Enterprise Reps, Large Accounts, and Long Sales Cycles
Randy Seidl
Board Member | CEO | CRO | Executive Recruiter | Sales Community Leader | Advisor | Consulting
When bringing on new enterprise reps, the first 3-6 months are difficult to quantify.
Longer sales cycles typically mean they may not be generating immediate revenue.
Marty Sanders outlines a great scorecard based on activities to help measured and validate to show consistent effort toward continuous activities in pursuit of the long-term contract.
Use the link below for a Sales Community FREE year membership:
🎯 Get access to exclusive events, content, and tips and tricks from the top CRO's!
Tech Sales Insights LIVE
Stay tuned for an announcement of our next guest, who will be joining us on Monday, July 17th at 12PM EST!
“Because, you know, oftentimes it's just too late and basically, hey, here's pricing, here's product, here's the strategy, how do we fit it into the channel? It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way... You need to be able to give partners services opportunities... We want to give the partners the opportunity to be able to be trained on a product, but trained in a way, not just to operate the product, but to be able to make the customer environment better... You need to be able to give the partner the opportunity to be able to upsell along with that too. It's really the multiplier effect.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ → For those of you who have been following the show, we'd love it if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! You can find it at the bottom of the Tech Sales Insights page in the Apple Podcast app.
Check out our previous episodes here: Tech Sales Insights LIVE
From Our Sponsors:
The Alexander Group
Sales Comp Symposium – August 15
Hundreds of sales compensation professionals are attending Alexander Group's annual Sales Compensation Symposium. Don't miss your chance to gain the latest insights and best practices for all things sales comp!
This year's event has been expanded to include more sessions across three tracks, including:
1. General Track
2. Recurring Revenue Track
3. Fundamentals Track
If you're a sales compensation leader or revenue-focused executive, this is the event you don't want to miss!
Fullcast
Design More Effective Territories to Win More Deals
Phone Ready Leads
3 Steps to Building a Winning Cold Calling Script
Randy's Tips to Sell More 👉 Excerpts from Your Go-To Sales Advisor
Managing New Enterprise Reps Calling on Large Accounts with Long Sales Cycles
What the Idea Is: Managing new enterprise reps calling on large accounts with long sales cycles. One challenge sales leaders have in hiring enterprise reps to sell a product that has a long-term sales cycle (six to twelve months) is determining how to know if they are doing a good job in their first three to six months. You are potentially paying them an expensive, non-recoverable draw, and yet you have to wait another six months to see the final results. How do you judge how they are doing along the way if they are not posting any revenue?
Why It Is Valuable: Leadership needs a scorecard or other mechanism around activities that can be measured and validated to show consistent effort toward continuous activities in pursuit of the long-term contract. This also helps identify roadblocks and provides cues to a weakness or lack of effectiveness in an area that can be addressed and quickly remedied.
How It Works: Study your KPIs and establish measurable activities such as these listed below:
1. Number of net new meetings
2. Number of second and third meetings 3. Proposals generated
4. Executive briefings
5. Getting senior leadership on calls
6. Project identification
7. Validated pipeline names and numbers
8. Number of marketing events attended
Set targets for each one of these activities, and measure using colors such as red, green, and yellow to identify the status within the metric, with the ultimate objective being moving all the red activities into the green category.
Reference the spreadsheet example below:
The Alexander Group | Outreach | Gong | Convertiv | DecisionLink | Salesbricks 🧱 | Creator Spark | Modigie, Inc. | Spotlight.ai | trender.ai | Sandler | Fullcast, The Go-to-Market Cloud | TitanX (formerly Phone Ready Leads®) | Humantic AI