The Emissary Blog

All your meetings have gone well. Everyone you talked to at your buyer's organization was really engaged. You asked good questions, and they gave great feedback. They really seemed to grasp how your particular solution could help their business.

But you didn't get the deal. There were lingering compatibility questions that your tech team took ages to address, and during that time, another vendor swooped in and won the business. But even if your tech team had moved faster, you wouldn't have won the deal. In fact, you were never going to win the deal for one simple reason: You didn't have an an internal advocate to carry the deal across the goal line.

With more than 15 people, on average, involved in enterprise IT purchases, Iarge and complex B2B buying centers can feel like minefields to salespeople today. Decisions get made by committee. There are an ever-increasing number of people in the room, representing 3.4 different functions on average—and each of them have their own priorities. Is it any wonder, in this context, that "save money"and "avoid risk" would become watchwords?

"Thanks for your time, but I don't think it's a fit for us."

Wait—what?

Why would your hottest prospect turn you down so quickly after your first meeting? You crushed it. You killed it. You knocked it out of the park. Your pre-sales research was solid, your deck was on-point, and your delivery was flawless. On top of all that, they seemed really into your solution. So what went wrong?

This is it: your big enterprise sales pitch. You've spent hours crafting the slickest, most polished sales deck the world has ever seen.

You've got your best suit pressed and your shoes shined. Now it's time to present, and you've totally got this. You're a flew slides in, and everything seems to be going well until a senior stakeholder interrupts with a question:

"Oh," the stakeholder says. "If it doesn't integrate with Oracle, we can't use it."

All of the time and effort you put in — and all the money your company spent to get you out there — just went down the drain. You lost a major opportunity for good, and all because you didn't do the one most important thing when prepping a pitch: your homework.

Ready to storm into your next IT sales meeting and wow the room with a snazzy deck full of slides showcasing how great your product is? That's perfect—if you want to get laughed out of the room. If, on the other hand, you'd like your prospect to take you seriously and progress down the funnel, you should do exactly the opposite.

In the IT edition of our Ultimate Enterprise Sales Playbook series, we caught up with Emissaries from companies like Merck, Kellogg's, Johnson & Johnson, and CVS to find out what the right approach to sales looks like in 2018. These former IT decision makers all told us one thing: the days of product-pushing are over.

Emissary Founder David Hammer recently told a story about a client who had spent 9 months on a six-figure deal, and couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.

The topic of women in the workplace has been a huge conversation in the past 6 months. The Time's Up movement and some of the resulting revelations have sparked a long overdue nationwide conversation about the challenges faced by women in the workplace. 

These conversations have created the opportunity for organizations to propel women forward in the professional world, removing stigmas and helping more women shatter the glass ceiling.

Let’s face it – before you can land and expand, you’ve got to understand. This means doing the upfront research about the account you’re selling to and the contacts you’re speaking with before you go about aggressive outreach.

And even with a sea of databases, outside research and analyst reports available, it is difficult to discern exactly what’s most important.

Too often sellers charge head-first into a high-stakes sales effort without having insights into what the actual buyers within that organization want or need.

To become more efficient on their account strategy, the client’s net-new team began working with Emissaries — former decision makers from their accounts — to unearth the intelligence that only an insider could know. The results speak for themselves.

A year ago at this time, we first unveiled Emissary to the world. It was a different, contrarian idea, making the case that in a world increasingly dominated by data, human insights and relationships still mattered.

Globalization is a challenge facing all IT organizations - from startups to multinational corporations doing billions of dollars in revenue. If a vendor is looking to partner with a corporation doing business internationally (like Johnson & Johnson), they need a different approach than the typical IT sell.  

A seasoned senior executive with more than 30 years of tenure in the IT space, Laura Sokolski is an Emissary who recently helped one of our clients sell into MetLife. This is what she had to say about her experience working on the other side of the table:

Great salespeople matter. If you don’t believe me, just ask MuleSoft — they just announced a jaw-dropping $100k referral fee for anyone who refers a seller to them.

Let’s start with one of the worst pitches of my career.  It was not the worst in terms of work conditions or general human suffering -- it wasn’t “Showgirls”.This pitch was bad because it could’ve been so good.

It’s back-to-school time, and you know what that means in the business world: back-to-school metaphors! Guilty as charged. But hear us out.

“The Emissary Files” features Emissaries in our network, providing insight into their experience and businesses they have helped sell smarter, close faster, and win more.

4th of July is over, summer is in full swing -- how are you going to hit your goal with the year already halfway over?

“The Emissary Files” features Emissaries in our network, providing insight into their experience and businesses they have helped sell smarter, close faster, and win more.

Will sellers be replaced with AI bots? Is the ‘spray and pray’ approach finally a thing of the past?

Gone are the days of finding the one decision maker needed to close your deal. Today’s enterprise deals require you to identify at least five key players -- and they need to be impressed.