The problem of enterprise sales

Enterprise sales are hard.

Enterprise sales take time.

The high complexity and high value per contract means that apart from making the sale (i.e. getting someone on the buyer’s side to be delighted to pay for your service), actually closing the deal is different story altogether.

If you’re a core systems provider or tech company selling to large corporates, this also means you’ll have to get through hardcore procurement processes, risk assessments, vendor compliance reviews and (probably) a detailed legal review and negotiation of your terms.

Bleh.

All of this can take months.

Add the emotional drain on everybody involved in the deal and the effect on the temperature of your negotiations and the costs of prolonged closings can quickly rack up.

So, what’s the deal? How can legal and sales teams shorten the time it takes to close enterprise deals?

Bad briefs

Apart from sounding like a punk rock band name or an under-garment brand, a problem I’ve encountered is that internal teams often receive bad briefs.

In an ideal world, legal and compliance teams will always receive complete and detailed information when being asked to do contract reviews.

If you’ve ever spent any time in an in-house legal, risk or compliance team you’ll almost certainly know the real world is far from it.

Your instructions will probably arrive in the form of a short email or ping on Slack/MS Teams with a Word or PDF copy of the contract and little to no context about the contract, the service or the counterparty.

At Root, the problem we faced was that our insurance tech product can be incredibly complex for non-insurance people or people who aren’t familiar with cloud-based SaaS to understand.

In my world (legal and ops), this problem manifests itself when we see protracted vendor due diligence processes and unnecessary negotiations because there is a misunderstanding with internal compliance teams about the nature of our service.

That translates to longer sales cycles – which means more time to earning revenue.

Risk aversion and uncertainty

When we don’t understand stuff, we’re more likely to say no.

There’s nothing sinister or wrong about this. It’s a natural human, risk averse reaction.

The uncertainty of not knowing leads the typical person to avoid the risk altogether or to take actions to mitigate the risks they perceive.

In legal and sales terms, a legal or compliance team saying no can look like:

• forcing you to agree to use their ‘template’ service provider / vendor agreement (i.e. the one they know)
• insisting on excessive liability caps
• including unnecessary and OTT warranties or covenants in redline during the first turn of an agreement
• excessive & irrelevant due diligence questions

The question is how can we bridge the information gap to make decision-makers and approvers feel safe to make informed, accurate decisions?

The solution? A one-page explainer

Enter the ‘one-page’ explainer.

A document where you concisely explain relevant FAQ-type information that legal, risk, compliance and procurement teams need to know in order to understand the contractual terms they’re being asked to sign-off on and understand what the risks to their business are.

This is something we’ve been trying at Root.

To try to bridge the info gap, we put together a one three-pager containing:

• A brief explanation about what the platform does and how the service that clients are buying works
• Who owns and controls the different kinds of data, code and other IP stored on the platform
• Links to our security and privacy information (with a motivation for why standardised security & privacy measures are needed)
• Links to our public statuspage (with a motivation for why bespoke, paper-based SLA monitoring is not needed)
• Links to find our product documentation
• An explanation of what documents will be signed and how they interact with our online standard terms

Wherever possible, I insist on sending this to clients along with our clients agreements.

It’s still early days, but the results are promising.

So, what’s the fuss?

Close enterprise sales faster

Having a one-pager ready to send to a buyer when it gets to the contracting stage can unlock tremendous value because you have a chance to educate your buyer’s internal teams about your service before they start reviewing your terms or kicking the tyres on your service.

You have the chance to pre-empt technical questions about your company’s services in a pre-baked, specifically tailored written doc.

This means:

• Less time wasted with back and forth over email or calls answering FAQs.
• Less chance of misunderstanding and confusion.
• Less chance of having to negotiate unnecessary mark-ups from your agreements.

In other words, having a one-pager specifically aimed at legal and compliance teams can have an outsized impact by helping you get deals done faster.

Making an enterprise sale is hard enough as is – the last thing you want is the buyer losing interest because approval for their cool new tech is stuck in compliance or delayed by a long legal negotiation.

Get goodwill with buyers

The other major benefit is that you’re making it easier for the buyer (i.e. the person who is delighted to buy your company’s product) to move their internal machinery to close the deal.

You’re doing the work of briefing their teams for them and reducing the chance of their compliance people raising non-real issues that either they or you have to answers.

The goodwill you get from visibly trying to make the buyer’s job easier will also go a long way to gaining an ally in the room when any issues come up.

A disclaimer

The hard truth is that for some departments or people, no matter how much information you provide it may not make a difference (sometimes providing too much information makes things worse).

The entire premise of all of the above is also that the people who matter actually read the doc.

Clearly there are no silver bullets, but employing one page explainers is at least one way to make the task of closing an enterprise sale a little quicker and easier.

Let me know if you’ve encountered this or similar tools to help teams speed up sales, or if you’ve had any success with one-pagers!