What makes a sale “enterprise”
| Small business sale | Enterprise sale | |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides | Often one person, the owner | A group: users, managers, finance, IT, legal, purchasing |
| How long | Days or weeks | Months, sometimes more than a year |
| Paperwork | An email and an invoice | Security review, legal review, purchase order, supplier onboarding |
| The seller's job | Persuade one person | Run a process with many people and dates |
| Biggest risk | The owner loses interest | The deal stalls in a step nobody knew about |
Eleven years of it
Tobias Ahlin joined Splunk in 2012 as employee number three in EMEA North and sold there while revenue grew from $121M to $1.8B. In 2019 he moved to Snowflake as employee number nine in the Nordics, and stayed through the largest software IPO in history. Over those years he closed over $30M in enterprise deals and made President's Club five times. Today he runs his own firm and sells small deals himself, which is where the lessons below were tested a second time.
Five enterprise habits worth copying
1. Qualify before you work
Enterprise sellers can't afford to spend six months on a deal that was never real. They qualify with a framework like MEDDPICC and treat every unknown as a risk. A consultant has even less time to waste.
2. Map every person
Ask who else is affected, who decides, and who could say no. In a 40 person company that may be three people. Missing one of them still kills the deal.
3. Build a champion, then test them
Someone inside has to sell for you when you are not in the room. Ask them to do something small, like booking the meeting with the CFO, and see if they do it.
4. Write a shared plan
Enterprise teams call it a mutual action plan: the steps both sides will take, with dates, from now to signature. On a small deal it is five lines in an email. It turns “we'll get back to you” into a calendar.
5. Ask about the paperwork early
“Once you say yes, what has to happen before we can start?” Asked in the second meeting, this question saves weeks.
What not to copy
- Fifty slide decks. A small buyer wants one page and a conversation.
- Process for its own sake. Forecast meetings and CRM fields exist to coordinate teams. You are one person.
- Long cycles as normal. In enterprise, a deal that takes nine months may still be healthy. A $15,000 deal that has not moved in two months is dead.
How Allin brings enterprise sales to small deals
Allin Sales Brain is the method Tobias used in enterprise sales, written down and scaled for deals from $2,000 to $150,000. It qualifies with MEDDPICC, runs conversations with agreed meeting goals and pain questions, and drops the parts only a big team needs.