B2B enterprise sales usually take six months or more, as they involve multiple stakeholders and big money—just some of the challenges sales teams face in the enterprise space. Selling to enterprises requires a strategic and focused approach beyond traditional SMB tactics.

With longer sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and higher risks, enterprise sales team structure becomes crucial in finding ways to optimize their B2B enterprise sales processes and drive revenue growth. This article will explore four key strategies to improve your B2B enterprise sales process. Supported by real-life examples and the expertise of Revegy, a leading sales execution platform, these strategies will help you overcome challenges and unlock the full potential of your sales team.

Understanding B2B Enterprise Sales

Selling to enterprises requires a distinct approach compared to selling to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). SMBs typically have fewer than 100 employees and generate up to a few hundred million dollars in annual revenue. Medium-sized companies, on the other hand, range from 100 to 999 employees, with up to $1 billion in annual revenue. Enterprises, the market’s most prominent players, generally boast over 1,000 employees and generate over $1 billion in annual revenue.

Some key features of enterprise B2B enterprise sales are:

Long Sales Cycles

Enterprise-level deals typically have considerably longer sales cycles compared to SMB sales. Sometimes, it can take a year or longer to close a deal. 

A structured sales framework is necessary to navigate enterprise deals’ long and complex sales cycles. This framework includes account visibility to identify bottlenecks and opportunities at the right time and active pipeline management to help you track progress.

Customized, Customer-Centric Value Propositions

Understanding a business’s unique product and service requirements and pain points and mapping your solution to each is one of the most difficult tasks in enterprise sales. You must build compelling business cases tailored for each prospect to maximize your close-won rate. 

More Stakeholders, More Relationship Building

According to Gartner, B2B enterprise buying decisions involve an average of 6 to 10 decision-makers. Each stakeholder brings their priorities, concerns, and perspectives to the table, and it can be challenging to identify and connect with each stakeholder, let alone build and nurture relationships with them.

Bigger Contracts, Higher Risk

In enterprise B2B sales, the average contract value is significantly higher. For instance, SaaS enterprise companies often see average contract values surpassing $100,000. These larger contracts reflect the scale of enterprise requirements.

With more significant revenue streams at risk, organizations have more to lose if a sale is lost or fails to deliver the expected results. Enterprises often have strict evaluation processes and rigorous criteria to ensure their chosen solutions align with their strategic objectives.

In other words, you should have sales tools to evaluate opportunities precisely. Plus, you need more data-driven insights and analytics to improve your chances of success. 

Why Are Sales Teams Overwhelmed?

You’ve seen the uphill challenges sales teams face regarding enterprise sales and the need for an effective enterprise sales strategy. In addition to these challenges, enterprise sales teams may be overwhelmed by a high volume of opportunities, a heavy burden of administrative requirements, or a lack of internal resources—impacting their overall performance and results. 

Competing and Unclear Priorities

Sales reps often need help to keep up with multiple administrative tasks, frequent product/service updates, and shifting objectives, making it difficult to prioritize effectively and allocate time judiciously. For instance, enterprise sales reps may have to prospect enterprise customers while also managing customer retention. Similarly, if you have multiple product or service offerings, reps have to understand the unique sales approach for each.

Inconsistent Processes

Confusion, inefficiencies, and wasted efforts begin when sales tasks are disjointed, such as conversations that happen out of sequence. Inconsistent processes reduce sales team efficiency and create unwanted roadblocks, making them lose out on bigger deals. 

When no standardized procedures or guidelines exist, sales reps struggle to navigate the sales cycle. It also becomes challenging to track progress, identify bottlenecks, and optimize performance.

Your sales success depends on the efficiency of your processes. Therefore, it’s best practice to identify the critical milestones in your sales cycle and then define the steps between them. 

Poor Technology

Using outdated technology can hinder sales team productivity and add unnecessary workflow complexity. Sales toolsand software may lack the features, integration capabilities, or user-friendliness required to support the sales process effectively. This leads to frustration, wasted time, and reduced efficiency.

Changes in the Enterprise B2B Sales Landscape

The landscape of B2B sales, particularly enterprise selling, has significantly changed in recent years, mainly driven by evolving buyer behavior, an increasing focus on the customer buying experience, and technological advancements. These changes have required B2B sales organizations to redefine the B2B buyer’s journey and shift toward account-based sales strategies.

The Shift to Account-Based Sales

A notable change in B2B sales is the increased emphasis on Account-Based Sales (ABS). In ABS, companies target specific accounts they deem ripe for conversion, identified using custom data points. Once target accounts are identified, sales and marketing teams collaborate to create a business case. Then, they forge connections with key decision-makers within the target companies.

Account-based sales strategies are more personalized and focused. They allow organizations to tailor their messaging and offerings to the specific needs of each account. By concentrating efforts on high-potential accounts, B2B sales teams can maximize their effectiveness and increase their chances of success.

B2B Sales Enablement Tools

In the face of growing sales complexity, B2B companies have turned to sales enablement tools to implement ABS. The right tools will streamline processes, accelerate ramp-up time for new sales reps, and enhance team coaching. These tools simplify sales operations and provide sales teams with the support they need to succeed. Some of the most impactful sales enablement tools available today include:

Sales Dialers

These solutions empower sales representatives to make more calls, connect with prospects efficiently, and increase conversion rates. B2B sales teams often prefer dialers that offer features like: 

• Voicemail automation
• Local area code dialing
• Automatic CRM data logging
• Contextual information integration
• Calendar integration

Guided Selling Solutions

Beyond traditional dialers, guided selling solutions provide real-time guidance to sales reps. The solutions suggest which prospects or accounts to contact and the best communication channels (phone, email, text, or social media). These solutions can even prioritize leads in real-time based on activities like email opens, form submissions, and downloads.

