In business, growth is usually good, and exponential growth is even better — when your sales or customer charts get that "hockey stick" look.

Unlike linear growth, where increments are constant, exponential growth leads to larger increases as the quantity grows. This phenomenon is common in investments and viral spreads, where small initial changes can lead to significant impacts over time.

For your team to respond to and capitalize on exponential growth when it hits, you must master the fundamentals of enterprise sales. This guide will review 12 essentials of enterprise sales to set you up for exponential growth in the future.

Is exponential growth a realistic goal?

Exponential growth can be a realistic goal for businesses, particularly in technology and innovative sectors where scalability and network effects drive rapid expansion. 

First, you'll need good data, a good team, and a spirit of experimentation. Second, you'll need to be ready to match demand. Exponential growth isn't possible if you hit barriers that prevent you from taking on more customers, making more sales, or expanding your offerings. 

12 essentials of enterprise sales

That’s why it’s so important to master the essentials of enterprise sales. Here they are:

1. Know your product

A strong sales team isn't just persuasive, responsive, and strategic. They should also be experts on their products. 

Enterprise sales often require customization and managing the prospect's exceptions. While you should be open to bringing in additional technical resources to make your case, the more questions about your product or service you can answer yourself, the better.

While the expertise of the product team, for instance, should not be overlooked, it can take time to cajole other departments to participate in sales activities, especially when sales is not their job — not to mention, time kills all deals.

Learning the ins and outs of what you're selling is a proven strategy that can set you up for exponential growth in the future.

2. Choose the right tech stack

Giving your sales team the tools it needs to succeed — like Superhuman for Sales — can mean the difference between making money or spending time trying to catch up on emails. 

In enterprise sales, your sales team needs tools that help streamline complex tasks, like contract management, quoting, sales planning, and compensation management. Not to mention the tools to simply stay on top of complex, multithreaded deals.

Talk to your sales team frequently and ask them what barriers they face each day that take away from revenue-generating activities.

3. Strong customer service

Your customer service team can be your company's saving grace when it comes to customer satisfaction — and the land and expand nature of enterprise sales makes seamless collaboration between customer success managers (CSMs) and sales representatives that much more important.

Seamless collaboration ensures a reliable experience, and your CSMs play a crucial role in customer satisfaction, acting as a link between initial acquisition and lasting, long-term growth. A customer service team can also act as an extension of your sales team through outreach later in the customer journey. They can offer upgrades to other services long after your sales team is involved.

A strong customer service system is how you can keep customers happy. By retaining customers, you save money by avoiding the high customer acquisition cost. It's almost always much cheaper to keep customers than to earn new ones, after all.

4. Perform market research

Within enterprise sales, ebbs and flows in sales and engagement are common, and understanding customer preferences and responsiveness is key. 

Market research in the enterprise landscape can help you gain insights into client expectations and market demands and can help you identify opportunities to enhance your products or services to better align with enterprise customer needs.

Enterprise-focused market research can involve customer segmentation analysis, competitive landscape assessment, and industry trend monitoring. You can also expand or test your marketing with A/B testing across ads and email marketing campaigns.

5. Organizational awareness

In enterprise sales, you aren't just selling to one person. Instead, you are selling your product or service to an organization with multiple stakeholders. Still, those stakeholders are acting in their company’s best interest, so it's your job to understand what those interests are.

You need to understand the dynamics of your customers' organizations as well as you understand your own. This will give you the perspective you need to move a deal across multiple departments and stakeholders who often have different priorities and needs.

6. Ruthless qualification

Not every team and persona will be a good fit for your product, service, or sales team. Before you commit half a year or more to developing a deal, be ruthlessly honest about whether it's a good deal or not.

A smart sales representative knows that quantity is not always quality when it comes to prospecting. It can be hard to say no to business before that business says no to you, but it's a sign of a true professional. What's more, it can optimize your sales team's time, improving your company's bottom line by honing in on prospects that are a perfect fit.

7. Multithread your deals

Are you familiar with multi-threading? This strategy involves your sales reps establishing relationships with multiple stakeholders involved in a deal. It requires extra effort but can make the difference between closing a deal and losing it.

The reality is that organizations don’t buy as individuals — unless you’re selling directly to the CEO, and even then, it's rare. Instead, companies buy as committees. With this in mind, it's still important to have your "champion," but it's also crucial to be able to sell to the wider committee in addition to making sure your champion can sell your solution internally on your behalf. 

8. Align internal stakeholders

Before you can multithread external stakeholders, you need to ensure everyone on your team is on the same page. 

The real challenge is aligning the sales team with other internal departments to make sure your service and its messaging are optimized for your deal.

On the product side, is what you're selling actually something that addresses the customer's need? On the marketing end, are the materials your sales team is working with high-quality and consistent? And for your sales reps, is your messaging in step with everyone else? Only when each internal stakeholder shares the same vision will you set yourself up for exponential growth.

9. Continuously follow up

When it comes to enterprise sales, you can never follow up enough. These are complex purchases that involve multiple stakeholders, so communication and updates can easily slip through the cracks if you’re not paying attention.

If you haven't heard back from a prospect, follow up. Still haven't heard back? Follow up again — then, follow up some more. While your sales team can fine-tune your messages and their frequency to individual leads and ensure you aren’t being a bother, the reality is, your customers are busy, and buying your stuff isn't their top priority. Following up acts as a reminder for them to take action against the specific problem you solve.

10. Be present for implementation

The sales process doesn’t stop after you win your prospect's business — that was just step one. Step two is staying by their side throughout implementation to ensure they receive the product or service you promised them. Part of this process is ensuring sales teams work closely with CSMs to make sure each client’s journey is optimal. 

This level of care is your responsibility as a sales representative. But besides this intrinsic motivation to deliver high-quality work, ensuring your clients are satisfied with their purchase after the deal is closed reflects well on your company, encouraging positive word of mouth and future deals in that industry.

11. Automate your workflow

For enterprise sales reps, automation and AI offer time-saving opportunities tailored to your specific needs. Whether you need to respond to emails faster or manage leads more efficiently, AI and automation can improve efficiency and productivity. 

Specifically, automated lead scoring tools can help enterprise sales reps focus on high-potential leads, ensuring that they're investing their time and efforts in the right places. With automated and AI tools, sales reps can instead focus on high-value activities, ensuring accuracy and responsiveness, improved prospect engagement, and more conversions.

Superhuman AI makes it easy to address crucial emails in a timely manner — provide a few phrases, and we’ll generate an entire email that reads like it was written by you. Focus your attention where it matters most, and we’ll handle the rest. 

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