Selling enterprise products in difficult market conditions  

“Being aligned with the prospect organization’s power structure and continually addressing its pain areas help the sale more than your product knowledge.” says Bhoopalan Padua, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, MitoKen Solutions, in this “nuts-and-bolts” article.

MitoKen provides purpose-built enterprise solutions to software and IT organizations. Selling its products initially to chosen reference clients has helped MitoKen to position itself for growth, after it conceptualized and developed a new enterprise product set from the ground up, in what have been very tough selling conditions for product vendors over the last 3 years.  

After the initial customer wins, it was clear to us that we needed a robust selling approach to sell in what continue to be difficult markets. More importantly, we are selling against several enterprise vendors, both Indian and international players, in the marketplace.  

We focused on integrating the two themes of political alignment in the client organization and addressing client’s pain areas into all our client pursuit activities – starting from our cold calling efforts through salesperson’s visits, product presentations and our value justification documents.  

In the cold-calling area, we have dispensed with cold emailing as it is an impersonal medium and decision makers do not view the mails as painkillers! Hence, our sales support team focuses on cold telephone calling – they call the decision makers in the target company directly and use a consultative approach. They position MitoKen as problem-solvers and pain-alleviators. They use a solution value proposition that is customized for the lead, e.g., if the company were a software organization that is considering SEI-CMM, the cold-caller will say “…we have helped another company like yours in Bangalore with quick achievement and sustenance of CMM…”  

We keep these cold calls very brief, say, about 5 minutes, so that the cold caller is in a position to request the decision maker for a 20-minute session (a face-to-face meeting or a telecon) that will be handled by a salesperson.  

In the 20-minute session, the key is for the salesperson to establish rapport with the decision maker and position himself as an expert who can address the client organization’s pain areas. In this session, she does NOT show the product – she provides an overview of what we offer and elicits the customer’s pain areas.  

If the salesperson does not get across to the decision-maker in the first call, she ascertains if her contact person can be her sponsor. The salesperson provides information to the sponsor, understands the client’s pains, and bargains for an early access to the decision-maker.  

The information gathering phase of the sales cycle is a key element of the sales cycle – this dictates the success of the sales cycle more than either the sales call opening or the negotiations & closure. With the help of this phase, the salesperson creates the vision and value for the solution in the minds of all the relevant stakeholders in the client organization.  

We do not have canned product presentations/demos for customers. They are adapted to directly address those pain areas that the salesperson has actively elicited from the decision-maker. The salesperson also gets a sign-off from the decision maker on the evaluation sequence and decision-making process for the solution purchase, before proceeding to the next steps in the sales cycle.

While these dialogues continue with the client, the salesperson and the sales support team continually qualify the prospect in terms of us meeting their expectations, the client’s purchasing power, and the existing products + the roadmap fulfilling the vision of solution usage that the salesperson is creating in the buyer’s mind.  

With this purposeful sales process, sales closure becomes a set of easy tasks on a checklist that can be completed quickly. The client typically will even drive these tasks if the vision and value is established well in his mind. Our salespersons are trained to provoke questions from prospects around the assumptions we make in value justification documents. This helps in getting the decision-maker to buy into the proposed vision and value of the solution usage.  

At MitoKen, this sales approach has contributed to more results from our cold-calling efforts, providing more leads to the sales pipeline and dramatically improving the quality of the pipeline. This step-by-step ‘power alignment + solution visioning’ approach is also helping us in better pipeline forecasting.   

“In the last six months, our lead generation output has improved five times, resulting in more qualified meetings. The time taken to move through the sales cycle from lead to warm/hot stage has decreased by half from the earlier 3-4 months", adds Bhoopalan Padua.