One of the things that I learnt doing sales and pre sales in large enterprise and found to be highly powerful is to.. Make sure that Your Champion Succeeds. Even if your product does not.
This approach is also a cornerstone of how you build flywheel for a top-down enterprise sales. And this applies irrespective of whether you are selling a product or a service.
What does making your Champion successful mean?
- Understand What Success is for your Champion: Make sure to ask and understand what success means for your Champion. In most cases it's something like a promotion. but no one would openly say so. For a lot of people it's building their brand internally in the org ex: " John is the one who transformed production operations" or "Jane led successful AI adoption for Customer Success" or "Joe built the security stack and the team".
- De-Risk engaging with you: If you are an early stage startup, chances are that you are trying to find "Early Adopter" (ref: Crossing the Chasm) within the Org. For Early Adopters typically the goal is to be known as Early Adopter. In Large Enterprises, adopting new tech is often a huge challenge and is riddled with Risks(Career risks - think the old adage "No one got fired for buying IBM"). and any leader who can navigate that has huge career upsides. Your job is to make sure that their downside is protected. If your project fails, take the blame as the vendor. Spare the champion at all costs.
- Make yourself useful: Do whatever you can to make yourself useful for their team. It may not be just solving the problem for which they are buying your product/service. Your JTBD now becomes success of your Champion. As an example: my company was selling AI platform for production operations, however, our champion at a F25 org did not have enough K8s skills at the time. So we unofficially staffed our K8s expert to his team to help him out. This went a long way in building relationship with them. Another example is, if they are trying to hire for a critical position, help them with people in your network.
- Be a sounding board for your champion. A lot of times discussing certain ideas within the org can be risky and peers can be judgemental. At such times everyone could use someone to bounce ideas off of without worrying about judgement.
- Make your champion look good in front of their bosses. Help them build presentations, help them navigate org politics. This is probably the single most important thing to learn in enterprise sales. This will directly lead to your champion introducing you to other people in their network.
Second-order effects
- you typically get a lot of leeway in your product, because you are solving lot of other problems for them. and they "want you to be around". and Don't underestimate the value of "being around". it increases luck surface area by a lot.
- tomorrow if they leave and join another organisation, you automatically get a new sales lead.
- on the other hand : if you start a new company, they are more likely to take a bet on your product because they know you will make things work somehow.
- they are likely to refer/intro you to their peers in the industry. better networks , better sales pipeline.
- you build a strong rolodex which becomes your backbone of top-down sales in B2B.