Everything You Need to Know About Selling to Enterprise Organizations | Thomas Niewiara - 1510

The Sales Evangelist

Account-based selling isn’t like your typical sales procedure. While both take skill and finesse, Account-based selling requires mastery over both your company and your clients. For the past year and a half, Thomas has worked for Amazon Web Services, making nine-figure deals. And on today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, he and Donald discuss what you need to know about selling to enterprise organizations. (Fun fact: On today’s undisclosed episode of recording, it’s our guest Thomas Niewiara’s birthday!)

Amazon is (to say the least) not a small organization, and they do both account-based and traditional sales approaches.

• Working with Amazon Web Services’ global accounts team, Thomas manages large AWS customers.
• Before, he did many sales and sales engineering roles from Google Cloud to a cybersecurity startup.
• The difference between traditional and account-based selling: the conventional model is a top-down funnel centered around creating and nurturing brand awareness. In account-based sales, you start by identifying critical strategic accounts to focus on and then building lead generation around them.

How to start account-based selling:

• Develop executive-level relationships because prospecting with a bottom-up approach might not work when 1000s of people work within one company segment.
• Because most of these larger accounts are public, analyze available financial statements (such as 10k’s) to frame your specific solutions.

Thomas spends much more time than average on research.

• He spends 40% of his time researching for his accounts, with the remaining 60% going towards pitching, presenting, and other facets of his work.
• Why does he spend so much time researching? You need to understand the problem before you prescribe the solution.
• As an account rep with these clients, you are the expert. You’re expected to know all the key players within that account and how they work with each other.
• He has google alerts for both of his accounts, and he uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator for company alerts.
• He moves nine-figure deals. With that amount of money, you need to bring knowledge and professionalism to the table.

Thomas’ final takeaways and sales advice:

• It’s essential to develop a relationship with the customer, but for account-based selling, it becomes even more important to network internally.
• Know all the tools available to you to do your job as best you can.
• For listeners working in bigger companies, check if coworkers have past connections and ins into the company. You’d be surprised how much overlap there is.

Quick Tik Tok Talk: Follow Tom on Tik Tok at techsalestom (and follow our own Donald Kelly at donaldckelly.) It turns out the app is far more than just dancing! Follow Tom for conversations about tech sales and how it goes beyond the standard software sale. If Tik Tok isn’t your thing, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.