We all know that closing deals in the current climate is a tough uphill climb.

One of my long standing coaching clients recently made the observation that just trying to close on anything at the moment “feels like nailing jelly to the wall”.

Recognise that feeling?

Here’s what my client meant:

1. You have been working on a deal for the best part of 2020;

2. You are aligned with what the client organisation wants;

3. You have been chosen as the preferred vendor;

4. Everything's starting to fall into place and closing the deal now rests on successful negotiation;

BUT...

5. The Economic Buyer (the person with the power to actually close out the deal, as opposed to your personal Champion) has lost their job;

NOW...

6. You’re faced with a new Economic Buyer with whom your Champion doesn't have an established relationship;

SO…

7. The Champion is worried about his position;

AND…

8. As a result, the deal is on hold.

I’m seeing this happening a lot right now. Where previously the Champion would have been looking to close the deal, to enhance their career and make them look like a star and shine, they are now in retraction mode. Your Champion has disappeared within themselves and is sitting tight.

There is nothing worse than a deal that is just sat there… waiting...

What do you do next?

See this friction as an opportunity for you to:

● Engage;

● Actively get more curious;

● Focus on how you can collaborate with your Champion more effectively;

● De-risk the situation.

You started by thinking big in the first place; by visualising success for all, so now look to find a way to win and to confidently disrupt.

This is the time to ask yourself these questions:

● How do I adapt?

● How do I move forward?

● How do I move this deal to the next level?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can build your strategy to confidently disrupt the customer’s restrictive thinking.

If you missed my article on how to create multiple winners in Enterprise sales, click here to read it now.

Enterprise Sales Club is now live and I’d love to receive your feedback. The platform serves the Enterprise Sales community and provides a safe space for members to voice opinions, explore new ideas and collaborate. We are here to facilitate bringing your inner hero out of its shell, and to empower you to manage and grow your career. We care about people and build relationships that last decades.

Please head over and take a look

We've launched in Beta and we're taking feedback over the next couple of months. Please get in touch to let us know what works for you and what you would tweak - all feedback is valuable. Just like MasterCard, we believe that when we do well by doing good, every part of the partnership wins.

If you’re looking to take your career seriously as we round off 2020 and enter 2021, get in touch with me: [email protected]

I recently explored why it’s crucially important to take advantage of even limited opportunities.

But…

How can you best place yourself to do that?

Like the Sagrada Familia, started in 19 March 1882; 138 years ago we are constant work in progress. It all comes down to acknowledging that you can always do better in at least one, if not more, zones of experience that encompass Enterprise Sales:

1. How can you do better at prospecting?

Take a moment to consider where you can make improvements in your process.

2. How can you do better in social selling?

Stuck for ideas? The world’s best Social Selling Coach Dan Swift head over to his site www.empireselling.com.

3. How can you do better in pre-qualification?

Use the tools that are available to you now. MEDDICC, for example, is a standout methodology tool that is very much focused on accessing and understanding your customers’ pain points and provides a line of sight if this is a real opportunity or one that should be sunsetted.

4. How can you do better in relationship management?

At a very basic level, your best relationships are built on trust, like and respect. So, consider how you can go about consciously getting better at building your relationships. Check out this article I wrote recently for a few pointers: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-trust-crucial-times-change-adrian-evans

5. How can you do better in creating an effective close plan?

Closing the sale might be complex but how could you get better at it? Starting small with any changes is better than not starting at all.

6. How can you do better in negotiation?

We could all get better at negotiation. Mark McCormack, the founder of IMG and author of ‘What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School’ said of negotiation:

● Think big

● Question everything

So, take time to consider when is the ideal time to actually close a renewal? Does it have to be the end of the contract? Or perhaps might a time when everybody's actually very happy be better?

When opportunities are scarce, we have to take advantage of those opportunities and we have to get better.

Embrace getting better because better never stops.

