Securing Enterprise Deals Through Storytelling with Christian Banach

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about, about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff.

But you just touched on something I think is so key, which is storytelling. Talk about that a little bit. How do you create a story throughout this process that is engaging?

Yeah, yeah, you know, that is, that's challenging again when you're, when you got just a hundred words or so to do. But you know, you want to make sure you're, you know, you're talking about the problem and there are different elements that you might want to poke at because there might not just be one problem. Maybe there are different facets of the problem. So, you know, you, maybe your first email touches upon one, the second email touches upon another. So that's another one way to look at it is kind of, you know, bringing the problem to life in some different ways. You know, you may be talking about, you're mentioning, you know, the workshop again, there could be a lot of different elements on some of the insights that you're going to share. You probably can't come right out of the gates and just say all of it. So maybe one of the emails goes a little bit deeper into what, you know, what the workshop will entail and some of the insights that you're going to have or perhaps it's more case study based and some of the experience than that you have. Because I think that's also key when you're talking enterprises, they want to know that you've done it for companies similar to them, you know, they're, you know, they're hit up again every which way. So, so how do you tell that story? You know, well, hey, these, you know, here's some workshop, here's some insights. Oh, and it's based on some work that we did for, I used Tesla earlier for, I don't know, Ford, you know, some of the work that we've done for Ford. So, so you want to kind of continue to add on to it and make that come to life. In each one of those emails.

Yeah, it's connecting the dots to the whole process. Cause I see that happen a lot too. Like email 1 talks about this thing, then email 2 just talks about a totally different thing over here. We're not connecting the dots. We don't keep that thread going throughout the entire process. Now where do you know, I guess some of the other channels fit into this? We've been talking a lot about email and I hope people are kind of picking up on really, we're talking about email, we're talking about messaging and the messaging kind of carries over, but like, then where kind of walk me through your thoughts on what channels or like, is it just email? Is it email social? Like kind of. What have you seen work best for you and your companies?

Yeah, so email and phone are probably the primary two channels that we work with. We're definitely using LinkedIn from a research standpoint, but our experience, you know, interestingly for enterprise has not been as strong. Doing the kind of, you know, connection request and, and sending a cold DM and LinkedIn, we haven't seen great results from that. I will say for our company. And we're targeting for us, our customers are mid size advertising or small advertising agencies are who our customers are. We get a lot of leads from the kind of the LinkedIn approach. But we're really. Phone and email are probably our two from outreach standpoints, our two main channels. Mm.

And then how do you approach that call then? Right, so we've been sending these emails. How do you approach that call? Like you, you know, again, like, what's the opener there of like, okay, I've been emailing you and all of a sudden you answer, right? All of a sudden, wait, wait, he actually answers now? What?

Yeah, great point. So what we, you know, we've done all this great research to personalize the email. Well, why are we not using it on the phone as well? So what we do is, you know, you have to kind of get past the first, you know, song and dance to just at least get them to engage in a little bit of a conversation. But very quickly in your opener, you want again, make them realize that this is not just a blind, cold call. So, you know, we're going to reference, you know, hey, we've been looking into your business, Tesla. You know, we saw this, you know, you speak on this podcast. So the same type of talk track that we're using for the email, we're trying to incorporate that into the beginning of the cold call. So. So again, so it's Unmistakable that we were, that we engaged you on a one to one level. And there's a reason, you know, for reaching out. So that's, you know, that's kind of how we'd like to start. You know, these cold calls that we make. And, you know, the objective then is to share enough about, you know, hey, you know, here's the personalization, the personalized opener. We talk a little bit about the problem. We make it very clear that, hey, we're not here trying to sell you anything. You know, we've got this interesting workshop that we're looking to offer you. And then we try to then book, you know, that book a session with them. If they're not willing to jump right into, you know, a big one hour workshop, then we try to move them. Hey, how about maybe a 15 minute call? We'll just at least dive into what this workshop is all about and that we kind of make it a little bit of a bigger ask and then we'll pull back and ask for something maybe a little bit, a little bit, you know, smaller of a commitment on their behalf.

