
Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations? - ahmedaly
Hi,
I am founder of a chatbot startup... it&#x27;s a b2b..
I am interested to know how to sell to corporate America? how does it work?
======
markbnj
The advice I'll give is based on my experience as cofounder of an early online
banking technology company back in the mid-90s. We started with three people
in rented class-C space and over seven years did high six-figure deals with
large and small banks including Fleet, Bank of America, Citi and others.

There's not really a "how it works" for this. If I had to tell you how it
works I'd say: it works by you making friends inside a corporation and
convincing them to buy your product. Did that help? :). Probably not, so
here's a little more: you preferably start with a member of your founding team
who is articulate, outgoing, amiable and enjoys meeting and talking with
people. That person needs to know the product and competitive environment
cold, and it helps if they are passionate believers in the value prop. They
need to have an identified list of target companies. They need to start
calling and emailing and working contacts to get meetings. Eventually, if you
actually have a value prop, one of those meetings will result in a
relationship with someone who is willing to champion the product internally.

You then work outward from that contact, meeting with their colleagues,
eventually identifying decision makers who control actual budget that can be
used to pay you for something. If you do all this skillfully then you may get
them to commit to a purchase. They will then have to shepherd you through a
potentially long series of internal policy and legal hurdles. You may need to
get on a qualified vendor list, or meet certain business stability criteria.
You will likely need approvals of the deal from different departments, and
their legal team will review and try to negotiate any agreements you request
them to sign. You can see why developing internal champions is absolutely
critical. In every single successful deal we did, by the time we got to the
second or third round of meetings our internal champions were doing most of
the selling.

The last thing I'll say is that it can be powerfully tempting to think you can
purchase success at this by hiring the right magic person who can work their
little black book and make sales happen. I tend to doubt it, and it definitely
never worked for us. A founding sales person can make this happen. That's the
person I'm talking about above. But just bringing in a hired gun is unlikely
to result in success imo. I think you need to believe in your own thing
enough, and be good enough at talking about it, that you can land your first
few deals. Then when you do bring aboard professional sales people you'll have
some actual idea of why people buy from you and how to systematize the
approach. Good luck with it!

~~~
siruncledrew
This is all good advice.

A note jumping through the legal/paperwork hurdles with large companies: be
prepared for it to take a long time. A very long time in some cases.

It all depends on who you’re working with, how big the company is, and how
much money the deal is worth.

~~~
brey
I've been through deals with large financial institutions that have taken 2-3
years from an initial incredibly positive demo and PoC and strong buying
signals, through to a signed contract.

IMO going through that successfully is also sending a signal that you have
sufficient endurance - there's a large risk for a corporate to sign up for a
long contract with a startup, they don't know how long you're going to be in
business for. If the startup doesn't have the appetite to spend 2-3 years to
get a contract over the line, then they aren't going to be a stable partner
for the long term.

You need to also have sufficient numbers of small/medium scale deals so you're
not 100% relying on elephant hunting.

------
crmd
I am the CTO of a “unicorn” B2B tech company that focuses almost exclusively
on the global 2000. Sales are 95% about relationships and 5% about Product. If
you want to sell into Citibank, you go hire the one guy or girl who previously
sold $20M of X to Citi, who golfs with the VP of Procurement and goes to Billy
Joel concerts with the VP of infrastructure operations. Once you hire this
person it feels like cheating, like playing super Mario brothers hitting warp
zones, but alas I learned this is how business gets done. To get a PO you have
to build a coalition: procurement, architecture, operations, finance. You
almost certainly will also need a reseller who has an MSA (master services
agreement) with the firm, so you don’t have to spend 6 months in due diligence
with their lawyers. You have to give up ~15% to the VAR just for that
facilitation, but it’s part of the cost of doing business.

~~~
vinay_ys
Most big corps have anti-corruption policies that prevent decision makers or
key influencers from letting sales people take them to golfing or to concerts.

~~~
ohples
No they have policies against paying for those concerts or golf games.

~~~
pas
IBM's BCG for example has very strict rules about giving and/or receiving
gifts.

------
zbentley
Never underestimate the capability and connections of a good sales person.

There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to
avoid them, a single experienced professional sales person can work wonders,
even for a startup that is still a few pivots away from its final shape.

This may not be the most HN-compatible opinion, and there are certainly many
additional ways to sell to big companies, but I worry that a lot of founders,
especially technical ones, overlook staffing sales until later than they
should.