We have to be open to getting better. We have to have self-awareness to know where we can improve. And, ideally, we need exposure to people who guide us through that process, whether that's mentors, career coaches or sales coaches.

Enterprise Sales Club is now LIVE at https://www.enterprisesalesclub.com.

Our goal is to provide world class enterprise sales, career management and life skills to help you navigate through challenging times. I’d love for you to head over to the website and let me know your feedback.

If you want to take your career seriously, please contact me [email protected]

As we move towards the end of 2020 and into 2021, we’ll be seeing Enterprise Sales Opportunities becoming rarer. One of the key challenges in times of economic instability is that key decision makers can become more risk averse.

Organisations have switched from expansive and innovative mode to looking at the many ways that they can cut costs.

This risk averse climate makes it important to maximise the opportunities that are available to us, as they are presented to us. In other words, don’t do a Djokovic!

Novak Djokovic must have known that his US open was over as soon as he hit a ball directly at a line judge - in the throat. It is a non-negotiable, you're gone. This was at the exact same point that he was steering his way towards his 18th Grand Slam, without his two major rivals in that event - a gilt edged opportunity. Instead of making the most of that, he lost his cool and, in a moment of anger, blew it all.

Just like Grand Slams, Enterprise Sales opportunities are really difficult to come by

The parallel to the Djokovic situation in Enterprise Sales would be that you’ve done all of the hard work, you're shortlisted for a particular win for a particular customer, your two biggest competitors are actually not in the race and, still, you do something that really doesn't allow you to actually maximise the opportunity available to you.

You let the opportunity slip through your hands because you haven’t done the work that enables you to maximise it. The ‘win’ is lost.

Putting yourself in the best place to exploit those opportunities is becoming even more key in the current climate because commercial opportunities for significant Enterprise Sales are going to get more and more limited. You need to be ready to take advantage of those opportunities no matter how narrow they may be. You have to be ready, so focus on getting better.

The great Irish rugby Captain Paul O'Connell and the current Welsh Captain, Alun Wyn Jones are both known for being absolutely relentless at trying to get better. For them, better never stops. They always want to improve and if somebody knows a little more than them, they learn from that person. They are known as sports men who take full advantage of the opportunities available to them and win in their sports as a result.

Are you making the most of the opportunities available to you?

The following stages describe Enterprise Sales in a nutshell.

1. Prospecting

2. Social selling

3. Opportunity qualification

4. Relationship building

5. Closing

6. Negotiation

If you were to mark yourself out of 10, which would you give yourself an 8 or a 9 for? Which ones would you give yourself six or seven? And which, maybe Four?

What could you do to get better in each of those areas? I’ll be sharing my thoughts on how to ‘get better’ next week.

But...in the meantime...

I’m really excited to announce that Enterprise Sales Club is now LIVE at https://www.enterprisesalesclub.com.

Our goal is to provide world class Enterprise Sales, career management and life skills to help you navigate through these challenging times.

If you want to take your career seriously, and also improve your skills in Enterprise Sales, please contact me [email protected]

Last week, I shared my thoughts on why a win/lose strategy is no longer the best business strategy. I believe that that binary approach now needs to give way to a much wider spectrum approach which values collaboration over rivalry and in which we multiple stakeholders can achieve the win simultaneously.

Look at Mastercard’s approach:

In a recent podcast appearance, Ajay Banga, CEO of MasterCard, shared two really valuable insights which have helped Mastercard to secure wins for themselves and multiple stakeholders in two different business scenarios. These scenarios highlight the value and importance of collaboration and why a wide spectrum approach can deliver dividends.

1. When he first came into MasterCard, 10 years ago, Ajay realised that everybody was obsessed with beating Visa - their rivals. That obsession was the company’s win/lose strategy. He took a different approach, seeing their biggest competitor as cash.

At the time, most of the world economies were 80-90% cash focused. He saw cash as the real opportunity and told his employees that it was the big prize, rather than the smaller prize of just taking their competitors lunch.

