Kunal Das: How to close $1m+ B2B deals
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What does it really take to close million-dollar enterprise deals?
Kunal Das breaks down how big B2B sales actually happen behind the scenes… from warm intros and executive dinners to year-long deal cycles and aggressive follow-ups.
If you think it’s all cold emails and funnels… it’s not.
(1:30) Companies bring in Kunal to close big and complex deals.
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(2:00) In enterprise sales they partially hire you because of your Rolodex and who you know. Or even who you 2nd degree know to meet others.
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(5:30) “Doing small diners with a group of executives work way better than cold email. The response rate of cold email is less than half a percent.”
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(6:00) The totem pole of effectiveness is: Cold email, Warm email, Phone Call, In-Person Meeting.
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(6:20) “No is signing a million dollar deal without meeting you.” Sometimes you can close a small $100,000 deal over just Zoom calls, but anything above that almost always involves some type of in-person meeting.
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(10:54) If you get the CEO to push a deal through, it can happen quick as 2-3 weeks, but otherwise it may take over a year.
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(14:00) “The most successful sales people use their two eyes, two ears, and one mouth, proportionately. Seek to understand before you seek to speak.”
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(17:37) His surprising method of getting people to hurry up and respond. The shorter the punchier, never more than one line. Must command respect for your time and indicate you are serious. There is a fine balance of this
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(19:05) Aggressive followup email: “Seems this is not important to you anymore.”
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(20:18) How much email are you doing per day? 2-3 hours per day of email. Before AI it was 4-5 hours of email per day. 3-4 hours a day on Zoom meetings. Get 50 to 100 emails per day, and after a year at a company 300 to 400 emails per day. Not to mention Slack + texts.
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(24:10) “Execs rarely respond to cold email.” A video in CopywritingCourse with a CMO of a big company shows that he’s soooo unbelievably overwhelmed with cold emails he doesn’t even respond unless his boss asks him to.
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(22:56) Big B2B clients are almost always acquired through manual outreach, they rarely submit inbound requests.
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(24:45) Campaign I created sends out $50 boxes of chocolates with a printed out pitch, it has generated roughly $12,000,000 in revenue.
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(29:14) Must have software for B2B sales: Used ChatGPT but fully moved to Claude for everything and finding even more uses, SalesForce, Gong, LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, Outreach.io in the past but automated outreach was so low hit rate they just do manual outreach now with warm intros.
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(32:00) I find higher success rate DM’ing people on socials over cold emails.
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(34:10) I’d rather go to one conference than send 10,000 cold emails. In person intros end up in a super high close rate. You can sus out: They have a high impact problem, they think we can solve, they told me the names of the people that need to be involved, the timeline. Those deals move quick.
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(35:22) Method for meeting people at conferences. They look at conference attendees and speakers, setup up small private dinners and cocktail hours. At lunch he always tries to sit with new people and not co-workers.
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(37:22) Ever since college, Kunal had this talent of being a value ADD when visiting. So if he comes into town he’ll also have some even he’s hosting. The good will he makes this way is amazing, people will later invite him to cool stuff.
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(41:45) How has AI impacted large B2B sales. In two years you’ll see a significant reduction in sales people for lower end products. On high end you won’t see much reduction, maybe SDR positions will see a lot of automation and less need.
Follow Kunal Das on LinkedIn
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