Insights that extrapolate to a lot of Enterprise tech companies...
After running SDRs at 50+ companies that sell 6-figure deals, I have insights that extrapolate to a lot of Enterprise tech companies. Here are a few problems and solutions:
1. Sales stages are late-pipe-heavy. I've seen things like
Demo -> POC -> Negotiate -> Procurement -> Legal -> Won. This makes collaboration with Marketing much harder and training AEs in a data-driven way impossible.
2. Sales Stage enter/exit criteria is not agreed upon. A Stage might be called "Demo" and some sales reps use it when a demo is scheduled, while others when a demo has happened, and others leave it in demo even when they've been working the deal for months.
3. Companies love their data and never want to delete anything. So they spend 6-figures to clean it, just to figure out that 95% of the contacts they had in CRM were outdated and it would've been cheaper to delete every contact (READ THAT WELL: CONTACTS) and start from scratch.
4. Companies love lead follow up, and are shy about Outbound. Many rather call the Marketing manager who attended a webinar than the Marketing VP who's never heard of you. Yet, the close rate with Manager levels is 1/14th of that with VPs.
Solutions:
1. Add Stages that track early progress so you can train your team on it, and see how far Marketing Generated leads get before they die.
Meeting Set -> Meeting Held -> GAP Defined -> Impact Quantified -> Requirement / Use Case mapping -> etc.
If each stage is 1-2 calls, you learn where your AEs are getting stuck, especially useful for Outbound.
2. Have an SLA, but most importantly create automated notifications. A Meeting can't be in "Meeting set" if the Scheduled date is past due. A meeting can't be in "Meeting Held" more than 2 weeks, it either moves or dies.
3. Your Account Data is gold for ABM... but contact data is trash... It's easier and cheaper to research contacts from scratch, than to try to clean them up. Pay up for ZI, Lusha, LeadIQ, Pipl, etc. Once you want to engage an account, research fresh phone and email info.
4. If you're good at outbound, your value per meeting can be 3-10x higher than on the MQLs. Never schedule other things on top, show up early, turn cameras on, and do impressive Executive Level presentations. If you master outbound, that will bring the 7-figure deals. MQLs will be a lot of 5-figure deals. Be strategic.
I hope you enjoyed these insights. Tag a colleague and mention what point above they should look at. Also, share this, the world needs to know.
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