In this way, Ajay has identified multiple markets in which he wants to see Mastercard’s technology - card or no card.

2. The development of a Kenyan initiative called ‘Jaza Duka’ that has been so successful that it is being rolled out into other markets. Jaza Duka means ‘fill up your store’ and was created to deal with a very specific ‘problem’ - a lot of the micro merchants in Kenya, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa only deal in cash.

These merchants were buying multiple products from FMCG businesses like Unilever but could only afford small quantities of each product. The merchants were therefore missing out on the lower unit price available when bulk purchasing.

A large proportion of the merchants were women who couldn't own a house to offer as collateral, so had no access to credit.

MasterCard offered to use their history of sales as a proxy for collateral and to offer affordable, appropriate loans to the merchants. The merchants were then able to purchase in greater bulk, at lower unit prices and offer more to their own customers.

This programme created four lots of wins:

● The micro merchant was able to purchase more and therefore sell more.

● Unilever saw more than a 20% increase in their sales.

● Kenyan Commercial Bank were able to increase their loans securely.

● MasterCard transacted more.

How can this approach benefit you in Enterprise Sales?

1. The Jaza Duka initiative was built on multiple layers of reciprocity. Building those layers and creating multiple wins means that people are more likely to do more for you.

2. Both of these approaches are scalable - they can, and have, been taken into other markets.

3. These approaches are also repeatable.

We're always looking for repeatable success in Enterprise Sales Club.

My challenge for you is to embrace ‘FOMO’. We all have the ‘fear of missing out’. Get comfortable in interrogating what that means for you. What are you missing out on by only being focused on your direct competitors? How could you adopt a wide spectrum approach in a bigger marketplace that is moving forward?

Enterprise Sales Club is now live at: www.enterprisesalesclub.com - we would love your feedback so please head over and take a look.

If you’re ready to get your career flying into 2021, contact me at [email protected]

Do you remember the last time that you got really competitive? I bet it wasn’t that long ago - the business world thrives on it! Working in a fast paced world like Enterprise Sales is to live in a world that is obsessed with winning. And we all know that only one team, or person, can win and therefore somebody must lose - every time.

Culturally, we have grown up to believe that the only options are to win or to lose. In the business world, we see that reinforced by frequent references to sporting analogies and admiration for ‘Type A’ sporting personalities who have completely invested themselves in their sport. We strongly identify with our sporting teams and their rivalries - it matters whether you’re a Djokovic or Federer Fan, Ronaldo or Messi, England Rugby or Celtic Rugby. And it really matters that your idols win.

What win/lose thinking really looks like

Business built on this binary win or lose approach has created a culture in which we feel the need to constantly prove that we are the best and there is little, or no, room for anything else. It's toxic. By being myopically focused on our competitors, we’re valuing rivalry over collaboration.

There’s no doubt that some of the great business rivalries have resulted in huge successes - Oracle v Microsoft/ Oracle v SAP/ Microsoft v Apple/ Bill Gates v Steve Jobs among them. These super successful businesses were born out of an outstanding individual - a real force of nature.

But… Is business built on rivalry fit for the future?

This binary approach in which there can only be one winner is no longer the best way to create a successful enterprise sales career and to win the most revenue you possibly can

We are living in times in which we can see much greater benefit from much wider spectrum thinking and where binary thinking might actually limit our success.

This is a time of change, perhaps in fact, change is the new normal. Post war, we got used to stability but, historically, we’ve faced huge highs and lows which are also characteristic of the pandemic. Historically, pandemics aren’t new. Political instability isn’t new. Economic challenges aren’t new. These things were the old normal and, perhaps, that volatility is here to stay.

And, in this time of change, we need to be drawing our focus to how we can optimise our business collaborations rather than our rivalries.

Enterprise sales club will be launched next week - If you'd like to find out more, head over to the website. www.enterprisesalesclub.com.

