What to Look for in a Great Enterprise Salesperson

We answered this question on LinkedIn:
-What are the key strengths/skills to look for in a great enterprise salesperson; someone who can swing $100,000+ deals?

Peak Response: Great question. Every company will have a slightly different set of requirements based on the unique selling environment, company culture, and whether this is an Account Manager (farmer) or Account Exec (hunter) role, but generally for an enterprise rep doing large deals ($10k deals are C-suite these days), we would normally see the following criteria, broken into three groups:

1. Skills – Selling to C-suite, solution sales, ability to sell to multiple stakeholders, selling against P/L, negotiating, presenting, closing

2. Experience – Complex sales, solution sales and lots of C-suite sales experience (generally a lot of experience proving the skills mentioned in point #1). Domain experience is nice to have but usually not critical.

3. DNA – Ambitious, resilient, persistent, competitive (for a hunter role). Relationship oriented, organized, confident (for a farmer role). Goal oriented, optimistic, smart, value added mindset and curious (for both).

We didn’t include other skills such as prospecting, cold calling, listening as these are either a given for sales roles, or are not desirable (ie. most companies would not want their high end enterprise reps prospecting).

You can see the other responses here.
What to look for in a great enterprise sales person…

Photo by Bjorn Simon.

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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