What a good enterprise sale looks like when your team has only sold small

A good enterprise sale for a team used to small deals is slower, wider and written down. Slower, because a purchase passes through several desks. Wider, because five or six people each need a different reason to say yes. Written down, because someone inside the buyer has to carry your case into rooms you will never enter. The basics stay as they were: find a real problem, quote honestly, reply fast.

The quote that went quiet

Take an invented Madurai firm that sells attendance and shift-recording software to small factories. The owner has always closed in one visit, with the proprietor sitting across a desk. A spinning mill group with several units asks for a quote.

The owner treated it like the others: met the HR manager, who liked the demonstration, and sent a price. Then nothing came back for three weeks. The HR manager could not buy alone. The plant head had never seen the product, the finance controller had never heard of the firm, and the group's IT person had a view about anything that touched their network.

The owner had sold hard to the person who liked the product, and that person had no way of explaining it to the people who decided.

What the owner did on the second attempt

The owner asked the HR manager for ten minutes with the plant head and offered to stand at one gate for a shift, watching how the register was filled by hand. That visit produced a number the plant head believed: the supervisor hours spent each week copying sheets. It went into a two-page note for finance. The IT person was asked for a list of what the software must not touch, and the owner proposed a paid trial at one unit before any group-wide order.

The order still took longer than anything the firm had sold before. It covered only that one unit, at a lower price than the group had hinted at, and the wider order is still unsigned. But every row of the sheet was filled, so nobody could say they had not been asked.

Five roles, one sheet

Before the next meeting, the owner drew a sheet with five rows and filled in what was known:

Role                          Name     Last spoke   What they need from us
Raised the need
Checks it works
Negotiates terms
Releases the money
Signs

Any blank row is a risk. A blank beside "signs" is the worst one, because you may be pitching a person who cannot say yes. In this case four rows were blank. The next call had a purpose: ask the HR manager who those four people were, and what each would want to see.

You get the names with plain questions. "Who else has to be comfortable before this goes ahead?" and "Who has signed something like this here before?" do the work. A champion is usually glad to be asked.

Make it easy for the one who likes you

One person inside wants this to happen, usually because the current problem lands on their desk. Everything you send should make their job of explaining it simpler.

Give them a page or two they can forward, in the words their own boss uses. It should contain:

• the problem in their numbers, with anything you estimated marked as your estimate;
• the cost of leaving things alone, as one honest sum;
• your proposal, with price, scope and what is excluded;
• the risk they will think of first, and your answer to it;
• references you may name, and what each can confirm.

Never invent a saving. If a figure cannot be worked out from their own data, say that, and offer to measure it during a trial.

The paperwork that surprises small sellers

Small buyers pay on an invoice. A group pays after a vendor is registered, an invoice is approved and a payment run comes round. Ask in the first meeting how a new supplier is registered, which documents the vendor form wants, and how long approved invoices wait for payment. The answers decide whether you can afford the deal.

Agreements need the same early look. A larger buyer may send its own contract with terms that a small firm has never signed: penalties for late delivery, long warranty periods, rights over data. Read it before you celebrate, and show it to your adviser if anything frightens you. Rules and terms differ, so do not assume.

Keeping a slow deal from going cold

Memory fails by the third meeting. Keep the five-row sheet alive, with the date you last touched each person and the next step beside it. Look at it on your side every Monday and chase any row you have not touched in a while.

Silence in a large company does not always mean no. Your file may simply be under another file. A note that offers something useful, such as a reference call or a smaller first scope, is more likely to get a reply than "Any update?".

When the big one is the wrong one

Skip it if your cash cannot wait ninety days for a payment. Skip it if one buyer would grow into most of your income overnight. Skip it if nobody can be spared to follow the deal for months, because a large order can also pull a small team away from the many smaller buyers who pay on time.

Fill the sheet for your biggest open quote

Draw the five rows for the largest quote now waiting. Every blank is a call you have not made. If you decide to go after large buyers, enterprise and solution selling is the service for it, and the sales section holds the related posts. When you are ready to describe your own first large account, tell us what you need.