I let you know as soon as it is live

If you want to get yourself career ready for 2021 in this final part of 2020, contact me at [email protected]

Structure Q4, so it's on YOUR terms

Here’s the strategy that is working for me:

1. Get motivated - the motivator could be rallying against someone who says you can't be successful, close that major deal or have that particular role. You’re determined to show them otherwise.

Recently, whilst on holiday, I asked myself

‘If I was to start my business right here right now, what would I do?

How would I do it?

Starting with a blank canvas, what would I do?

How would I change it?’

and you can do the same in your current role. By asking these questions, you will be gaining both clarity and motivation.

By asking myself those questions, I’ve learned over time that the non-negotiables for me are:

● I have to be serving others;

● I have to be having fun;

● I have to be successful commercially.

● I have to be playing my A game and not my B game - so I have to be either talking or coaching etc. and not just writing (I’ve actually taken on someone to do my drafting for me).

● It has to be team orientated; and

● It has to be learning based.

2. Being Committed - being committed is about being smart in the way that we aim for success rather than going after everything. It's about 80/20ing the 80/20 and making sure that we're moving forward from that point. So we know how we can embrace our goals and follow through with achieving them.

3. Become your own chief relationship officer - I see this as fundamental to making the most of Q4. The people with the best depths of relationships are the ones who are most readily able to take things to a new level. Know what your key customers and prospects' challenges are, their fears, their ambition levels and their attitudes to risk etc.

Why? When you've got that, it opens up the possibility of being able to use a tool like medic, the x, y sales tool, to identify the pain point, look at the key matrices, what the economic buyer is about and what the decision making process is.

By adopting this approach, we will be working smart and working hard which hopefully is going to lead to the best possible end to the year.

I wish you all the best!

The Enterprise Sales Club which is now very close to launch. For more information about what’s inside or to talk about how you can manage your career more effectively to successful 2020 contact me at [email protected]

If ever there was a time for a reset. This is it.

The summer is over and it’s now up to us to optimise what is left of 2020 for success.

We have four months of the year left and we need to make the most of them - a successful 2020 is still possible. It is up to us as individuals to make this last quarter matter.

Q4 will be a quarter of change

Within the next 13 weeks, we’re going to be well into Q4 and by early December, the chance to optimise Enterprise Sales opportunities is going to be over and we're going to be into 2021 before we know it. So, whilst the chance is there - take it!

It is becoming clear that this is going to be a fairly fundamental quarter. There could be some big changes that can happen for many of us. This could even look like:

● Losing your role;

● Having your territory changed; or

● Any number of less significant changes

There is a real opportunity here...

...so why not take it?

During Q4, embrace the change that’s coming so that by the end of the year you've maximised out on 2020 and you’re prepared for 2021.For you, that might mean a career move, or territory move or learning about new or different technologies. Whatever the change is that comes your way, it is an opportunity to grow.

I’m already seeing clients embracing some of the rapidly growing marketplaces like IoT, AI and big data, as well as FinTech where previously they've been in different businesses or sectors.

So what are the opportunities currently available to you and how are you going to take them?

We all know the adage:

“Where you'll be in the next five years will be the sum total of the people who've you've met.”

I would add the following to that:

1. The people who have influenced you or who you have allowed to influence you,

2. The books that you have read

3. The information you've allowed to influence you and influence your mindset.

These are your opportunities - make the most of them.

By adopting this approach, we will be working smart and working hard which hopefully is going to lead to the best possible end to the year.

I wish you all the best!

The Enterprise Sales Club which is now very close to launch. For more information about what’s inside or to talk about how you can manage your career more effectively to successful 2020 contact me at [email protected]

Continuing my series on Trust in Enterprise Sales, this week I’m taking a look at the effect that cultivating trust has on bringing about change.

