Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by charleyma 2942 days ago
Main goals of a salesteam include building accurate pipeline, and closing that pipeline as quickly as possible.

In B2B, level of touch definitely depends on the size of the deal. Excellent discovery + qualification done quickly is super important for larger companies.

E.g. signing up for Dropbox for my 2 person company is (and very much should be) self service, with transparency around price and what it will look like as I grow in the short run.

Signing up for Dropbox for an enterprise company for thousands of licenses, each with different apps, permissioning, environments, infrastructure, etc should be a much in depth conversation. Typically enterprise clients with volumes also expect to have discounts due to their scale (they know they're worth $$$), and in order to have a properly managed negotiation, a sales team needs to full understand who they're selling to, what they care about, what levers can be moved, decision maker, timing, etc. All of these attributes are typically much more distributed in large companies vs leaner entities with 1 decision maker.

First call closes are great, what I can say is that I've never heard of a $1mm deal close on just one call.

1 comments

Yep exactly. And for the enterprise company it's never going to be a single sign off. You'll need to get IT involved, maybe legal, probably finance, maybe procurement. Every company has a different process, and everyone will want at least a few people saying "yes" when the price is high enough. Enterprise sales is more project management and scheduling than it is about learning the magic words that close any prospect.