Large Accounts Are a Different Sale

Most of DMA’s sales were small and quick: a discovery call, a proposal, a payment link. Large accounts did not work like that, and treating them as bigger versions of the same sale was one of the easier ways to lose months.

The RFP that arrives uninvited

In June 2018 DMA was invited to respond to a formal request for proposals for search engine optimisation from a large US department store chain. The package was what these usually are: sourcing instructions, a spreadsheet of requirements and questions, and the buyer’s standard services agreement to return “with minimum redlines.”

Inside the team, opinion split. One salesperson did not like RFP deals: too much time for a chance at the business. Another took the view that somebody would win it, so it might as well be us. The question that reached me was whether we should pursue RFPs at all, and if so whether we could template our responses.

My answer was neither yes nor no:

I think it’s worth talking to them and learning from them the selection process. Additionally, I don’t think it hurts to tell them that we will charge them 10k to form a strategic proposal. We are not interested in a long process that leads to 0.

The reasoning came from experience: in the same email I pointed back to an earlier enterprise selection process we had been through. A large buyer’s process is designed to compare many suppliers cheaply. A supplier that answers every question for free, without ever speaking to the people who decide, is helping the buyer run its process, not making a sale.

So the two conditions were access and value. Talk to them first, to learn how the decision would actually be made. And treat a real strategic proposal as work worth paying for. Without both, I wrote, they could “go and fly a kite.”

Go and see them

Six years later the question was the opposite one: not whether to chase a large new account, but how to look after the ones we had. In May 2024 a member of our partner team was travelling to the US, and our sales lead asked whether he should visit any clients while he was there. My reply set the threshold:

Arrange travel plans with [him]; go see customers that pay 5k+ or will pay 5k+ with him. And go see past customers that want to meet you guys that paid 5k+….all these numbers are monthly numbers.

Three groups: current clients at that level, prospects who would be, and former clients at that level who were willing to meet. The last group is easy to forget. A former client who paid $5,000 a month and will still take a meeting is worth more than most new leads. That is the subject of Calling the Ones Who Left.

What changes with a large account

Going by those two emails, a large account changes the sale in three ways:

• The process is theirs. Learn it before investing in it. Who decides, on what, and when?
• Your time has a price. Strategy is the product. Giving it away inside a procurement document teaches the buyer that it is free.
• The relationship is in person. Clients who pay that much deserve a visit, and the visit tells you things a monthly report will not.

A large account is also the point where commercial terms stop being a formality. That preparation is a negotiation in its own right.

Related: Postponing Again, on what a pipeline of a few large recurring deals does to a month, and Activity Is Not the Number.