I love that. Well, what I taught my teams often was twofold. One, what's the big no to little?

Yes.

What's the big no? Like something that maybe it is too big, but you ask for it because it sets up that smaller. Yes, but we also very, very often we talked about what's the next best thing and being prepared to make that ask. Okay, we asked for the workshop. They say, no, what's the next best thing? How about a 15 minute, just like overview of what it could be? They say, no, what's the next best thing? Well, if I sent you a video of just some of the main highlights, would you at least give it a watch? It'll be 90 seconds. By that point, they're probably gonna give you a yes. And it's like, all right, fine, yes, I'll watch the video. All right, next best thing. As we go through this process and so as we start to kind of get towards, towards the end here, we start to wrap, like, really, it's almost like, what else? We've talked about messaging, we've talked about the channel, we've talked about offering insights. We just started to touch on the call. Like, what are some other strategies or tactics you've seen work well for you and your clients to land more of these larger meetings?

Yeah, a couple other things that I'll throw out there. You know, oftentimes where people are surprised at the limited number, I guess, of companies that we're reaching out to and I think when you're doing smaller mid sized businesses, from my experience the list have actually been a little bit larger than what we do. But when you're doing more enterprise level deals, there's not an endless supply of companies, you know, we may be reaching out to. Again, automotive, think about how many automotive companies there really are. You know, I don't know, 20, potentially brands that you could reach out to. So you can't just blast out, you know, these lists. So, so I think, you know, taking a more quality over quantity based approach is the mentality that you need to have when you're doing more of these enterprise type of deals because and again it's worth it because one deal can, can make your entire year in some of these cases. So I think that's you know, really important to think about. I think also trying to be aware of this is a little bit down the road. But nurturing these prospects is also a big key because again you're looking at enterprise deals, the sales cycles are much longer. You know, there could be 6, 12, 18, 24 months. Sometimes you meet somebody before they're ready to sign on the dotted line for something. So there's a whole process on how do you then stay top of mind with these prospects. You have a great meeting, you go through the workshop, everybody loves each other. But the bottom line is budgets are set for the year, they have another vendor that they're currently working with. So like you need to. But but doesn't mean there's not an opportunity. And it's worth keep staying top of mind when you're going to have multiple million dollar deal with them. So how do you stay top of mind with them? And there's a whole strategy that we can talk about briefly about how to actually go ahead and do that.

Yeah, that'll be a great place to kind of rewrap on this topic because I do think it's important because also as you're talking through it kills me when people use like budget as an early qualifier because like this is a large deal, someone's willing to talk and one of the first questions, you know, rep or a sales dev rep will.

Ask like so like do you have.

Budget allocated for this? They'll say well no. They go oh, then probably not the best time to talk. It's like no, no, no, that's exactly when you need to be talking. Like you need to get into that process early versus waiting till those negotiations start to happen. But let's talk nurturing. So either I didn't hear back or to your point. Hey, we love the idea. Budgets are pretty set for the quarter right now for the year. Talk to us in six months. How do I stay in touch besides just checking in for six months?

Just checking in, Right. So I think about it in two different buckets. I think ideally you have a marketing bucket. So there's something from a marketing standpoint, maybe there is a newsletter that your company puts out, maybe there's social ads, something that you're kind of putting out there that you can kind of stay top of mind. Maybe you have that, maybe you don't. But from what you can actually control as a seller is your communications with them. So what I like to do then is you have your list of these prospects then that you've met with and you've had a conversation with them. You got to know them a little better, you know a little bit more about their business. It's really staying in touch then with what is happening in the marketplace. So you have a reason to reach out. So for example, you know, maybe again just to kind of use that Tesla and the social media thing that we've been talking about here, maybe, you know, you see some report that comes out by Gartner about social media, that's a great way to reach out to the prospect. Hey Tom, you know, I was thinking about you. I saw this report, thought it would be interesting and pass along your way. There's no ask, there's no let's meet, there's no anything like that. It's just trying to put something ideally in their inbox, maybe every 30 days that adds value back to them.