Todd Caponi:
Todd knows that enterprise consensus selling is hard, enterprise consensus buying is harder, and everybody working remotely makes it even harder! Todd discovered some research that showed that our decisions are biased by the cost to act. In other words, if we see a reward and the path to get to it is hard, our brain will tell us that the reward is not that great. That mostly results in no decision getting made, so Todd shares some research-based actionable tips to help us in overcoming the cost to act bias.
Todd’s tips:
- Always lead with transparency to build trust from the get-go. Research shows that leading with your price is better than hiding it, and it also removes friction from the buying journey.
- Leaders need to stop measuring people’s potential success based on their pipeline mode. They should encourage their reps to qualify deals out faster so that the whole organization can focus their prospecting and deal-making efforts on the deals they should win.
- Look at your sales process and imagine what it is like as a buyer. If there is any friction, you know that you are triggering the brain’s remote buyer bias.
Rob Jeppsen:
Procurement and contracts are part of doing business at an enterprise. Rob shares some tips and strategies that he and his team have used successfully in speeding things up with either the paperwork or the decision-making process.
Rob’s tips:
- You need to create an experience that shows that you know how to sell to an enterprise.
- You should be able to find out early in the process (a) who all the people are that have to be playing, and (b) if the person who you are working with can get you access to those people.
- You have to do the mutual close plan (action plan) early on in the sales process. In other words, you need to quantify why a big problem is worth solving and then create a mutual action plan to solve it smoothly.
- You need to know what all the steps in the process are, and you need to demystify the process for all the players in the mutual action plan.
- To get procurement to move faster, you need to look at 1) the problem that you need to solve, 2) the action you need to take, and 3) the results you expect to get. To do those things, you need to speak to people in their language.
Lisa Palmer:
Lisa and her team use mutual action plans consistently, and they are a core part of what she does. To her, a mutual action plan clearly defines who is going to own what. She also likes to use a visual dartboard (like a visual chart or a diagram) in concert with mutual action plans. Lisa points out that to move things forward, throughout the buying process, people need to feel like it is their idea and that they own it. If they can feel that way, they will help you to move things through the complex enterprise buying cycle.
Lisa’s tips:
- Stay on the problem. Rather than going in trying to sell a product or a solution, you need to go in with an educated perspective, bring a point of view to the table, and come in with one version of what a potential solution could be.
- From the beginning, it needs to be clear that your intention is for you to make the problem better together.
- Leverage visual tools to get people to the table so that you can solve a problem together and create co-mental ownership. You could use a list of pros and cons or a list of customer experience problems that you suspect they could be trying to solve.
- Co-ownership pushes competition out of your environment, making it very difficult for someone else to come in and disrupt your sales cycle.
- Get outside of your box and start to become creative in solving problems.
- To help your customers to be successful, you have to get them to engage.
Ryan feels that it is always best to bring an action plan or a visual dartboard in as early as possible in the sales process.
Links and resources:
Suggested tools:
Bubbl.us (a visual brainstorming tool)
