​​

There is a lot about enterprise sales that has changed, especially since the pandemic. Buyers have come to prefer the digital sales process, and more B2B sales are being handled remotely. According to McKinsey, between 70 percent¹ and 80 percent of B2B decision makers prefer self-service or remote sales transactions. 

This past year, we have all been rubbed a little raw. Expectations have been changed and what’s “normal” continues to change. Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? As salespeople, we have needed to adapt to a new level of being personable, understanding, and authentic. For many of us, it will take us back to our dating days. 

When I first got started in Customer Success (CS), I was over a large US-based organization where we had roughly 60 Fortune 500 companies as customers. These customers represented a large recurring revenue stream for our organization, and it was imperative that we retained more than 95% of our revenue (ARR) and it was more important that we retained logos.   

Most individuals have come to know and understand the Pareto principle of 80/20, conceptualized by Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, born in 1848.  Rumor has it that one day Pareto noticed that 20% of his pea plants in his garden generated 80% of the healthy pods.  Upon further research and understanding into different industries, he came up with the well-known and generalized result of 80% of the results will come from 20% of the actions. Over the years we have come to accept this principle in many aspects of business life. For example, it is often assumed that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers or 20% of a company’s products represent 80% of the sales, and so on. 

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the way we do business, including how we sell enterprise technology. With employees working from home, licenses for on-premise enterprise software are being replaced by software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions. Cloud solutions have been with us for some time, and adoption has accelerated thanks to the pandemic.

Cloud services have become the foundation of enterprise computing. Migrating enterprise resources to the cloud gives corporations more agility and cuts costs. To add a new enterprise application or more data storage, you simply add more cloud capacity. If you are selling enterprise services, then you must include cloud services and cloud service providers in your sales strategy.

When validating sales prospects, you want to make sure that pursuing a potential prospect will yield profits. To determine the potential returns from any new lead, you must start by calculating the customer acquisition cost (CAC). 

Every customer journey starts with your sales team. Stop. Please ask yourself if you are liking the results. Are you accurately defining success for this team? How does your definition translate to the larger enterprise clients’ sales experience?

No sales rep succeeds on their own. Successful sales performance is the result of many factors. You need the right leads, the right sales pitch, the right conversion tools, the right customer service, and more. Sales success is the result of solid sales enablement, which is why successful companies are more focused on developing a frictionless, integrated sales process.