Peter Winick explains how enterprise sales differ from smaller deals. Enterprise buying is a team sport with multiple stakeholders who each have veto power, and sales cycles stretch 6 to 18 months. He covers adapting your tactics and pipeline for large-scale deals.
When you get to small and mid-sized businesses and Fortune 1000s, you're out. You're done. Totally different game in terms of what works for them. So we'll talk about that for a second. It ain't a one-size-fits-all world. So I want to just touch on the blatant differences here. So if you can see on the bottom here, we'll start with the bad news, then we'll get to the good news. So the bad news is— Buying has become a team sport, right? Selling has typically been either an individual sport or a team sport, but we're typically having a buyer make a decision about the transaction and move forward. Now, that is still true at certain price points. When we get to larger scale offerings, let's say north of $200,000, $250,000, at that level, it is a team sport. Why is that a team sport? Let's look at Lightspeed, for example. If I fall in love with somebody's content in here, and they come to me, and I'm a Fortune 1000 buyer, and they say, wow, that was awesome. I've got 2,000 people, blah, blah, blah. Who am I selling it to? Well, you're probably selling it to a training person or a business leader. Now, hold on. There's a technology piece to Lightspeed. Uh-oh, let me get the CTO in here. Wait, you're dealing with data and stuff. Uh-oh, let me get regulatory in here. Uh-oh, we've got other things that HR is doing. Let's get HR in here. And the next thing you know, you've got to sell to all these people. Not one of them individually can say yes and sign the check, But each one has veto power. So this is sort of like The View or America's Got Talent with the buzzers. Bad stuff, right? So you've got to be able to understand and satisfy all their needs. And if you don't feel comfortable satisfying the need of a technology person or a compliance person or a learning person, figure it out. You're going to either have to get some help figuring it out, because you will strike out. And those numbers are going up. It went from, I think, 5.4 2 years ago to 6.8 people. That's a lot of people. The days of taking the client out to the 3-martini— martini lunch and getting the deal on the back 9, or the golf course, well, the back 9 would be the golf course, or the back 9 on the golf course, pretty much over at scale. Pretty much over. So in B2B, they have budget cycles. Here's the good news. They have predetermined amounts of money to spend on you and stuff like you. Do you know what those cycles are? We're dealing with a client right now where based on the seasonality of the market that he's into, there's a big problem that a lot of his clients and people that look like his clients have. They've got to spend a ton of money before October 30th. Hashtag good problem. So what are we doing? We're pounding the hell out of these clients going, hey, we know this is the time of the year. There's a little bit extra sitting on the budget here. Here's some cool stuff we got. Are you interested? Oh, great. Can we park some money here and you don't deliver it till next year? Yeah, we're really good like that. We're good. We're customer-centric. We'll let you do that. The decisions are made by groups. We talked about that. It takes time. If you're used to a transactional-based sale, Speaking, that is a short game. Large-scale sales could take 6 months, they can take 12 months, they can take 18 months. So I'm not suggesting that you just flip a binary switch and say, I'm going all into the big clients, 'cause you gotta feed your pipeline and you gotta eat in the interim, but you have to layer this onto what you're doing, and you have to develop a pipeline that says, in 6 months from now, 12 months from now, in 18 months from now, I wanna sell my first $100,000 deal. I wanna sell my second. How do you do that? You have to be able to build that up. On the B2C side, obviously, it's a fast cycle. I mean, literally, some of the tactics I saw today, it's so impulsive. I mean, it's literally people surfing the web, clicking, boom, boom, boom. Biometrics, I don't even have to take my card out. Like, that's an antiquated gesture now. It's got my thumbprint and it just goes right to Apple Pay. It's emotional. Not that there aren't emotions in the B2B world, but they're tempered. They're less so than, oh my God, somebody in the back of a Grant Cardone event that's just, can't wait to throw the money at the stage. It's impulsive. Most people in the consumer world, if they sobered up 3 days later and bought that in a very deliberate way, probably wouldn't have made that same decision. And this whole back-of-the-room cycle, there's a lot of stuff that works there. It's not valid on the corporate side.
