Complex sales – How to nail them

Multiple stakeholders, multiple decision-makers and large-value deals can be challenging for any business to manage. These are known as complex sales, and although they are valuable deals, they are also lengthy deals that require careful management. In this article, we will look at what complex sales are, and how you can nail them.

What are complex sales?

Complex sales are deals that include high-value, high-risk products or services that include multiple stakeholders and decision-makers. These deals will typically have a longer sales cycle, with a deeper understanding of customer needs required to have a successful deal. Usually, in a complex sale, a team member’s role is not only to sell a product but also to act as a consultant for a client, helping them find the best solution for their pain points.

What are the stages of a complex sale?

A complex sale will go through these stages:

1. Discovery
2. Qualification
3. Proposal
4. Closing
5. Delivery

These stages are similar to a traditional sales process, but they all have unique characteristics within them making them specific to complex sales.

• Discovery

The first and perhaps most important stage of a complex sales cycle is the discovery stage. Here is where you discover who your client is and will need to carry out research to better understand their pain points. To find out more about your client, research them on social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Furthermore, if they are a business, search them on Google or another search engine.

• Qualification

This stage of the complex sales cycle is where you will be determining whether a prospect is a good fit for your business. You will need to be asking them questions to find out more about their background and requirements. A common acronym businesses follow during this process is BANT

Budget – Does your customer have a budget that matches your product or service?

Authority – Is your customer the decision maker that can authorize the purchase?

Needs – What are the pain points your customer is facing and what do they need to them?

Timeline – How urgently is your customer looking to make a purchase?

• Proposal 

Once you have identified that your prospect is a good fit for your business, it is time to put forward a proposal to your customer. This proposal is where your sales representatives will pitch their product or service to the client. This pitch should be personalised for the customer, based on their pain points and context. Moreover, tailor your pitch to suit all the decision-makers and stakeholders involved in the deal, and ensure they understand that the value of your product will bring them a high ROI.

• Closing

You have almost sealed the deal, but it is not finished yet. You now have to close the deal. This means that you must find out when the customer will execute the agreement with you, make sure nothing has changed since your last conversation and there is nothing else that needs to be completed to win the sale. Furthermore, now is your time to find out any last questions the customer has, and reassure them that they are making the correct decision.

• Delivery/post-purchase

Now the deal has been completed, it is time to deliver your product or service to your customer. But your relationship does not end there. Your customer success team will take over. Post-purchase nurturing is important as it will develop a long-term relationship with customers’ leading to repeat purchases and referrals. Ensure your customer success team follows up with your clients and ensures their needs have been met.

The challenges with complex sales

Watch out for these common challenges during complex sales:

Substantial time and resource use – Due to a long sales cycle with many stages, your sales representatives will have to spend substantial time and resources attempting to win a sale. When a deal is lost, it may have a bigger impact on a business’s resources compared to a smaller deal due to this.

Difficulty tracking a long sales process – Complex sales involve a longer sales cycle due to multiple decision-makers, stakeholders, higher value deals and elevated risk. This can be difficult to track as there will be many interactions with stakeholders over a prolonged period of time. Adopt CRM software to combat this, as your interactions will be automatically tracked and recorded for your sales team to view.

Fully understanding your customers – It is essential you have a great understanding of your customers to win complex deals. This requires extensive research on customers which will cost time and resources. This can be eased with the adoption of CRM software, as you will get a 360-degree view of their needs and requirements.

Make your complex sales easy with TEB

Streamline the tracking of your deals, the communication with your clients and the collaboration of your team with TEB, the sales automation CRM software. TEB will completely transform your complex deals, helping you simplify the process with these key benefits:

• Get a great understanding of your customers – Using TEBs customer storyboards, and reports, you can get great insights into who your customers are, what their requirements are and how they are progressing through the sales cycle.
• Improve your team collaboration – Leave notes on clients and assign tasks to team members to increase the collaboration amongst your team to offer customers great consistent service.
• Guide your decisions with reports – Generate custom reports to increase your data visibility on your clients and guide your decisions.
• Streamline the management of your deals – No matter how large or complex a deal is, TEB will allow you to use simple Kanban-style management to keep your deals clients moving towards a winning deal.
• Follow-up and win deals – Schedule automatic follow-up reminders to ensure that you keep your customers engaged and increase the likelihood of winning a sale.

To see all of these features and more, book a quick demo with us. It is time to make your complex sales simple.