Small deals or Large deals ? What should you go after ? - A Sales Managers Perspective
Pankaj Chadha
Empowering Leaders to Drive Impactful Change | Strategic Leader | Sales & Business Development Expert | Developing High Performing Team
Lot of sales person have asked me how does the size of the deal matter till am meeting my targets…. What should an ideal portfolio of sales consist of?
Sales team typically spend time on reacting to the requirements that come from customers for a need they already have…. There are only a few Sales folks who understand customer business and sincerely explore how they can contribute to support them in their vision thus creating opportunities ( Large / Unique Deals).
Below are some of my thoughts:
Large Deals and where to we find Large Deals?
It’s interesting when we speak of large deals as many ask “What’s this large deal” and “where do we find it”…. One thing I tell them is that you cannot see a whale in shallow water and you would have to go deep into the sea to get a glimpse.
Have never seen a large deal come over an email as a query or on a cold call with the customer…..with exception of tenders probably…
Large deals don’t exist in customers mind…it only exists in Sales Mangers mind…..
Customers are only focused on solving business challenges and exploring who can help them…. They divide the business challenges into smaller set of manageable workloads and try and find out who can address the same….
?A sales person needs to understand the overall challenge that a customer is facing …to create this large deal …. This can only be done when they are thinking about the customers’ business and understands all the smaller workloads, what they can offer and?who else is the best fit to provide the right product / service which can address the overall requirement…
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This Sales person works as a consultant and advises the customer on how they can solve this and how he/she can bring in his organization and the partner ecosystem to solve the overall challenge.
Today no one organization / product / service can solve a business challenge and customers are always looking for someone who can address a larger portion of the overall problem statement.
The sales person to achieve this needs to have a very strong relationship at the C- levels including board members in some cases. Such deals which offer significant value to end customer and have a huge investments and budget require a different level of engagement within customer environment.
Where should the sales person spend time on - Large or Small Deals?
Ideally a combination of both ! A Smart sales person ensure that they meet the target month on month and have sufficient pipeline for the year to meet / exceed the overall numbers… All great sales person create large deals in their overall portfolio to ensure exponential growth and early retirement of the quote and avail special incentives….they are driven not only by the incentives but the inner motive to do something beyond and consistently challenging themselves to do something bigger and different…
Many of the sales folks are afraid of failure or don’t have engagement to push and try these large deals…
One needs to engage early with C-levels and nurture a relationship to ensure they work on such transformational large deals.
A single deal can help the sales person achieve the full year’s quota or create a huge gap in the overall business… So always have a balanced portfolio and try to create those large deals as that would help you have a better engagement with customer and help you build a robust pipeline of different opportunities towards the journey of that large deal.
Happy Selling!!
Synapse Learnings; Coach, Learning Professional, Consultant, Educationist
1 年Well articulated article... Staged well. In my view... There are few aspects that I would want to touch... 1. Understanding the pareto principle (20:80) and its link to the article. 20 % of customers/ Organisations bring 80%of the business. These 20% are those big fish accounts. 2. The competencies required to nurture and build large accounts, differ from those required to handle smaller accounts / Organisations. Handing large Accounts to Sales people maybe done after identifying and confirming them. 3. Sales funnel is a highly scientific area. Statistics and mathematics is used in a big way to use this tool and it will convey the health of the geography handled by the sales person, as well as the areas of strength and improvement of the Salesperson.
Global Sales Leader | GSI Partnerships | GTM Expert | Cloud & AI Advocate.
3 年So Spot on Pankaj. You have always been a very keen observer and like the analogy bought in the article.
Economically Inactive by choice and enjoying life. Taking some well earned time away from working. Previously Head of Sales and Head of Strategic Accounts, Vodafone Global Enterprise and Vodafone UK.
3 年Pankaj, I liked reading your article, some people say the day of the big deal is dead but in my opinion it’s not. The requirements and solution may have changed but large enterprises are still looking for a supplier who can be their partner to overcome their business challenges and help in delivering their goals. Credibility and capability along with a strong relationship is key to winning any large deal and this is generally built up over years and in a commercially driven tender can be the differentiator. Never ever only chase the large deals, the smaller deals drive the achievement towards sales targets, generate the short term revenue and build the credibility. The big deal should always be seen as the icing on the cake or the over achievement against a sales target.
Founder Fintoo
3 年Superb Article and well said by other big giants in replies. I am very small and learning form all of you. I always say three lessons to my team; First "Keep your focus to SOLVE client problem, don't focus on SELL.". Second "Client will always test you first before giving any big deal. Be ready for that and give your 100%. Lastly its all about mind set, don't go with your offerings, go natural, understand what client need and than design. if we go with our things than we will listen less and speak more." Superb article Pankaj Sir.
Sales Director at Gartner
3 年Well articulated Pankaj . This is so important in today’s fast changing business environment. At FIRST we need to have the mindset for larger deals and then plan to execute. Most clients often treat the relationship as transactional (Small Deals) and hence they don’t open up to sales person in the beginning with what are their challenges and pain point. Hence its important to “Know your customer and their business” . Invest in the success of the relationship with your clients . Ask yourself Why should your client partner with you strategically? To start with … Elaborate what value have you delivered back into their business? And then be bold to ask for more so you can demonstrate “Future Value” that’s where you will find Larger Deals .. Spend time with your clients that’s where your deal is ?? .