How many times have you had a big deal on the hook only to lose it after weeks of effort? What a let down! I have personally sold many large and multi-location businesses and when I speak to sales reps who lose these types of sales, I find that they simply do not have a solid understanding of how these sales are made. Today I am going to share with you some tips on how to sell large businesses or multi-location small businesses.
#1 – It all starts with a phone call from your assistant. One thing I am so excited about with our new marketing platform is that we provide you with a “Prospecting Assistant” and this gives you so much more clout with large clients.
I still believe the most effective prospecting strategy is walking into a business but this doesn’t apply to large deals who view this as something that is beneath the type of sales professional they would deal with. So, get a list of large businesses in your area, sort by “Number of Employees” and “Number of Locations” and get your prospecting assistant to call these businesses in an effort to track down the decision maker and generate some leads.
#2 – Find the decision maker, emphasize that you have a local presence and talk about other businesses you currently service. I can’t tell you how many times a sales rep has told me they have a big deal on the hook, only to learn that a secretary or low level employee told them they might be interested. This is meaningless. In a larger organization, decisions are made at the top.
#3 – Start with Payroll Processing. Probably the most important tip I will share with you today is that in order to differentiate with larger clients, I advise against starting with merchant services. Instead, start with Payroll Processing. This is a service that is not pitched nearly as often and one where long term agreements are not as common. It is also a service in which you can get enormous commission up front and long term as well as set yourself up for future sales.
#4 – Recognize that it all comes down to two things, numbers and trust. This is very, very different from your normal mom and pop shop. These smaller sales rely more on emotions than pure numbers analysis. With a larger client, they know what they want and so unless you are going to walk in with a serious technology proposal like online ordering or one of our other technology solutions, you need to focus on the numbers. Our payroll processing solutions is traditionally 20% cheaper than ADP and Paychex, our two biggest competitors so we have the numbers to help you close these deals.
Having the numbers of course is only half the battle. You also must have the trust. A large business recognizes the cost of poor execution and delays in implementation. If they feel you are not up to the challenge they will not move forward regardless of how the numbers look. Because of this, you need to call in reinforcements to close these deals. Get a high ranking employee from our company on the phone or schedule a live demo to make the process more professional and give a specific timeline of how long implementation will take.
I hope these 4 tips will help you close more big deals!
Have a great day!
James Shepherd
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Upselling Payroll Processing to Your Current Merchant Services Clients