Ask most sales people where they want to spend their time. If given the choice to close one $1,000,000 deal or ten $100,000 deals, most people would choose to close the bigger deal. Why? Because it can take about the same amount of time to close a bigger deal as a smaller one. You are a professional and an extremely busy sales person who wants to spend your time as efficiently as possible.  So you utilize your company’s sales process to help guide you. Your sales process tells you how to work the opportunities that will yield more consistent results—the high yield activities that will maximize your time by ensuring the client’s buying process is aligned with your sales process. You know that you want to hit your quota—or better yet, exceed your quota—and you want to do it in a way that optimizes your time. So, you talk to the prospects you know have a need for your solutions and services. However, these deals tend to be very competitive and smaller because the buying process is way ahead of your sales process. The clients have already established a need, know what they want, and assigned the project to someone who will spend most of your time talking features and functions. And after working really hard competing in the feature-function world, and competing on price, you make your quota. Although you are following your sales process, you are reiterating the sales process multiple times to get to your end goal. This can be exhausting. Here are 4 ways to optimize your time and get bigger deals:

1. Ensure you are talking to everyone in your territory—not just those that will talk about projects. This means talking to the C suite and other executives you have never met.
2. Talk their talk and walk their walk so that the conversations are more about their business than your solution or services. Do your research and find out what business issues are important to them.
3. Evangelize the knowledge you gather when talking to these executives. You have the rare opportunity to talk to their peers, hear about their issues and how they have solved them.
4. Continue to provide pertinent information that is either specific to them or their industry. This way, you can stay in touch with them by providing relevant information that provokes them to think differently than they have in the past.

If you do these four things, you will get bigger deals because you will be solving business issues at the higher levels of the organization while maximizing your time and your quota. Happy selling. Janice Mars, Managing Partner and co-founder of SalesLatitude, is a senior business and sales executive with more 30 years of experience helping companies build successful sales teams. She has parlayed that experience to help her clients to improve their sales processes, accurately forecast revenues, ensure focus on winnable opportunities, and attain consistent results. View my LinkedIn profile | Twitter