What exactly is an enterprise account? Well.. thanks to our friends and partners at ej4, let’s take brief look…

Most salespeople think, mistakenly, that enterprise accounts are the largest accounts in one’s book of business. But, this is not necessarily true. Enterprise accounts might not be those huge dollar accounts. But they are also not the customers you sell to once and never hear from again.
What makes an account an enterprise account is a mix of factors:

• How reliable the account is
• How loyal your customer is (i.e., they stay with you)
• The degree to which the account “runs itself”

Enterprise accounts, then, are part of the “long game”—they represent the most money spent over time for the least amount of hassle. (The technical term is that they “maximize lifetime customer value.”)

Landing an enterprise account does not occur overnight, and even when you do land that account, special care must be taken to ensure the account stays an enterprise account. This takes keen enterprise account management skills.

So you may be asking yourself, how can I best manage these accounts and what kind skills sets are required to maintain these accounts? Salespeople who are successful at managing enterprise accounts do the following:

Add value. Traditional salespeople sell products; successful salespeople solve problems by finding and meeting unmet needs. Get to know your account and the customer’s pain points, form a close partnership, and work in their best interest. Products can be had from the competition, but if you bring additional value to the table, your account won’t even notice that the competition is there. Oh, and a word of caution here. Added value doesn’t mean “free”.

Aim for lifetime customer value. Those that manage enterprise accounts well, do not continually drive for the next close. They think about the lifetime value of a customer. This sometimes means doing extra research to unearth unmet needs or warm a client with only a small current need. The idea, though, is to find and nurture leads that will become steady streams of no-hassle business in the future.

Aim for the “no push sell.” A big part of cultivating accounts with maximum lifetime customer value is perfecting the “no push sell.” Before customers open their wallets, they want to know that the company they are buying from understands them and the issues. They want to feel heard. And, more and more, they want to drive the customer-salesperson relationship. Successful salespeople thus adopt a “no push selling” mindset in order to maximize customer lifetime value.

Have a plan for before and after the sales call. Managing an enterprise account really does take hard work and planning. For each sales call, a good enterprise account manager spends some time doing a five-minute “pre-brief” and a five-minute debrief. Spending that extra 10 minutes on each call saves that much time and more by helping them stay focused and informed.

Handle objections. All salespeople handle objections to one degree or another, but the successful manager of an enterprise account sees objections as a place to start a conversation. Customers often object out of a lack of knowledge, a warranted concern, or an unstated desire. Unearthing the source of the objection can often lead to a fruitful discussion that, itself, brings up new opportunities.

Mastering these skills takes more than reading a few paragraphs worth of advice, however. To see how these steps work in more depth, we recommend logging into P1 Learning and viewing the complete nine course series on Managing Enterprise Accounts – including a few extras we didn’t cover here. Not a P1 Learning subscriber? No worries! Setup a 7 day demo, here.

{{cta(‘f7eeef49-ab6e-47b1-9012-733c2454e249’)}}