Conversation Intelligence

These solutions leverage artificial intelligence to automatically analyze conversations and discover valuable insights from sales calls. The solutions identify critical criteria like mentions of competitors and help sales coaches pinpoint areas for improvement and provide targeted guidance without manually reviewing every call.

End-to-end Sales Enablement Software

Holistic enablement platforms like Revegy provide intelligent solutions to help sales teams every step of the way, from uncovering cross-sell and upsell opportunities to developing the right relationships within key accounts and building a predictable pipeline. Sales enablement platforms facilitate cross-team collaboration to engage and convert target accounts effectively and empower sales teams to work more strategically and efficiently by helping build a repeatable, scalable process.

4 Ways to Improve Your Enterprise Sales Process

Optimizing your enterprise sales process is critical to driving revenue growth, sales growth, and success. Implementing strategies and using the right tools can enhance sales execution and improve pipeline predictability. 

Revegy, the leading sales execution platform, offers a complete solution to help sales teams in these areas. Let’s explore four ways to improve your enterprise sales methodology with Revegy.

1. Unify Data and Enhance Relationship Mapping

To decrease sales cycle time and win enterprise sales, you need visibility into customer and prospect data, including key decision-makers, champions, and influencers. You also need to understand whether these individuals are engaged in the purchasing experience and whether you can get their buy-in. 

Revegy’s sales intelligence platform provides a unified view of customer and prospect data and a relationship map so your sales teams can identify the right people in your accounts and build better relationships. By leveraging these relationship maps, sales reps can see where they have solid relationships and where they need to develop better connections to mitigate risk. 

2. Identify Untapped Opportunities with White Space Identification

Increasing revenue from existing accounts is a significant goal for most enterprise sales teams, as expanding opportunities within existing customer accounts is generally easier than acquiring new customers. 

Revegy’s white space identification feature helps you identify unmet customer needs. With a better view of this white space, you can offer targeted solutions to ease customer pain points and earn more upsells or cross-sells.

Revegy’s platform equips your team with the tools to maximize sales potential and wallet share. Ultimately, it leads to revenue growth and increased customer satisfaction.

3. Streamline Sales Processes and Foster Collaboration

Blind spots and information silos within your organization can slow sales execution. Revegy’s platform removes these barriers by providing consistent, cross-functional sales execution plans. 

Revegy centralizes your data, so it isn’t scattered across multiple apps or limited to certain functions. It also helps streamline sales processes and enables effective teamwork across functions, including CX and marketing. Sales reps and managers can access a single source of information regarding account plans, coaching opportunities, and sales strategies, ensuring alignment and efficiency across the entire organization.

4. Drive Predictable Revenue Growth with Robust Analytics

Accurate forecasting and predictable pipelines are vital for enterprise sales success. Revegy’s robust analytics capabilities provide the necessary insights and context to power accurate forecasts and revenue projections. 

By leveraging data-driven analytics, you can make informed decisions, identify trends, and align your sales strategies accordingly. Revegy also helps track and measure account planning activity, revenue, account health, and more.

How an Enterprise B2B Sales Team Leveraged Revegy to Unlock Strategic Account Intelligence and rive Revenue

Fujitsu is a $35 billion IT company based in Japan, supporting businesses with digital transformation worldwide. Fujitsu leveraged Revegy’s enterprise sales software to consolidate all client data in one place, enabling Fujitsu to help clients achieve their transformation goals quickly and empower its sales teams to hit revenue targets faster. 

Using Revegy, Fujitsu shifted its customer conversations from a purely finance-based dialogue to a strategy-based one. The tool helped align clients and the sales team, and by carefully tracking account activities, Fujitsu eventually brought more value to its clients.

Fujitsu also faced the uphill challenge of bringing its team together in recent years. But thanks to Revegy’s virtual collaboration environment, the team had easy access to managers and peers across multiple departments in one place. Virtual account reviews were possible, and together, the team could easily leverage relationship maps, strategy maps, and account plans to understand the client better. They could better illustrate how their products could deliver value to their clients and thus win opportunities faster. 

Optimize Your B2B Enterprise Sales Engine with Revegy

Empowering your sales team in the ever-evolving B2B enterprise sales landscape is critical to revenue growth and success. You can optimize your sales process and drive success by addressing enterprise sales challenges through account-based strategies and sales enablement tools.

Revegy is a leading sales account planning and enablement platform that offers a comprehensive solution to enhance sales teams’ focus, streamline operations, and hit revenue growth targets. With powerful features like data unification, relationship mapping, white space identification, and robust analytics, you can unlock the full potential of your B2B enterprise sales team.

Take charge and revolutionize your enterprise sales approach with Revegy. Schedule a demo today and provide your team with a blueprint to see the way to win.®

Now On Demand!

“Sales on the Move: Embracing Agility for a Changing Sales Journey.”

Watch our on-demand webinar, where we delve into the key elements of an agile sales approach from start to finish, featuring Luiz Martins, CMO of Revegy, along with esteemed guest speakers Donald C Kelly, Founder and The Sales Evangelist, and Doug Inda, SVP of Enterprise Client Development at Syndigo. Discover how to adapt to tighter budgets without compromising sales performance, leverage technology to streamline processes and close more deals, provide meaningful value to buyers amidst abundant data, succeed in a remote sales environment with effective communication and virtual presentations, and position yourself as a trusted advisor in today’s ever-changing sales landscape. This is your chance to increase your pipeline and propel your success forward. Watch on-demand here!