I’ve already covered Why you need to become a trusted partner in Enterprise Sales

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-you-need-become-trusted-partner-enterprise-sales-adrian-evans/

and How to become a trusted enterprise sales partner.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-become-trusted-enterprise-sales-partner-adrian-evans/

We are living through a time of huge global change

Enterprise Sales is far from immune to that change. If there ever was a time to confront reality, 2020 is it.

It goes without saying that it has not been anybody's ideal year. Whilst you might feel like sticking with what you know and expecting things to change around you, now is the time to embrace change and adapt to this new world...

...Below are some examples of how you can give more and cement the work that you have put in to building trust:

Clarity of expectations.

Practice personal responsibility and accountability.

This might look like asking yourself:

How could I get better in that situation?; or

How could everybody get better?

The best leaders that I coach do exactly that. When they are facing a problem or a challenge, the last thing they do is point fingers. They get it right for customers. And then, after time, they say ‘okay, hands up, what could we have done better collectively?’.

In doing so, these leaders are creating an environment in which change is expected and encouraged. And one in which mistakes are used as an opportunity to learn.

Listen first - everybody needs a damn good listening to colleagues and customers alike. Listening gives people an opportunity to blow off steam. You can’t underestimate the value of feeling heard, particularly when it comes to our mental health.

There’s no doubt that the global pandemic has brought with it a multitude of challenges. I'm currently seeing those challenges manifested in stressful situations leading to mental health challenges for some of my clients. For many of them, being and feeling heard would have nipped a lot of the stress that they feel in the bud.

Take steps to keep your commitments - This is something that my dad taught me at a very, very young age. He said to me: “...be careful about what you commit to, but if you do commit, you do it whatever it may be.”

Show your customers and key partners that you are committed by ‘climbing the stairs’ with them rather than doing the bare minimum and leaving them to figure out the rest for themselves.

To be a trusted leader, you need to earn it - During a recent podcast interview with Anant Patel

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/241-interview-with-anant-patel/id1437393283?i=1000477406090

he shared what it was like to work with Carol Cosby when he was at MasterCard. He said she created ‘Followship’ - she earned the right to have ‘Followship. People followed her because they trusted and respected her.

If you would like to know more about Enterprise Sales Club or to discuss how I can help build trust in your business relationships and enhance your career contact me at [email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-become-trusted-enterprise-sales-partner-adrian-evans/

In building a relationship and engaging with a customer over a period of time, you ‘earn the right’ to have the conversation with them when they're ready to buy. That’s the time to then talk about your product or solution. In the meantime, we need to personalise our approach. In order to do that, we need to look to move to beyond over-automation.

Technological automation enables us to continually push our products or solutions. Whilst automation certainly has its advantages, by placing too much reliance on it, we risk the sale never actually happening. This is because automation lacks personalisation. The key is to take off your sales hat and to deliver value consistently, over time.

The personalised approach gets you ahead

Particularly in the UK, we have got a real opportunity to personalise and build trust - because we have a reputation for providing poor service. Award winning Restaurateur, Michel Roux, believes that this has much to do with snobbery and the British class system.

I think more than any time ever, this is the time for the enterprise sales community to press reset on that. Now’s the time to say that we're going to get really clear on becoming trusted partners to our most important prospects and customers.

We have an opportunity to really understand our prospects and customers, so we can do something quite spectacular, which is anticipate what their needs are. By building trust, we're no longer guessing, we’re engaged and anticipating without being assumptive.

So how do we go about actually building trust with people?

There's nobody who has done this better than The Late Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). He talked about the core elements of building trust and building credibility as:

1. Integrity - building integrity and having integrity.

Be careful what you commit to and keeping your word when you do so i.e. walk your talk. I know that my best clients do this. This is how they distinguish themselves and enjoy greater depth of conversation and get themselves in better rooms than their peers. They get access to accounts that are more effective because they take ownership of their conduct.

2. Intention - what is YOUR intention? Many organisations are only interested in what they're going to get out of a deal. Those that aren’t, stand out. MasterCard, is committed to “doing well, by doing good”.

