Agency Owners, here’s how to sign enterprise clients

“Go upmarket”

You’ve heard it a million times.

Unfortunately though, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

You can’t just source different leads.

Preface: I’ve helped my clients book 5,600 discovery calls and close countless deals with 9-10 figure enterprises, so our methods actually work.

A. Why your current approach doesn’t work

Firstly, enterprises evaluate opportunities differently.

If you offer to help a $300M company add $250k revenue, they’ll just ignore you. That’s a 0.08% revenue increase.

On the other hand, if you offer to help them compliantly improve the efficiency of their subscription cancellation flow by 10% and save $700k of lost revenue every month, they’ll certainly pay attention.

They have endless opportunities they could pursue, and if yours doesn’t move the needle, then they won’t care about it.

Secondly, enterprises make decisions differently.

A founder can say yes on a call.

Your contact at an enterprise can’t.

They need to speak with other stakeholders, review the terms with their legal team, complete an internal procurement process, and more. If one of them disapproves, the deal can die.

Enterprises are extremely risk averse, because they actually have a lot to lose, unlike most SMBs.

And your contact is putting their reputation on the line…

They’re not asking “Is this good?”

They’re asking “Can this blow up on me?”

Right now, working with you seems too risky.

B. How to fix your current broken approach

Firstly, change your offer.

At our company:

offer = outcome + methodology + proof + terms

So to change your offer means to adjust these four components within your marketing assets and sales process.

More specifically, you need to align the outcome with what enterprises want, have a perceivably unique methodology for achieving this outcome, have proof of helping enterprises achieve this outcome, and have terms that reduce their perceived risk.

This helps address the shortcomings I explained in section A.

Secondly, restructure your sales process.

I could write an article the length of a book explaining all the sales process optimisations that most agencies need to make.

But I’m busy. So instead I’ll just share a couple needle moving tips:

• Plan for a 5 call close, not a 1-2 call close
• Help your champion sell other stakeholders
• Use a term sheet to ease into the legal negotiations
• Avoid sending contracts early; it kills deals
• Loop in competent team members at each stage
• Start with a short pilot, not a 12 month commitment
• Include easy exit clauses in the contract

Whoosh, this article is getting too valuable…

I’m gonna have to cut it short here…

Good luck on your journey, soldier. Hope you don’t step on too many landmines on the way to the promised land of closing enterprise deals.

Or alternatively, if you don’t like the idea of spending months or years trying to figure this out on your own and losing countless multi-million-dollar deals in the process…

You could just work with us.

We can run a fractional business development team that closes enterprise agency clients for your agency; on a done-for-you and pay-on-results basis!

If this offer interests you, then head over to www.gigaclients.com/schedule and schedule a discovery call where we’ll speak and see if it makes sense to work together.

Hope you found this valuable

- Hector “The Enterprise Dealmaker” Johnsson

P.S. Yes, that title is totally self appointed, but it sounds cool so let’s roll with it.