Enterprise Sales Process: A Playbook for Closing Deals Faster

A strong product or service no longer seals the deal in enterprise sales. Enterprise clients want partners, not just vendors. Their challenges start with building business cases and getting budget approvals. Then, they find themselves juggling multiple stakeholders and evaluating competitors for complex requirements. No wonder they don’t just want an airtight sales motion. 

They want to see how you can go beyond the product. Getting them to choose you isn’t easy unless you bring together BDRs, AEs, SEs, and RevOps leaders to move the pipeline forward. Why? 

Team selling helps close deals faster. At least 81% of sales reps think so, according to a survey of 7,700 sales professionals. 

Tim Sanders emphasizes this need for collaboration in his book, “Dealstorming”. He says, “We need to proactively pursue sales collaboration and not look at it as a last resort option when best individual efforts aren’t enough.” 

When enterprise sales leaders bring together individual contributors with different areas of expertise, they can drive results quickly. This article shares how those looking to create or revamp a collaborative enterprise sales process can do so. 

Collaborative selling or team selling: what works better

Many sales leaders use collaborative selling and team selling interchangeably. But they are different. Team selling limits collaboration within the sales team. Collaborative selling, on the other hand, means you work with collaborators on both sides of the fence. 

Sales leaders turn to team selling when the stakes are high. They form a team instead of relying on a single sales rep to manage long sales cycles and impress enterprise buying committees. 

Collaborative selling ensures collaboration among teams on both buyer and seller sides. It includes working with prospects, customer success, marketing, and product engineering. The best part is that everyone brings their A-game to close a deal faster. 

Collaborative selling for enterprises

So, what should you choose as an enterprise sales leader and why? Collaborative selling, because it helps you: 

• Bring together the broader team for revenue alignment while contributing to growth.
• Increase logo win rates by addressing the concerns of multiple decision-makers.
• Offer customers tailored guidance and ensure product adoption.
• Unify sales, marketing, and customer success teams so they support each other throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Collaboration within sales

Modern sales teams have different sub-units, like RevOps, sales engineers (SEs), account executives (AEs), and sales leaders. Seamless collaboration among them results in an efficient sales process that speeds up the enterprise sales cycle. 

Let’s look at how sales leaders can ensure collaboration among these teams.

How to collaborate with revenue operations

RevOps or revenue operations teams are the backbone of the revenue growth flywheel. They integrate data from sales, marketing, and customer service teams to provide everyone with a 360-degree view before, during, and after the sales process. 

In reality, they handle more than just data. They manage processes, tools, and strategies that drive an enterprise's go-to-market motion. 

To better collaborate with them, sales teams can create weekly sync meetings, where they discuss:

• Goals, metrics, and strategies. Transparent communication between teams helps them stay on the same page about progress, challenges, and upcoming initiatives.
• Customer insights. Working with data gives RevOps teams the unique advantage of better understanding customer behavior and market trends. Sales teams can use these insights to spot sales opportunities and optimize processes.
• Integrating processes. Sales and RevOps teams can also align on workflow automation, standardizing processes, and CRM systems, which helps them optimize the revenue cycle. 

These meetings are packed with valuable insights, so you want to ensure everyone is in the loop. Reelay keeps everyone posted throught its corporate meeting assistant that uses AI automation to document meeting minutes. 

How to collaborate with sales engineering

If you sell tech products to enterprises, you know the value of sales engineers (SEs). They have the technical know-how to liaise between sales and technical teams. B2B enterprises rely on SEs to build custom demos based on prospects’ needs and use cases. 

Sales engineers can’t do their jobs right without account executives. Because it’s up to AEs to:

• Build client relationships,
• Match prospects’ budget requirements, and 
• Bring them to the point when SEs can pitch them

AE and SE collaboration becomes easier with frequent check-ins to discuss prospects’ needs and pain points, jointly create meeting agendas, and conduct mock presentations. 

How to collaborate with executive leaders

Regardless of the company size, every founder aims to “close more deals faster.” But when AEs hear those exact words, they have nothing but a vague North Star. 

Better collaboration happens when company leaders quantify targets like net new business acquisition, net logo retention, and revenue expansion. To collaborate better with AEs, executive leaders must:

• Coach AEs and help them stay abreast of best practices.
• Set realistic sales forecasts that are motivating yet achievable.
• Support on sales deals that require a little extra push to close.
• Gather feedback from AEs on what customers are saying and make strategic shifts.

Collaboration with marketing

Most organizations suffer from a lack of sales and marketing alignment. 

If you examine the complex relationship between sales and marketing, you will find that their misalignment results from ineffective communication, insufficient lead quantity, and a lack of high-quality, low-friction leads.  

Horizontal collaboration in solving these problems pushes both teams toward the same goal. It also unlocks deal efficiency and drives revenue growth. And here’s how they can do it.

• Weekly catchups: Transparent communication becomes more effective starting from the top. Consider setting up weekly meetings between sales and marketing leaders to discuss pipeline challenges, opportunities, and campaigns in a safe space.
• Cleaning sales pipeline data: Sales and marketing managers must connect to clean pipeline data. These data-cleaning exercises prevent marketers from targeting prospects already in the pipeline.
• Campaign communication: Marketing teams can create one-page briefs for new campaigns so the sales team knows the context and the follow-up process.
• Supporting sales beyond driving leads: Marketing teams must go beyond driving leads and find more ways to team up with sales. For example, they can work with AEs to create pitch decks or help sales create targeted mail campaigns to speed up deal closure.
• Centralized sales content management: Sometimes, sales teams can’t find case studies or proposals they’d like to share with prospects. Salespeople know the content is essential because it will help close the deal faster. It’s best to set up a centralized content repository to store up-to-date content in such scenarios. 