They want to do well, they want their customers to do well, they want their merchants to do well, they want the consumer to do well and ultimately, they want their partner banks to do well, whether that's issuer aside or acquirer side.

Naturally, we must build our capability and competence - our results are a direct result of our competency.

7 Ways to build Trust

1. Talk straight - I use the term 'empathetic candour'. Clear communication is kind communication.

2. Demonstrate respect - I think that's really, really, important, especially in this day and age when finding people with good manners is becoming increasingly rare. Excelling in this area can get you a long way.

3. Create transparency - so that there's an honesty in terms of your engagement and an authenticity to it.

4. Call things out - right wrongs rather than setting up another wrong.

5. Show loyalty - giving other people credit and crediting them in their presence.

6. Deliver results - Focus on delivering your professional competency. Obtaining results for your customers and employers are intrinsically linked...

If you would like to understand more about why building trust in enterprise sales relationships is so important, check out this post.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-you-need-become-trusted-partner-enterprise-sales-adrian-evans/?published=t

If you would like to know more about Enterprise Sales Club or to discuss how I can help build trust in your business relationships and enhance your career contact me at [email protected]

I think this conundrum has always existed in enterprise sales:

How do we get and stay close to customers and actually sell the most appropriate solution to them?

It’s when these two are successfully combined that customers are ready to buy.

It’s all about the timing...

If we try to sell too early on in the business relationship, we come across as too pushy. If, on the other hand, we're too late, well, we've lost out to a competitor. So, the ultimate enterprise sales conundrum for us all is:

How do we be there when a customer is ready to buy our solution from us?

...and trust

In the current climate, we don’t have to look too far to see that trust is at an all time low politically (internally and internationally) and between some employers and employees. The current levels of distrust are making it ever clearer how much trust really matters.

One definition of trust that resonates with me is used by LinkedIn:

‘Trust is consistency over time.’

I’m currently hearing people say similar things throughout the Enterprise Sales industry, including during a recent call with a VP of Marketing who commented that a brand is about trust over time across every channel.

When it comes to your career, YOU are your own brand.

Building trust in your business relationships will therefore set you apart from the crowd.

Before we even start engaging with customers, we need to have built strong relationships. All relationships are built on these basis:

1. Whether you trust that somebody is going to do what they say they're going to do;

2. How you respect them,

3. That they have the capability to do the job; and

4. Usually, you like them.

If any of these factors are missing, the result is friction in the system. And friction in the system and in relationships means either no sale, lack of optimization of sale, or ultimately, customers actually take that friction forward.

Very early on in my career I learned that even placing a very senior individual, and going through the recruitment process with them didn’t guarantee that their future business wouldn’t go to a competitor. So I asked someone why this was.

He replied that he had a 15 year relationship with my direct competitor who called him every single month and knew everything about him. This was someone with whom he had a real depth of relationship. This meant that even though I had provided a short due diligence and a good recruitment process, his client’s trust was still with my competitor.

That trust had been built over a long period of time and I would have to build it too in order to see the same results as my competitor.

I’ve seen the value of building trust

Here are some personal examples of how I have seen the benefit of cultivating trust in my network:

● Trust is efficient: I introduced one of my clients to a key decision maker today. My client said, no headhunter would have been able to get him in front of this decision maker because he didn’t have the relevant industry experience.

As a result of the trust that I had built with both parties, I was able to make that introduction. These two discovered that they actually have real core values that align and that work for them both. This is a great example of how warm introductions breathe a warm path.

● Trust accelerates: When I first became a published author I was struggling to sell individual copies of my book. One day, during a conversation with an ex-colleague with whom I had a trusting relationship, he suggested that we do an event.

This resulted in inviting a lot of his clients to Waterstones in the City in London - this was great engagement with his community for him and everyone would have a copy of my book. In about 30 seconds, I had sold 200 copies!

To discuss how I can help you build trust within your network, contact me at [email protected]