~~~
j88439h84
> There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to
> avoid them

Do you have any tips?

~~~
rhapsodic
I do. Don't shop price when hiring sales people. Hire the best available at
the market rate.

~~~
thrav
Reward them extremely well when they over perform. One sales person can easily
create more ARR than 3 or 4 average ones. Make sure you pay them accordingly,
and you can save yourself a lot of headaches and wasted hires.

------
goatherders
I do this for a living for other companies (no I do not want your business)
but the most overlooked aspect of B2B selling is patience. Your prospect has
many suitors vying for their attention, many bosses that must sign off an the
sale, and a legal department and IT department that all want to feel included.
Measure your pipeline/sales by quarter, not month. Patience. Patience.
Patience. Build rapport, be useful and valuable. Be prepared to do this for a
long time.

That's how it works.

~~~
thrav
Depending on how big they’re talking, year long cycles are not uncommon.

~~~
sk5t
12 months from first contact to first dollar--nevermind first dollar above
recouping costs--seems a deliriously optimistic goal in certain industries.

~~~
tappio
It has been roughly 2 years for us to get first dollar with corporations, and
will probably take 3 more to recoup the costs. The good thing is that once you
get in, it is pretty hard for competitors to get you out. They really need to
have a superior value prop.

------
Briel
I took a peak at the OP's post history
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945426)),
it seems this is their chatbot (for FB):
[https://mapletechno.com/landing.php](https://mapletechno.com/landing.php)

Unless you have moved the chatbot to a different website since then, based on
the product as is, it would be better to focus on a) translating the website
into English and b) finding some beta testers and users.

I guess most of the replies here are based on your use of the word coporation,
hence they're sharing advice about lanfing multi-figure deals but
realistically, the target market for FB chatbots are small to medium business
owners.

~~~
grepthisab
Paradoxically if this is the OPs business, in my experience they should
greatly, greatly increase price to increase chances of selling to an
enterprise.

------
valgaze
If you haven’t come across his writings already, you might be interested in
the insights from somebody named Mark Suster— he has experience has done a lot
of thinking out loud about this kind of stuff

Check out his thinking about “elephants” vs “deer” vs “rabbits”:
[https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-
deer...](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer-
hunters-7fdecf58f4f6?gi=3ba7481c5bcd)

------
openthc
We sell to a very narrow segment. I've got Google alerts for loads of phrases
and trade show names. We try to attend as many shows as we can. Sometimes with
a booth, mostly without...just rocking our own gear and handing out cards.
Some have a cheap way to add your logo somewhere to get awareness going.

Once you get a fish on, you'll need a professional sales person to carry the
deal forward. Meeting, review, reply, next meeting, follow-up, etc.

Cold prospecting from directories and trade-orgs is another channel.
Call,call,call. Then call some more.

And keep pumping the newsletter, opt-in only, keep content fresh.

~~~
jcims
This is the way to go. People will know they are taking a calculated risk with
a startup, if you get to know their industry you will gain a better intuition
about their use cases (and in particular ones they haven't thought of yet).

Definitely avoid highly regulated verticals at first as they will drown you
with security/governance requirements before you even get to their lawyers.
Meanwhile get to know these frameworks and what will be expected of you if you
want to approach them in the future.

From a feature-set perspective, any large company is going to want to see
management interfaces with single sign-on, at least basic roles (read only,
billing, ops). Customer should also be able to do everything via API that they
can via UI. You should have good audit logs and be able to push them or let
the customer come get them. If your architecture supports it, most large
customers would like the option for a dedicated tenant instance.

Good luck!

~~~
openthc
Oops! We're in a heavily regulated space. Upside is that it keeps competition
out. Your 3rd paragraph is 100% accurate IME

------
lettergram
Hello!

I too am working on a chatbot startup, that's b2b:
[https://insideropinion.com/](https://insideropinion.com/)

The path I'm working:

1\. Identify a clear problem / use case

2\. Determine inside of a corporation who makes purchasing decisions to solve
said problem / use case

3\. Search LinkedIn for contacts at companies that fit into that role

4\. Reach out over LinkedIn and / or use system such as Hunter.io to connect
over emails

5\. Goal is a video demo / discussion, pitch the product and show them how you
think it can help

6\. If you make a connection, ask if they know others that may be interested

7\. Attend trade shows for your segment if possible

Main thing is follow up, follow up, follow up. Sometimes on my 3rd or 4th
follow up I'll get a hit. Ask questions about their business and be as clear
as possible. Conversions should be anywhere from 1% - 20% depending on the
market segment (I'm not sure what yours is).

