How startups can win major enterprise sales deals

I'm a HUGE fan of Gong.io. They use tons of data from real sales calls to bring data and insight to your sales funnel and have created the movement that is Revenue Intelligence.

A super insightful post by their Head of Content Strategy has had me chewing over the implications for startups and scaleups in their attempt to sell to large enterprises.

I've spent my career in enterprise sales and have sold to some of the world's largest enterprises (pro tip: they take a *very* long time and always longer than you think!). This post from Devin Reed shines a light on something we've always known but we now know for a fact - building relationships with multiple stakeholders in a target large enterprise (including building multiple use-cases) is highly correlated to the value of those deals.

How do we know? Gong.io analysed 10,332?sales deals to show that:

The more people you work with in those target businesses, understand their needs and how you can help them means you will close larger deals.

It'll take longer for sure and be more complex - but that time is worth it.

Win rates DOUBLE if you add just one colleague from the seller’s side to the mix.?Having three or more people from the seller’s side involved gets you more than 3x the win rate.

But how does a startup with a small salesforce - often only the CEO themselves - cobble together a team to engage lots of different stakeholders within the client account?

Answer: Your entire company can be your sales team. Involve members of your team you've never thought of before by aligning questions you would have if you were the target against your team skillsets.

For example, ask yourself the following "If I was the client" questions:

• How would we even begin to integrate this into our stack - Get your Lead Developer to speak to their integration team.
• Would people inside our org/customer base actually use this? - Your customer success team can share what they see when onboarding new customers
• What impact does this have on our roadmap? Get your product owners to share insight on what your customers are seeing.

Even if you still have a small team, there are skills and knowledge that you can put in front of your customer that will be invaluable. Having diverse folk involved means you're less likely to concentrate focus on a very small number of stakeholders and be blindsided by organisational changes and busy diaries.

And showing off how awesome your team is builds trust and credibility which will further amplify your ability to win those complex deals.