trick is to keep your form as short as possible. The fewer the fields, the greater the number of conversions. But what about getting more information? This is where data enrichment comes in handy, as it helps you to keep the form short by asking only for the name and email, while the rest of the missing firmographic and technographic data is auto-filled in your CRM.
Get All the Necessary Data Under SalesIntel’s Umbrella
SalesIntel offers comprehensive data that is necessary for the sales and marketing team to ensure a consistent lead generation funnel and a stronger sales pipeline.
Firmographic and Technographic Data for Segmentation
You will be able to target and reach qualified accounts by using firmographic and technographic data. It stands to reason: the more accurate data on your target market, the better decisions you will make while segmenting your audience.
SalesIntel’s data filter variables include sector, sales, region, company size, executive title, resources and innovations your prospects use, and more. Sales representatives can use the data to narrow down their prospect list to their ideal customers.
Buyer Intent Data for Setting Up Lead Qualification
Understanding customer intent is important for any marketer or salesperson seeking to increase their success rate. Understanding prospects’ actions and triggers assist companies in determining what motivates them to purchase and when. With this insight, marketing and sales teams may target a specific profile and take a tailored approach for them on demand to increase the probability of a purchasing decision.
SalesIntel’s Intent Data will assist you in discovering and studying the intent topics that are actively being investigated by enterprise accounts. This allows you to uncover your prospects’ purchasing signals so that you can chase prospects/leads who are already searching for a solution.
Data Enrichment for Frictionless Form Submissions
Keeping the form as short as possible is a good way to enhance form submission. By doing so, you lower the entry barrier, increasing the likelihood that your prospects will apply when they discover they just need to have their name and email address. You can enrich your existing data with only an email address, and SalesIntel can auto-populate the human-verified firmographic data, technographic data, and direct dial numbers to assist you in the sales process.
VisitorIntel for Unmasking the Website Visitors
Tracking the organizations that come to your website is another clever way to get to find and prioritize enterprise leads. Knowing the details of your website visitors even if they haven’t filled the form on your website is a bonus. You can do so with the aid of VisitorIntel.
VisitorIntel tracks organizations visiting your website and provide you with data such as technographic data, firmographic data, intent data, and industry-leading contact information for the organization’s decision-makers and key influencers.
Direct Mobile Numbers to Boost Closures
Enterprise companies rarely have executives that are easy to get a hold of. Connecting to a decision-maker via switchboard numbers takes an average of 22 minutes, but just five minutes via direct dial numbers from SalesIntel.
Enterprise Sales is a Marathon
Enterprise SaaS sales is a marathon, not a sprint. As you learn more about your potential clients, you must remain vigilant throughout the process. The more you invest in your SaaS strategy and use your data, the closer you will be to high-speed sales growth.
