What Sellers Need to Know About Closing Enterprise Deals

Lambda leans on detailed discovery and deep industry knowledge to secure enterprise deals

Apr 12, 2024

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I won’t sugarcoat it: there’s no magic formula for winning big accounts. Wish there was and despite trying to find one at Outreach, they all came with their own nuances. Securing enterprise deals usually involves a complex and lengthy sales cycle - but there are effective ways to make the process smoother.

For Robert Brooks, part of Lambda’s founding team and their VP of Revenue, the process is highly manual: he encourages the sales team to take detailed notes during prospecting calls (yes, Google Docs are acceptable) and study up on the industry.

This ensures that before high-stakes meetings, leaders and sellers are deeply knowledgeable about the prospect and confident enough to close the deal.

This warrants a break down - let’s get into it.

What Sellers Need to Know

Points to help you land more enterprise deals👇

The power of documentation

To secure enterprise deals, sellers need to meet the diverse needs of each customer. This requires the sales team to:

Understand individual customer pain points.
Gather data from conversations with customers through detailed note-taking, or by leveraging tools like Gong and Salesforce.
Analyze the data to find patterns.
Bring detailed documentation to enterprise meetings.
Iterate and repeat.

Prospects provide a lot of data during a call, expressing their concerns and goals. By continually gathering and analyzing that data, your team can start to identify patterns of specific types of buyers. But the analysis doesn’t end there.

“Even if you’re selling a product that's needed in the market, that doesn't mean the buyer who has that pain is automatically going to buy it from you.”

Brooks recommends sellers spend time identifying the “how” and “why” of pain points to understand if the deal is a true fit.

Documentation is crucial to securing the deal. Sellers can relay back to potential clients what they’ve identified as pain points and how their product can solve them.

Selling to technical audiences

With a deeper understanding of the market, it’s easier for sellers to establish confidence with users and prospective customers. To better instill this confidence in sellers, Brooks prioritizes technical training over sales process training.

“In a technical role, sometimes you have to build up that trust, build up that confidence. The more you understand about the industry, the more you can connect with that machine learning engineer or software engineer you're selling to in a non spammy way, and the more opportunity you have to win.”

For take-home assignments during the interview process, Brooks asks candidates to read and analyze an industry article about any given product and submit a few paragraphs on the overall message and what the product does.

“Comprehension is one of the leading indicators of a salesperson's success is the ability to take complex ideas and thoughts quickly, understand them, and distill them down into simple information. If you have no comprehension of the basic tenets of what your prospect does, you're reducing your chances of actually closing the sale. If your sales leader is at the table with the CTO, you want them to be as confident as possible in that sale.”

Balancing product knowledge and sales process in training

Remember the importance of documentation? The same applies to internal processes. Especially for early-stage startups, sales leaders can help sellers onboard and excel by supplying playbooks and detailed documentation on process.

Even more critical is making sure sellers are knowledgeable about the product.

For Brooks, the reason is simple: buyers prefer one-on-one conversations. If a seller is well-versed in the product, they won’t need to bring in someone from the team who is highly technical until a later conversation. This allows sellers to build stronger relationships with buyers and understand their pains early on.

The benefits of full-stack AEs for early-stage startups

Until it’s time to scale bigger, Brooks believes in not breaking up the process for as long as possible. There are benefits for early-stage startups who appoint the same AE to handle prospecting, closing, and account management:

Shorter feedback loops internally and with buyers.
Shorter sales cycles to accelerate learnings within the organization.
Fewer people involved in the sales process, giving buyers a better, more seamless experience.
Building repeatable processes that can scale to BDRs and AEs.

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👂 More for your eardrums:

Daniel Ruiz has spent his career driving growth at high-velocity startups, serving as an early employee at multiple YC companies before co-founding Synch. As CEO, he has successfully raised funding from top investors like Haystack and Jack Altman in a challenging market. With Synch, Daniel is on a mission to streamline the go-to-market tech stack, helping revenue teams spend less time on sales ops and more time actually selling. He brings hard-won insights on leveraging investors, landing crucial first hires, and scaling with in-person sales. Most importantly, Daniel is a founder who leads from the front, always eager to hop on a plane to close a big deal.

In this episode, you’ll learn about bundling vs unbundling the tech stack, what’s working in outbound sales, finding and landing a critical first sales hire, and in-person sales.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

👀 More for your eyeballs:

Forbes just dropped their list of the top 50 AI companies to watch.

The range of years in which these companies were founded spans from 2013 to 2023.
The range of funding amounts for the companies listed spans from $0M to $11.3B.

The last five on the list in alphabetical order below and check out the full list here.

🚀 Start-ups to watch:

Delivery Collective - launched with a strong mission to decentralize local commerce delivery and provide merchants with a delivery platform to service and connect with their customers. Read Delivery Collective’s launch story.

Document Crunch - announced a partnership with Procore to form the latest advancements in contract intelligence: a seamless combination of Document Crunch’s contract compliance tools with a contractor’s everyday operations within Procore, empowering project teams to execute and manage the contracts they’re responsible for with ease. Read more on the partnership.

🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week:

Senior Product Marketing Manager at Mutiny (Remote, US & Canada)
Renewal Specialist at Cube (NYC)
Staff Data Engineer, Special Projects at Northbeam (Remote, US)
Customer Success Manager at Closinglock (Austin, TX)
Senior Product Manager at Stotles (London, England)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

🗓️ GTM industry events

Go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

April 16-17: PLGTM (San Francisco)
April 17: Goldenhour (NYC or Online)
April 18: CMO Summit (NYC, NY)
May 15-16: ELG Conference (Austin, TX)

◼️ GTMfund corner

The team has been split between a handful of cities attending and hosting events this past week, including a GTMfund dinner in NYC. Always a great crew in NYC!

That’s it, that’s all.

You can build all the process in the world… but never underestimate the power of a simple Google Doc and note taking.

The flip side also applies if ideating - I tend to keep tons of ideas stored in my brain, but it isn’t till I actually write them out that the thoughts fully clarify.

Hope this not only inspired you to take more notes during prospecting calls, but also in anything you’re trying to deeply comprehend.

Catch you next week!

Barker ✌️

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