Enterprise sales process: what, why, & how

What is enterprise sales?

Enterprise sales is a complex, high-value sales process that involves selling products or services to large organizations.

As a result, it typically has longer sales cycles, slower sales velocity, far more decision-makers, and a need for highly customizable solutions that meet unique customer requirements.

Generally speaking, enterprise sales involves deep relationship-building, extensive negotiations, and a consultative approach to address the specific challenges enterprise customers face. Unlike transactional sales, enterprise sales focuses on high-touch interactions — making trust and expertise crucial.

Enterprise sales vs. SMB and mid-market sales

Enterprise sales differs from SMB and mid-market sales in scale, complexity, and strategy.

Enterprise sales often include ongoing account management, upselling, and post-sale support to ensure long-term customer loyalty and success. Cross-selling also plays a key role as businesses look to expand their footprint within large organizations by offering complementary products and services.

Unlike SMB sales — which focus on volume and quick conversions — enterprise sales emphasize strategic partnership and long-term customer value.

Challenges of the enterprise sales process

The enterprise sales process is intricate, requiring patience, perseverance, and a deep understanding of customer pain points and needs. With the need to talk to more decision-makers and navigate complicated procurement requirements, it’s not uncommon for deals to take months or even years to finalize.

By understanding the common challenges enterprise sales teams face, however, you can begin to figure out how to overcome them and win more business:

• Challenge #1: Long sales cycles. Enterprise sales often take months or even years to close due to the complexity of the decision-making and procurement processes. To win, sales teams need to stay engaged, nurture relationships, and continuously demonstrate value far before the contract is signed.

• Challenge #2: Multiple decision-makers. Unlike SMB sales, enterprise deals involve multiple stakeholders across different departments. To convince all these folks that your offering is best, sales professionals need to personalize messaging to address each decision-maker’s unique priorities and concerns.

• Challenge #3: Complex procurement and compliance requirements. Large organizations have strict procurement policies, legal review cycles, and regulatory requirements to meet. Navigating these obstacles requires patience, expertise, and collaboration with internal and external teams.

• Challenge #4: High customer expectations. Enterprise buyers expect custom solutions that meet their unique business needs. To deliver on this front, sales teams must deeply understand the client’s challenges and customize offerings in a way that delivers measurable ROI.

• Challenge #5: Intense competition. Enterprise deals attract multiple vendors, which leads to competitive bidding and price negotiation. Sales teams need to differentiate their offerings by showcasing unique value and long-term benefits.

4 steps in the enterprise sales process

Enterprise sales success requires a strategic, structured approach to navigate the complexity and close high-value deals. By following these four key steps, sales teams can effectively engage prospects — addressing their unique needs while driving long-term business success.

Step #1: Discovery

The discovery phase is the foundation of enterprise sales. Here, teams gather insights about prospects, including challenges and goals. This stage of the process involves extensive sales prospecting research, stakeholder identification, and initial conversations that help understand pain points and decision-making structures.

Unlike SMB sales, enterprise discovery requires multiple touchpoints, including executive meetings, industry analysis, and competitive benchmarking. To uncover the root causes of inefficiencies and barriers to growth, reps need to ask highly specific questions that feel tailored to the enterprise company.

Additionally, building rapport and trust is crucial as enterprise buyers expect a consultative approach rather than a transactional pitch. A strong discovery process ensures that sales efforts are aligned with prospect needs — setting the stage for deeper engagement.

Having a robust discovery process also enables teams to cut losses far sooner than if they rush this phase. While an enterprise company may seem like they fit your ideal customer profile, they may have one or two things that you uncover that make it the deal impossible such as specific legal requirements or specific technical infrastructure.

You also want to make sure that you aren’t having to build new functionality if the deal isn’t really going to go through - so spending time in this phase of the enterprise sales process is crucial for both you and the potential customer. 

Step #2: Diagnosis

In this diagnosis phase, sales teams analyze the insights gathered during discovery to pinpoint the main issues the enterprise prospect faces. This step involves mapping out inefficiencies and identifying operational bottlenecks or gaps in current systems. Enterprise buyers tend to expect a data-driven approach, so reps should leverage case studies, industry benchmarks, and ROI projections.

During diagnosis, reps work closely with decision-makers to confirm challenges and quantify the business impact of not addressing them. As such, this phase helps reps filter out unqualified prospects who are unlikely to be the right fit. By clearly defining the problem and its financial or operational consequences, teams position themselves as trusted advisors.

Step #3: Design

The design phase focuses on delivering custom solutions that align with an enterprise’s specific needs and objectives. Unlike one-size-fits-all approaches, enterprise deals require customization — like product configurations, integration support, and service-level agreements (SLAs). To ensure the feasibility of their proposals, account executives often collaborate with internal experts — like engineers, consultants, and customer success teams.

What’s more, design often includes proof-of-concept demos and pilot programs to gain buy-in from stakeholders. Pricing, implementation timelines, and support structures are also discussed in detail. Since multiple departments influence enterprise decisions, reps also need to outline how proposed solutions benefit each stakeholder.

With a well-structured design phase in place, reps can increase the likelihood of securing a commitment and getting ink on a contract. While every enterprise is unique, sales leadership can still build repeatable workflows and processes to ensure both sides have the information they need to feel confident moving forward. 

