I work in sales at Twilio and manage the account of a huge enterprise customer. We've sold to a few of their departments and what we've done so far has been successful.
But every time I call my contacts at this customer, something seems to derail us from the path to further integrations. They know our products work and save them money. But just last week I called Glenda in accounting only to find out her phone number now goes to some guy named Bob who refused to tell me what desk he works on or what happened to Glenda.
So I fired off a quick email to Vincent, the CIO, asking for an updated contact list since Glenda is gone and I heard Sally moved to outside sales. Vincent's secretary wrote back to me saying she'd "ping" him and "circle back". That was two weeks ago.
Last year when we closed a bunch of deals with this company I was recommending to my management that we spend even more effort to get further with them this year. But here I am halfway through the year and I feel lucky that my proposal was turned down because we were already too busy with other clients. What would another sales guy have done anyway, apart from dogfooding our sweet new IP phone stack as he wasted his time trying to navigate an endless megacorporate morass?
Do you guys have top tier enterprise sales guys? Maybe people in their 50's and 60's, who have a lot of contacts, and relate to C level people better than millenials? Is commission capped or uncapped? By uncapping commission sales is driven to maximize deal size and be hardcore about closing, even if that means one guy gets a $700k bonus. He still brought in way more!
Really solid enterprise sales guys see the corporate morass as a challenge and have developed and learned tricks to overcome it. It's a very psychological game. You need to create urgency, you need to think up reasons to call, reasons you need meetings. For a huge, fortune 100 client, you should treat the sale as an orchestrated project, not something you casually shoot an email off to and forget about for 2 weeks
I see this a lot at start-ups as I come from automotive (similar to large enterprise sales, engineering teams with product teams make calls on buying 10's of M to 100's of M in product.)
The biggest problem I see is you're not on site. You're not there physically and haven't met Glenda and her manager or immediate peers. Because if you were on site Glenda would've let you know she's thinking of leaving and would've referred you to her manager in charge of her replacement. There's so much gained in just showing up and being present.
It doesn't feel scalable or meritocric but it is how a lot of humans work.
Without more context, my suggestion is to sell to the CIO instead. You are already in contact with him. Get him to initiate a project.
Blueprint-sell, solution-sell, or whatever is the current hotness in enterprise software nowadays :)
Joke-aside, engage with the CIO. If the current sales rep thinks he or she is too "low-level", involve someone higher up in your company, get the VP of sales involved. Hell, get your CTO, chief architect and/or CEO involved. CEOs make great salesmen in enterprise software. Get the CIO and higher ups excited about using Twilio throughout the organization. If you want to hit it big, don't start from the bottom (only). Start from the top.
As for this problem:
> since Glenda is gone and I heard Sally moved to outside sales. Vincent's secretary wrote back to me saying she'd "ping" him and "circle back". That was two weeks ago.
Build a sphere of influence and expand on it. I found out the hard way that it was absolutely terrible for me that I had only 1 or 2 points of contact in a company. What if they moved on (suddenly)? Build contacts within the company, and expand. Keep in contact with them.
But every time I call my contacts at this customer, something seems to derail us from the path to further integrations. They know our products work and save them money. But just last week I called Glenda in accounting only to find out her phone number now goes to some guy named Bob who refused to tell me what desk he works on or what happened to Glenda.
So I fired off a quick email to Vincent, the CIO, asking for an updated contact list since Glenda is gone and I heard Sally moved to outside sales. Vincent's secretary wrote back to me saying she'd "ping" him and "circle back". That was two weeks ago.
Last year when we closed a bunch of deals with this company I was recommending to my management that we spend even more effort to get further with them this year. But here I am halfway through the year and I feel lucky that my proposal was turned down because we were already too busy with other clients. What would another sales guy have done anyway, apart from dogfooding our sweet new IP phone stack as he wasted his time trying to navigate an endless megacorporate morass?