Enterprise sales can be like chasing a big fish that’s hard to hook.
Enterprise sales (or complex sales) is selling high-value products or services to large organizations, typically involving 1,000+ employees, long sales cycles (6-12+ months), and multiple stakeholders.
While all salespeople need consultative selling strategies and relationship-building skills, these deals also require the ability to navigate complex buying committees and manage multi-year contracts.
This means enterprise sales training must emphasize a customer-centric approach and a long-term perspective. Here are the core elements of the best enterprise sales training programs.
Key Characteristics of Enterprise Sales
Enterprise sales differ from small and mid-size sales in several ways.
- Consultative Approach: Sellers must act as trusted advisors, focusing on long-term value and solving specific, large-scale business problems.
- Long Sales Cycles: Deals often take 6-12 months or longer to close.
- Multiple Stakeholders: Decisions involve various departments, including IT, finance, and executives—often requiring a “buying committee.”
- High Value/Complexity: Involves expensive products with a massive impact on the customer’s business—requiring significant customization, security, and integration.
- Detailed Procurement Process: Often involves formal Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and intensive legal/security reviews.
What Makes a Good Enterprise Salesperson?
Salespeople who excel at enterprise sales are trusted advisors to their customers. The Brooks Group has identified these core sales competencies for today’s complex B2B sales:
- Planning and Organization: Ability to establish a process and implement systems or procedures
- Results Orientation: Ability to identify actions necessary to complete tasks and obtain results
- Goal Achievement: Ability to set, pursue, and attain achievable goals regardless of obstacles or circumstances
- Flexibility: Ability to modify, respond to, and integrate change with minimal personal resistance
- Data Analysis: Ability to read and analyze data to understand closed-lost deal patterns and drive prospecting efforts
- Customer Focus: Commitment to customer satisfaction
To succeed, your salespeople should also have these personality traits and abilities:
- Problem-solving
- Collaboration
- Empathy
- Active listening
- Confidence
- Patience
- Resilience
Enterprise sellers also need to be good at working with a team. They need to tap into the expertise of product specialists, sales engineers, and other subject-matter experts in your company. In enterprise sales, everyone works together.
Steps of the Enterprise Sales Process
The first thing enterprise salespeople need to do is evaluate opportunities using the five characteristics of a qualified prospect: awareness of need, authority to buy, urgency, trust, and a willingness to listen.
Next, they should consider why the customer is struggling and why they need a new product to help them. What issue are they trying to solve?
Sellers then need to navigate multiple stakeholders—building the buying committee’s trust and adding value before presenting a solution that meets those needs and wants.
Last, the customer may have objections or roadblocks that the seller must overcome or negotiate. The seller needs to show that the deal is a “win-win”—that your company wins by closing the sale and the customer wins by getting a solution to its problem.
Benefits of Enterprise Sales Training
Whether your team is made up of new salespeople or experienced veterans, your sales team training should focus on the core capabilities of consultative selling and a consistent sales process.
Fundamental sales skills are necessary if you want your company to experience real success. When you equip your salespeople with consultative selling skills, they feel more confident and are more effective.
The more you invest in your sales training program, the more you can develop your sales team. Sales training gives your team a greater sense of what the customers need.
With sales training, your team can also have more consistent results. A straightforward, repeatable sales process gives them a roadmap to follow each time they make a call or go to a meeting.
Sales training also improves the customer experience. Customers lose trust with sellers who don’t know how to build rapport or convey value.
Sales training also helps with hiring and retention. People are more likely to join your team if they know they’ll have the training and support to be successful.
If you don’t have a training program in place, new hires will be discouraged because they’ll feel they’re not being set up for success. This can make it difficult to hire talented salespeople.
How to Choose the Best Enterprise Sales Training
Selecting a good sales training program can make a huge difference to your overall success. You’ll have better sales volume, higher margins, and improved win rates with a well-trained team.
Finding the right program is key, as some are better than others. But evaluating sales training programs can also be daunting if you haven’t done it before. Make sure you choose wisely so you get the highest ROI for your investment.
The success of your sales training depends on three pillars: the training provider’s expertise, the relevance and quality of the content, and the training delivery method.
Choosing the right sales training provider for your organization depends on your industry dynamics, management objectives, organizational culture, and sales team capabilities.
If you’re investing in a sales training initiative, then give your project the best chance of success by selecting a provider that’s the right fit for your organization. Ask questions like these to find a provider that will deliver the sales skills, strategies, and process to drive revenue.
- “How will you learn about our business, assess our strengths, and uncover opportunities for improvement?”
- “How can I make sure your sales process makes sense for our selling environment?”
- “How do you ensure our sales professionals adopt the training and keep them from reverting to their old habits?”
- “How will you customize training content for our company and industry?”
- “What’s the recommended training delivery for our sales team—in person or virtual?”
- “How will you prove the ROI of my investment in sales training?”
Choosing the right training provider is one of the most important steps you can take in the pursuit of top-line revenue growth, because sales revenue drives the success of your organization. The best enterprise sales training program—from initial discovery work to design to delivery to reinforcement—will have a measurable, long-term impact on your entire sales team.
Contact us for more information about The Brooks Group’s enterprise sales training programs.