Step #4: Delivery

Last but not least is the delivery phase, where the proposed solution is implemented and the organization does everything it can to set its new customer up for success. 

These days, enterprise buyers expect seamless onboarding, exceptional technical support, and measurable outcomes, making this phase critical for long-term success. To meet these expectations, sales teams often collaborate with customer success, account executives, and technical implementation specialists.

During this phase, upselling and cross-selling opportunities often arise once customers see the value in their purchase and start thinking about expanding the partnership. But don’t move too quickly and try to push new solutions on to the customer too quickly - instead view this time as an opportunity to increase discovery for land and expand opportunities. 

By optimizing the delivery phase, sales teams can set the stage for a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership and increase the guarantee of a renewal.

5 winning sales strategies for the enterprise sales process

Enterprise sales success requires a calculated approach designed to help reps navigate long sales cycles, persuade multiple decision-makers, and address complicated procurement and compliance requirements. To win business, sales teams must go beyond traditional selling tactics and adopt proven strategies that build trust, demonstrate value, and drive long-term success.

With that in mind, let’s explore five winning sales strategies that can help your team close high-value enterprise deals and create lasting customer relationships.

1. Lock down your ICP

While large enterprises have a lot in common — like a commitment to cybersecurity, a focus on scalability, and complex decision-making processes — they are also very different from each other. 

Coca-Cola, for example, likely has very different needs and goals than Bank of America. While the beverage company might be most interested in supply chain optimization, the financial services organization is likely laser-focused on regulatory compliance.

Mastering enterprise sales starts with defining and refining your ideal customer profile (ICP), or the characteristics the perfect customer of your business likely has. Since enterprise sales cycles are long and intricate, focusing on the most qualified and likely-to-convert prospects is essential through the lens of efficiency. By identifying the right ICP, sales leaders and professionals can ensure that their efforts are directed towards companies that are truly invested in what you’re selling.

2. Utilize account-based marketing (ABM)

Account-based marketing is an effective strategy for enterprise sales. Instead of casting a wide net, ABM enables you to hone in on specific companies, targeting them with personalized campaigns. 

By identifying and prioritizing key accounts that are the best fit for your solution, you can better customize your outreach strategy to meet the unique needs of each prospect. This approach helps your team move beyond generic outreach and develop stronger relationships with decision-makers — increasing the chances of conversion. 

If you haven’t started out with ABM just yet, even having a well-defined target account list can help you create a structured approach, enabling you to focus more directly on accounts that are most likely to deliver results.

Ultimately, the power of ABM stems in its ability to align sales and marketing around a shared goal: winning specific accounts. By investing time and resources in researching and understanding the pain points, goals, and buying processes of your target accounts, you can create outreach that’s more relevant — which improves your chances of closing deals.

3. Map the potential buying committee

The average enterprise buying committee has between 11-15 members, and it can fluctuate up to 20 people. Before you send your first cold email to a prospect, it’s a good idea to map out the potential buying committee at each target company — including names, titles, and contact information.

LeadIQ makes this easy by providing accurate, up-to-date b2b contact data for key decision-makers, allowing you to quickly identify and connect with the right stakeholders. With LeadIQ, you can efficiently build and organize your target account list, ensuring that your outreach efforts are directed at individuals who influence purchasing decisions.

On top of this, LeadIQ offers robust data enrichment with other types of important data and integration features, enabling teams to streamline research and maintain a single source of truth. As a result, it’s easy to personalize messaging and engage each member of the buying committee with relevant insights — even using generative AI tools to speed up the email-writing process.

4. Start from the bottom up

As you make contact with a company, it may be beneficial to start with folks who are lower on the totem pole to kick off your fact-finding efforts. If you take this approach, try to get as much information as possible out of these folks such as their strategies, the technologies they’re focused on, and what their managers are worried about.

By forming a relationship with individual contributor level employees, you can start to make your way up the chain of command — either by asking for introduction or sending their bosses a message saying you’ve been chatting with their team and have identified specific pain points you can solve.

Pro tip: If you take this approach, play it carefully. The last thing you want is for management to feel like junior-level folks are stepping on their toes or getting too big for their britches.

5. Make sure your offering can meet their needs

Enterprises have different concerns and needs, yet there are some common threads around cybersecurity, data storage, and global regulatory compliance. 

If you want to succeed selling into the enterprise, you need to make sure your products check all of these boxes — and you need to make sure that fact is broadcasted clearly on your website and in sales materials.

By ensuring that you’re offering an enterprise-grade solution, you can eliminate any concerns that your company is too small or not secure enough — two traits that can be early deal-killers.

LeadIQ’s data powers the enterprise sales process for hundreds of teams

If you’re looking to strengthen your organization’s enterprise sales process, LeadIQ can help. Our purpose-built sales tools and top-tier data were designed to enable teams like yours to navigate complex buying cycles with ease. Here at LeadIQ, we often work with enterprise buyers ourselves so we understand their complexities and needs, unlike other data providers who focus on quantity over quality (but we’d like to think we have both!). 

Using Prospecting Hub, reps can capture contact data in real time, track buying signals automatically, and even use AI to personalize outreach at scale. Coupled with Data Hub, your team can automatically improve CRM data integrity with real-time data enrichment and seamless integration with the tools your sales team uses every day.

To learn more about how LeadIQ can power your enterprise sales process and help you crush your numbers, book a one-on-one demo today.