76. How do you become successful at enterprise sales? What are the biggest challenges people experience? If you haven’t done corporate/enterprise sales before, the biggest thing to understand: you can do it. But, you’re going to have to hustle. Really, really hustle. Many web-focused professionals want the customers and leads and users to come to them. They want to focus then on the funnel, A/B testing, optimization, SEO, SEM, etc. etc. That’s all great, and for self-service business, that’s most of it. But for enterprise sales, you’re going to have to get your butt out of the office and go close some real live human beings: • Become a really good listener. Go see your prospects, as often as you can, in person. That may including flying somewhere. It may include flying a lot of places, in fact, that you don’t really want to go to. • Learn your prospects’ business processes in detail, and how your product enhances them. If this is boring to you, you will fail. • Learn how your potential customers will excel in their companies through your product. How can you help the person buying your product’s career? It’s not just about your fabulous UI/UX. • Make, or don’t make, commitments to future development and features to meet their needs. Your product will always be deficient in some fashion in the enterprise. Always and forever. • You’re going to have to learn how to not take no for an answer, how to beg for a meeting, and how to ask for money and a check. This is really, really hard if you haven’t done this before. • And internally, you are going to have to manage and hire sales people. Some will be great, but some won’t and will end up taking your money and be extremely expensive. You’re going to have to invest A LOT of time here. You can’t just hire some magic “VP of Sales” with 4 years of experience and have him/her scale the business. Instead, if you do that, you’ll actually end up with less sales than before. SAASTR.COM 73