Seasoned enterprise sellers know that closed won deals have 3 common traits:
A clear champion, who stands to gain from buying the product. This is the easy part.
A collaborative plan between the champion and the salesperson to build consensus, secure approvals, navigate procurement and get a contract signed. This is also fairly easy to figure out.
A number of key internal meetings where consensus is built, approvals are secured and procurement is navigated, yet where the salesperson is never going to be invited to. This is the #1 challenge in closing deals and it’s only getting harder.
A $50k deal can have 4-5 stakeholders and a $100k deal can have 10 or more. If you’re lucky you’ll end up stuck in endless meetings saying the same thing over and over again but more commonly you’ll end up managing chaotic email threads in an effort to get everyone on the same page.
My friend and former colleague Brendan Weitz, co-founder of Journey is at the forefront of solving this problem. Journey enables salespeople to give their champions the ammunition they need to sell the deal internally, by using an interactive story format to engage all the stakeholders. This has given him a lens into how top performing AEs are closing deals and what they are doing right.
From the content and strategies used to engage stakeholders, to how to help your champion navigate their buying process, to how to use warm intros to build pipeline 10x faster, to how to automate your LinkedIn outreach, to when to use product-led vs sales-led sales processes, there’s a ton of gold in here for any founder or early stage sales leader doing enterprise sales.
I always learn something new when I talk to Brendan and I know you will enjoy listening to this one! And if you haven’t done so already, please subscribe!
Podcast contents
1:00 Tell us about Journey and the problem you are solving
3:15 Strategies salespeople can deploy to engage stakeholders
5:35 Figuring out your ideal customer profile for Journey
7:30 The surprising number of stakeholders involved in a $40-50k deal
8:50 Helping champions understand their own buying process
9:45 Strategies that have worked best for generating leads
11:10 Systematizing and scaling warm introductions
14:00 Comparing the success rates of warm intros vs cold outbound
15:30 Scaling automated outbound on LinkedIn
18:30 Comparing the results of product-led vs sales-led motions
20:50 Common hacks that AEs are doing to engage stakeholders
23:10 Overcoming objections to using Journey
28:10 The importance of multi-threading for understanding wins and losses
How to sell to decision makers when you can't get in the room: An interview with Brendan Weitz, Co-founder of Journey.io