No matter if you’re a small startup or an industry behemoth; your organization has ambitions.
Whether they are effectively communicated across your company is another issue.
Company ambitions, or key initiatives, play a huge part in making a mid to mega-sized deal. Learning about your prospect’s key initiatives is essential to not only making a sale but to qualify them in the first place.
Flip My Funnel guest-host Steve Watt sat down with megadeal guru Chris Engman to discuss the importance of uncovering key initiatives and the best ways to do so. In addition to founding four companies and being an active investor, Chris is the co-author of the forthcoming Megadeals: How Multi-Billion Dollar Deals Are Done and What the Rest of Us Can Learn From It.
Though Chris’ specialty is in megadeals, his reasonings and methods can be scaled down to any sized deal.
Here’s what we’re unpacking today:
- The importance of tapping key initiatives
- 3 low-effort, high-impact ways to find a company’s key initiatives
This post is based on a podcast with Chris Engman. You can listen to the full episode here or below.
Revealing key initiatives is high-impact
It’s imperative to learn about your prospect’s key initiatives before starting conversations with upper or even mid-level management.
Surprisingly, it’s common for sales and marketing teams to completely miss the mark with key initiatives. Even account-based marketers and sales forget the importance of finding out what their prospects’ objectives are for the future.
Reasons for investigating key initiatives include:
- Quickly qualifying or disqualifying a prospect. If their key initiatives don’t mesh with what you offer, move on. Especially if you’re looking to churn out a megadeal, don’t waste any more time or money on an account that doesn’t fit.
- Tapping into an urgent objective. By addressing the prospect’s key initiatives, you’ll hit on a sense of urgency and be able to propose a solution.
- Matching your services with their key objectives. Understanding the prospect’s key initiatives will allow you to match each with one of your services or features.
- Mitigating risk. You will have a better understanding of what risks your prospect is up against by investigating their key initiatives. Therefore, you’ll be able to mitigate those risks more effectively in your proposition.
By understanding your prospect’s key initiatives, you can speed up the sales process of any sized deal.
3 low-effort ways of uncovering key initiatives
Chris provides us with three ways of learning about your prospect’s key objectives.
- Financial or annual reports. An organization’s current and past financial health hints to its future potential. Financial data points can help you formulate a pitch that is relevant to the company’s trajectory. A prospect that is worth the research will likely have financial or annual reports published online.
- Research calls or emails. Chris suggests building a list of questions, breaking it up, and making short calls or emails to lower management positions. This way, you can piece together essential information while creating awareness for your brand on a quantitative scale. Not to mention, you’ll enter your conversation with the C-suite much more informed.
- LinkedIn research. LinkedIn is a great platform to gather more information about a company and its employees. Connecting with lower-level employees will give you the chance to spread brand awareness and informally ask about any key initiatives. Moreover, simply just viewing several employee profiles can prompt them to want to learn more about you.
Implementing these low-effort, high-impact strategies will help you learn more about your prospect’s key initiatives. This will allow you to quickly qualify or disqualify the company.
Low effort can make a big impact
It’s surprising how many sales and marketing teams forgo learning about a prospect’s prioritized objectives. Even seemingly small points of contact can help to make or break an enormous deal
If you discover your services suit the company’s needs, you’ll be able to walk into your conversation with the C-suite well-informed and ready to make a groundbreaking pitch.
