The Emissary Blog

It's not an exaggeration to say that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation pose existential threats to many professions—the number may be as high as 10 million, more jobs than were impacted by the Great Recession of 2008—and sales is no exception. In fact, Forrester predicts a million sales reps will be displaced by 2020.

If the headlines are to be believed, millennials have killed a lot of things: fabric softener, beer, Applebee's, lunch, and just about anything you can think of. Most of that is clickbait, of course. But as more and more millennials achieve leadership positions in enterprise companies—remember, millennials can be as old as 38 at this point—they're legitimately changing how purchasing decisions get made. Research is showing that they're sales averse, hate the phone, and do much of their research via social.

 Eighty-four percent of C-Suite executives and 70 percent of B2B decision-makers now look to social media when making a purchasing decision. Cold-calling and blowing up inboxes will no longer cut it, so if you want to keep selling successfully, you need to adapt. Building a social selling strategy and incorporating it into your playbook can help you reach a new generation of buyers on their own terms and build the trust you need to win a sale—if you know the right decision-makers to target.

When your team struggles to hit its quota quarter after quarter, what gets the blame? Are they not following up often enough? Are they following up too often? Is the competition too fierce? Maybe your product isn't keeping pace with what your market wants? Maybe it's marketing's fault for delivering crummy leads. Or maybe—hear us out on this—just maybe your salespeople's outreach straight up sucks.

We've already told you about the value of asking smart questions during the discovery phase of an enterprise sale (more than once, in fact). And with good reason—you need to listen more than you talk, and you've got to dig into a prospect's pain points, priorities, and long-term plans if you're going to navigate your way to closed-won. But can you ask too many questions?

There's no shortage of movies about sales. Some make the profession seem like a glitzy, high-roller gig with boozy client lunches and evenings filled with bottle service and beautiful people. Others paint salespeople as sleazy grifters, one step removed from carnival hucksters out to relieve honest folk of their hard-earned money. And while we all know that reality is (usually) different, there's still a lot of wisdom to glean from some of the best sales flicks out there.

What if there was a way you could closely align sales and marketing so that both departments were deeply synchronized and working in concert with one another? You would probably say, “Yeah, right. Marketing hasn’t talked to Sales since 'Breaking Bad' went off the air.” But what if you could also get more value out of your marketing spend, increase account relevance, and drive revenue?

Enterprise sales is a crowded space—especially when it comes to MarTech or IT—with more and more vendors throwing their hats into the ring each year. Competition isn’t going anywhere, so if you want your solution to stand out, you need to go the extra mile to get noticed.

Content is king, and that's not going to change any time soon. It can deliver results at every stage of the funnel for enterprise sales team in virtually every industry. Especially as account-based marketing (ABM) becomes more widespread, the importance of quality, targeted content for enterprise sales teams is only going to increase. After all, it generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing—and costs 62 percent less. So why is so much content marketing just so bad?

You've gone and bought lumber, bricks, mortar, drywall, and everything else you might need to build the house of your dreams. You've even hired a builder to put them all together. Easy, right? After all, you have all the pieces of a house. But there's just one problem — you don't have a house plan.

For complex enterprise sales, knowledge is power. Having slivers of insight on your side, like a prospect's pain points and who really calls the shots (and do they like ribs?) can be the final pieces of the puzzle that win you business.

Enterprise sales in 2018 is a lot like rush hour on an NYC subway: it's noisy, it's crowded, and when it stalls, no one really knows what's going on. And just as the subways are getting worse, sales is getting harder. New competitors, changing priorities, more decision-makers, and the sheer amount of noise buyers have to sift through in order to find the right solution—all of these factors are making sales teams' jobs harder and harder.

When you wake up in the morning and go to work, who do you talk to? That's the question our July Emissary of the Month, Jim Fortner, puts to CIOs looking for an edge. And after 28 years at Procter and Gamble (P&G), including stints as CTO and CIO, he’s built an impressive career by talking—talking to IT, talking to business leaders, and encouraging conversations between them to build the kind of cross-functional cohesion that businesses need to succeed in the digital age.

In March, our own Shaina Shiwarski wrote about the underrepresentation of women in enterprise tech, but the problem of diversity in sales extends far beyond just one industry. According to the last U.S. census, sales was the fourth-least-diverse profession in the country. In fact, 78 percent of salespeople in the U.S. are white.

In the past, our leading IT-buying Emissaries have told you why you should stop freaking out about pricing, discounts, and trials. But with so much riding on a subject as delicate as pricing, we knew there was more to say. This time around, some of our most sought-after Emissaries tell you how you can set expectations to make these discussions easier and smooth your path to closed-won.

At Emissary, we believe in people.

It has always been our belief that the value of human knowledge is a powerful resource, and that it is a rarely-mined resource in the marketplace. We have sought to bridge the gap between those who are seeking knowledge and those who possess it. In the words of our founder, David Hammer, “Our mission has always been the same: to connect people with valuable knowledge to the organizations who will benefit from that knowledge.”

Noted sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer once wrote: “There’s no lotion or potion that will make sales faster and easier for you—unless your potion is hard work.” Sure, hard work is important, but we've found something that can make sales both faster and easier .

Enterprise sales isn't Tinder. Instead of a series of short-term flings, the name of the game is building long-term relationships. And as Dr. Phil, Oprah, Delilah, and just about every other self-styled relationship guru has told us, doing so requires communication and trust. That takes time and commitment—and that doesn't happen overnight.

Like 50 Cent's legendarily off-target first pitch, a bad sales pitch isn't something you'll live down easily. It's going to close the door on that client for your company for years to come. It's also going to live in the stakeholders' memories well after they move on to other organizations.And if it's bad enough, they're probably going to laugh at you. Sure, a lack of consensus or the inability to navigate procurement effectively can derail a deal—as can any number of other factors—but nothing's quite as critical as nailing that first touchpoint. 

When sales cycles drag on, as they often do, it can be a real test of patience. At some point, whether your product is stuck in procurement or the subject of a continuously rescheduled meeting between decision-makers, you want an answer—even if it's negative—to at least put you out of your misery and allow you to move on.