Matt Ryder explains a strategy for landing enterprise clients centered on creating internal corporate advocates rather than cold-chasing CEOs. Success requires (1) the product genuinely solving a business problem and (2) internal champions perceiving personal benefit—if a solution threatens someone's job, they will block adoption. The talk focuses on understanding individual stakeholders' agendas to drive uptake from the inside.
Chapters
We land enterprise clients by doing this instead of chasing CEOs. The key is creating corporate advocates. If you're going to get a large enterprise level deal over the line, it's not going to be like your necessary sales ability. It'll be one, that the product solves the problem of the business, and two, the internal personnel who are driving the uptake and adaptation of that software see the benefit to themselves personally. The person who you're selling initially has to see the benefit for them. So if you get to know that person and you start to understand what they want, what they need, then you can start to understand how what you're doing helps their agenda. Not a negative way towards the company, but it just helps them progress their agenda. Like they're struggling to hit targets. And this will help them. And the vice versa of that is if you're selling something that puts somebody out of a job, you're going to want to identify that before you start selling people. Because if you're selling to a sales manager and you're selling some sort of sales manager automation software, they're not going to like you a ton. So they're going to make it very difficult for you to get up that chain. So creating those corporate advocates is what allows you to drive from the inside instead of trying to pound the door down.
