Make signing the contract a formality

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tl;dr

For our first enterprise pitch, we flipped the traditional enterprise sales model. Instead of the usual pitch decks and capability presentations, we spent three weeks studying a media conglomerate's business before even reaching out. Found they were wasting $2.7M yearly through duplicate campaigns across departments.

First meeting - No pitch deck. Just showed them their own data and problems. Then proposed a small pilot with one department, gave them free analytics tools, and only charged for manpower. Saved them $180K in the first month.

The key was becoming useful before becoming vendors:

• Built free dashboards they actually needed

• Shared insights across departments

• Solved problems outside our scope

• Joined strategy meetings as problem solvers

By month eleven, when we got the contract, it was just formality. We were already part of their operation.

The Strategy: Stop selling solutions. Start exposing and solving problems. Enterprise deals come naturally when you're already providing value.

<end of tl;dr>

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Enterprise deals are often the coveted dream for most b2b solution vendors, primarily due to their sizeable volume of business. There are many strategies that established corporations have taken to successfully land enterprise deals. I wanted to share a particular learning we acquired at Madsapiens through an approach that we have now made our norm for most pitches.

It is not the usual "find a champion, build relationships" advice, which is great and is still required. It is a slightly outside-the-box model of pitching which has allowed a small business like Madsapiens to land some giants.

First, let's destroy a myth: Enterprise sales isn't just about your pitch deck (because you have to assume that everyone has a good deck). Or your first C-level meeting (these happen more often than not, these days). Or even your solution (especially in standard industries like tech, consultancy or photography, the raw solution is rarely very diverse).

It's about becoming so embedded in their problem-solving process that signing the contract becomes a formality.

We were pursuing a major advertising media conglomerate. Everyone was trying to sell them our solution. Standard approach? Pull together case studies, capability decks, and ROI projections. Then try to get that coveted first meeting.

We did something different. Spent three weeks just studying their business before even reaching out. Found they were running duplicate campaigns across five different departments. Digital team didn't know what retail was doing. Retail was competing with enterprise division. Enterprise was overlapping with digital.

When we finally got that first meeting, we didn't show up with a pitch. We showed up with their own data. Mapped out their entire marketing ecosystem. Showed exactly where the overlaps were. Even calculated the waste - roughly $2.7M annually just from internal competition. We stopped there and did not proceed into our solutions deck yet. We decided that if this was going to be the only thing we presented, it would still be worth it.

We were ready to lose this account if this approach didn't work for us, but we wanted to do something different and learn.

We noticed that we immediately had their attention. And they were eagerly interacting with us through their questions. Not about our capabilities or pricing, but about their own organisation and the gaps we were presenting. We spent about an hour just exploring their challenges. We never opened our pitch deck during that particular meeting, and we were called in for another one to present our solutions to the challenges that we aligned on.

At this point, though we were still "pitching", we were technically already working for them. We were increasing our stickiness.

Here's why this matters for any company pursuing enterprise clients: You need to shift from selling solutions to exposing problems. Problems they didn't even know they had. The issue with "selling solutions" is that it tends to become very cookie-cutter.

Even innovation can be run-off-the-mill because everyone is innovating.

The only thing that can be unique is a solution that is specific to an enterprise's actual day-to-day issues. That is information that will not be given to you as the potential vendor, you would have to research and identify those issues, which is the real work. Post that, the solution becomes the easy bit.

But it goes deeper.

After that second meeting, we did something that seemed counterintuitive. Instead of pushing for a broad engagement with a quarterly plan, we proposed a tiny pilot.

A caveat to note here is that we did present the full-year plan to them (because without that, we seem juvenile and unprepared), but we didn't push on that being the main engagement. We knew that enterprise clients like to work with enterprise agencies, and hence had to pull moves that made us unique in every conversation.

So a tiny pilot - just one department. Just fixing the duplicate campaign issue through our own analytics tool that we gave them for free for the pilot duration. We only charged for manpower.

Why? Because enterprise deals aren't won with big promises. They're won with small, irrefutable proofs of value-addition.

That pilot saved them about $180K in the first month. But more importantly, it gave us deep access to their organization. We got to know their tech stack, their internal politics, their real challenges. We'd then bake this back into our roadmap for the year, which we presented again at the end of the pilot.

Every week, we'd share insights about what we were learning. Not just with our direct contacts, but across the organization. Found a tech stack issue? Shared it with IT. Spotted a data opportunity? Flagged it to analytics. Identified a process improvement? Documented it for operations.

We were solving problems we weren't even contracted to solve. By month three, we were being invited to internal strategy meetings. Not as vendors - as problem solvers. We were already in.

Here's the crucial part for anyone reading this: This approach works because it inverts the traditional sales dynamic. Instead of trying to convince them to buy, you function like you were already in.

We once noticed their internal teams were struggling with campaign reporting. It was none of our business because we had our reporting solutions in place for the work that we were doing for the company. But instead of leaving it at that, we created a simple dashboard that merged data from their existing tools into ours. Gave it to them for free. Just a Google Data Studio setup that took our team a day to build.

That dashboard ended up being used by people across their organisation. Each user became a potential advocate. Not because we asked them to be, but because we solved a real problem.

The final contract? It was basically a formality. By then, we were already integral to their operation. The only question was scope and scale.

This is how modern enterprise sales actually works, in my opinion, especially for companies who's brand is not highly prevalent yet, like mine. It's not about selling at all. It's about solving. Proving value before asking for value. Building networks of influence through genuine impact, not relationship management tactics.

Most importantly, it's about patience. That deal took 11 months to close. But we were building value (and influence) every single month.