In this video, we outline a step-by-step process for how to sell enterprise software. The topic of selling enterprise software is big and we try to squeeze a 2 to 3-day workshop into a short training video, so we move quickly and don’t cover everything. If you happen to like what is discussed in this video and want more details on the topics that we move through, all of these tips and concepts are taken from our full 2 to 3-day workshop which you can access here.

 

Getting Connected

The first step in this process for how to sell enterprise software is to get connected with target prospects and get your foot in the door. This can be a challenging step (in some ways the most challenging) regardless of what you sell, but especially if you sell enterprise software.

When you are prospecting and trying to get a hold of someone like a VP of IT, you will often find this person to be very difficult to get a hold of and will often get voicemail boxes. When this is the case, we recommend you institute a process of organizational movement to move up and down the prospect’s department and to other functional departments to find a prospect that you are able to get a hold of and find a way into the account.

 

Creating Interest

Once to get engaged with prospects, it is critical to create some level of interest. With how to sell enterprise software, it is important to focus on answering the question “What is in it for me?” when talking to prospects. This is easy to forget because there are often a lot of features and product details to talk about and that does not educate the prospect on what is in it for them.

To help with this, take a step back and think about the improvements that the product and features can make for the prospect. You can also brainstorm the pain points that the product can help to fix. By talking about benefits and pain points, you can improve your ability to make the prospect more interested.

 

Gathering Information

With how to sell enterprise software, it is critical to be effective at gathering information from the prospect. The best way to do this is to ask good questions, and we recommend that you ask pain questions and current state questions.

Pain questions are questions that probe if the prospect has any of the challenges that your software helps to resolve. Current state questions are questions that gather details about what is going on on the prospect’s side related to the software that you sell.

 

Sales Process

We recommend that you use some sort of sales process when selling enterprise software, and we break down the sales process into three steps: 1) Initial Contact, 2) Conversation, and 3) Explanation. By taking prospects through these three steps, it can become more clear what you need to accomplish and talk about in each step, and that can improve your ability to sell software.

 

Demonstrating the Solution

A key step in the process of how to sell enterprise software is to demonstrate the software or present how your software can help. Instead of providing a standard demo, tailor the demo to the customer. One way to do that is to start out the meeting by sharing the findings that you gathered in previous discussions in terms of interests and pain points. After that, you can align the demonstration with those interests and pain points, and this small change can greatly improve the impression that your demo makes on the prospect.

 

Closing

How to close when selling enterprise software is an entire subject by itself. But one tip that we discuss in this video is to present a partnership plan after your presentation or demonstration. This is a list of steps that need to be completed between the demonstration and the customer going live, and you can get the prospect to agree to the plan as your attempt to validate interest in moving forward. You can then use the list of steps to manage the remainder of the sales process.

 

We hope this helps give you some ideas with how to sell enterprise software!