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Enterprise Sales - Friend or Foe

Written by: Andy Piper

Article Overview: The key to being able to achieve a company's goals is to stay focused and keep people on task. But, too often upper management and sales teams are lured by opportunities of selling your solution to large enterprise companies. Learn if these large engagements are real potential or false hope and whether these large engagements are keeping your company from achieving its overall goals.

Enterprise Sales - Friend or Foe

Enterprise companies represent the Holy Grail customer base for sales teams launching a new technology. The upside potential is impossible to ignore when you think about doubling your sales goals or making a single year’s salary with a single deal. But, these sales are incredibly difficult to achieve. For many companies, these sales engagements can wreak havoc on a company’s productivity and prevent them from meeting their goals. This article will help you determine if these projects are right for you.

Engaging with an enterprise customer is incredibly time consuming. The RFP/RFI process can take several man weeks of effort alone. Sales cycles for these large deals are typically 9-18 months. Additionally, it requires your executive’s time for relationship building. And the worst scenario is that they will usually make a sale contingent upon developing functionality they require. These requests often take two to six man months away from achieving the development required to establish a repeatable sales model.

There are several considerations for predicting if all this time is an investment or a distraction. First, you need to understand if your product is able to function in the large and complex environments of an enterprise customer. Enterprise Readiness 101 is a multi-media course (available at http://www.enterprise-readiness.com) that can help you determine how enterprise customers will evaluate your solution. Additionally, you need to consider how prepared your company is to support the installation and ongoing 24/7 support these customers will require.

To maintain optimal productivity in a company, the leadership needs to make a plan and enable its employees to execute that plan. However, each time leadership takes on a project that diverts resources from their long term goals, they greatly reduce the chances of achieving the long term goal in a practical time frame. Each additional customer project further reduces your chances of achieving those long term goals.

There are two key scenarios where a company can fall into a severe case of short term tunnel vision. Constantly taking on new projects designed to meet the needs of enterprise customers often leads a company to state of thrashing-- an operational state where employees are so busy moving from one project to another that the overall output becomes severely diminished.

The second scenario is when a company does not decide to address this question head on. Executives like to leave their options open; they will decide to take each opportunity on a case-by-case basis or they will not address this question at all. In essence, what they are doing is giving themselves an illusion that they have set some boundaries. However, more times than not, they cannot resist the temptation of a large opportunity. So, each opportunity gets approved and the tunnel vision creeps in over time.

Every company has to answer the enterprise decision for themself. Once the decision is made, then everyone in the company can create a structure that works best to achieve the goals of the company. More importantly, each area of the company can have an opportunity to set themselves up to succeed in getting the necessary work done with upper management support. This translates into a more efficient company with happier, more successful employees. Everyone wins.

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Article Tags: contingent, customer base, customer project, distraction, engagements, enterprise customer, enterprise customers, havoc, holy grail, long term goal, multi media course, new technology, practical time, rfi, sales cycles, sales goals, sales model, term goals, time frame, time leadership



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