Collaboration with product

Sales and products don’t always have a solid alignment. This misalignment results in sales over-promising product capabilities and product under-delivering. To prevent such situations, revenue leaders must find ways for both teams to collaborate. Here’s how they can do it:

• Create joint KPIs: Sales teams prioritize revenue, while product teams want to ship new features. Creating a shared target for both teams helps them collaborate better. For example, a metric like net promoter score (NPS) can help the sales team measure customer loyalty and the product team understand product-market fit. 

• Define product-qualified leads: A PQL or product-qualified lead starts with self-serve freemium but has a high potential to become a paying customer. Product and sales teams can collaborate to define and match PQLs against predetermined criteria. 

For example, the sales team can share what a good lead looks like regarding the job role, company size, and industry. When these PQLs sign up, product teams can match them against preset rules and share them with sales. 

• Share product feedback: Salespeople are out there all day, every day, understanding customers’ challenges, goals, and priorities. Product teams can use these insights to determine whether upcoming products and features match the market's needs. 

Collaboration with customers

B2B selling is hard, especially today when customers have abundant information and conduct half of their research online before an offline purchase. To help them buy, salespeople must collaborate with them in the following ways. 

• Let buyers visualize the problem: Most enterprise buyers aren’t willing to explore solutions unless they know the ins and outs of the issue. Sales leaders must help them see the problem better by offering industry benchmarks, thought leadership content, and diagnostic tools.
• Make it easy for them to start conversations: Sales teams must collaborate with product and marketing teams to develop case studies, video demos, trend reports, and pricing pages. These offer buyers a clear path to starting a conversation. 
• Help them convince internal consultants: Once buyers consider your solution, you must help them sell your product internally. Consider offering them buying guides and checklists so they feel confident about what to consider before purchasing. Also, collaborate with sales engineers to build demos and show them your product's unique value proposition. At this stage, sharing customer testimonials, ROI reports, and product comparisons is crucial to seal the deal faster.

However, salespeople often struggle to find communication methods that engage their customers and prospects. Due to a lack of clarity, most emails and phone calls get ignored, leading to longer sales cycles and lower close rates. The stats below show customers’ preferences when it comes to choosing a communication channel. 

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Souce: Finance Online

But there’s a catch.

The statistics may not consider the comprehensive demographics of your customers and prospects. Any change in the demographic directly impacts on customers’ choices. 

When you work with different customers with diverse demographics, their personal choices vary. Leading with phone calls because it’s the highest preferred channel (based on data) wouldn’t solve your purpose of engaging all customers and prospects.

As a result, salespeople spend ample time spraying and praying, trying to find communication channels that work with specific customers. Reelay helps you avoid the hit-and-trial approach. 

Sellers and customers who use Reelay are four times more likely to respond to each other when they receive Reelay Recap and Meeting Recordings in communication. 

It helps establish two-way communication faster, helping reps move prospects and customer forward in their journeys.

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Moreover, Reelay empowers you to assign action items directly from the meeting report. This helps you delegate tasks easily while delivering to customers’ expectations consistently. 

5 ways to improve enterprise sales collaboration

Magic happens when sales teams collaborate with peers within their team and up and down the command chain. Here are some best practices to make this collaboration effortless.

1. Choose the right sales collaboration tools

The best tools out there don’t just look pretty. They give you back time so you can do what’s important. Here are some tools to capture data and automate certain workflows.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems store all sorts of customer data, including sales activities and customer interactions. The right CRM is a source of truth for all teams and helps them communicate better with prospects. 
• Sales engagement platforms make it effortless to automate sales outreach via email, voice, and social channels. 
• Corporate AI meeting assistants like Reelay help you automatically capture notes in meetings, review them later, and even assign tasks based on action items.
• Document management platforms allow multiple users to create, edit, share, and store documents and contracts. They make it easy for teams to access the information they need.
• Sales analytics platforms analyze KPIs like deal size, sales cycle length, and conversion rates to help leaders better understand the big picture and the details that matter. 

2. Centralize data in one place

Keeping pipeline data in a central place like CRM is crucial for improving sales performance. All teams can access this data to dive into a prospect’s history, demographics, interactions, and preferences. 

This data accessibility helps customer onboarding and success teams tailor their messaging. Moreover, cross-functional teams can easily find the contextual data they need to solve customer problems faster. 

3. Promote transparent communication and collaboration

When sales leaders prioritize transparent communication and collaboration, they instill a sense of trust among salespeople. 

As a result, sales teams openly share insights and ask for help when needed. This proactive approach to addressing challenges early on drives efficient problem-solving. 

4. Start alignment meetings

Alignment meetings help sales leaders understand what their AEs need to succeed. For example, you can discuss the scope for improvement in how product-led and marketing efforts drive the pipeline. 

The goal isn’t to conduct a pipeline review that shifts the focus to an account executive’s performance. 

5. Establish common KPIs

The best way to drive collaboration is to define similar KPIs across teams. For example, sales leaders can use PQLs when collaborating with the product team and track the number of MQLs from the marketing team. 

While these KPIs may look different, they drive all teams to work toward an organization’s priorities. This KPI alignment holds team members accountable for shared goals. 

Want to make your team more productive? 

Reelay saves time by recording meeting minutes down to every word uttered in the discussion. When you share the Reelay Recap or meeting recording, prospects and customers are four times more likely to respond. This response automatically conveys their preferred communication channel, helping salespeople avoid the spray-and-pray approach and expedite the enterprise sales process.

Moreover, the AI assistant automatically organizes meetings into topics, Q&As, highlights, and actions so salespeople can focus more on action items instead of note-taking. 

Want to see Reelay in action? Sign up for a demo to experience the difference an AI corporate assistant makes in your sales process.