------
louisswiss
I've built and sold a few companies doing enterprise sales. Now I run a small
course teaching founders the basics of early stage sales.

Won't plug that here, but I think you'd get a lot out of this interview I did
with Stephanie Hurlburt, cofounder of Binomial, where she explains how she
learned to close 6 and 7-figure deals as a technical founder with no business
background: [https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to-
close-7...](https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to-
close-7-figure-deals-as-a-technical-founder-with-no-sales-experience---with-
Stephanie-Hurlburt-of-Binomial-info-e41kj3)

~~~
tixocloud
Thanks for sharing.

------
wmaiouiru
This was a pretty good video on selling B2B from startup school:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZi4kTJG-
LE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZi4kTJG-LE)

1\. Prospecting 2\. Conversations 3\. Closing 4\. Promised land(revenue)

Slides of the talk:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9zlx72t9b4yk8d/Tyler%20Bosmeny%20...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9zlx72t9b4yk8d/Tyler%20Bosmeny%20-%20How%20to%20Sell.pdf?dl=0)

------
elorant
Contrary to the main sentiment in this thread I've done B2B sales with no
prior connections whatsoever. My approach is threefold. Build something that
either doesn't exist or is considerably better and cheaper than competition.
Give amply time for demoing, like six months free with no strings attached. Be
patient.

If I had to choose one approach I'd say demo your service for months so they
can get accustomed to it. Most companies I know give demos for very short
time-spans. If you give a one month demo the client might not even get the
chance to look at it because he has fifty other things to do. Let him get
accustomed in using it, making it a part of his workflow.

~~~
sandstrom
I guess this assumes that the product can be used by a single person, or a
small group of people, and don’t require a lot of setup. For example systems
monitoring, or a group-wide collaboration tool, makes things harder.

I still like the idea though!

~~~
user5994461
Counter point: I've been doing integration for system monitoring things, this
can be fully integrated in a few days.

The new trendy (and really great tool) is datadog, a HN company. They went out
the window when the trial expired after 1 week and their asshole sales were at
war against any extension. How am I supposed to demo the tool and sell it
internally when it can't even be accessed?

As if it were not enough, they kept calling day after day to try force the
sale. Then they got banned soon afterwards, after some mid level folks got a
hold of both of these practices. Nobody wants to deal with that.

~~~
tixocloud
Across the plethora of system monitoring apps who all claim they can do
everything, how do you decide and identify what fits?

~~~
user5994461
There are no apps that can do everything, there are different use cases that
require at least 3 different tools to cover logs, system metrics, application
metrics, alerts and performance instrumentation.

If you've never worked in that domain, you can trial the tool and figure out
what they're about. Short version is to go for ELK + Datadog + NewRelic.

~~~
tixocloud
Interesting. What does Datadog cover that NewRelic doesn’t?

------
cloudking
Go on LinkedIn, find contacts, email/call them to explain why your product
would help them and their business, set up a demo over video chat. Pitch them
your product, why it would benefit them and try to secure a deal.

After you've got some sales under your belt, sponsor a booth at a tradeshow
relevant to your market. Demo your product in-person, collect leads and follow
up for more sales. Rinse and repeat.

~~~
uchman
Skeptical about LinkedIn these days as it might be overused. Even I tend to
receive lot of pitches these days and generally distrust the medium.

~~~
majc2
Like you, I distrust cold linkedin (and cold emails).

But - we are not everybody.

If you're targeting someone you think has got a specific pain that you can
credibly help with - a well crafted, unique and relevant pitch, with
appropriately timed followups does work for a significant amount of people.

------
austhrow743
Read this

[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales)

~~~
gnicholas
Not sure why this is so low on the page, as it was incredibly helpful. I even
went to the author's archive directory [1] so I could read his other posts
about sales and life running/selling a SaaS company. He is candid and
knowledgeable. Definitely bookmarking — thanks for the link!

1:
[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/)

~~~
austhrow743
Yeah Patio11 is a champ. Also a long time hn user btw.

Probably low because I was in a rush and didn't explain the content at all.

------
edsim
All great answers thus far. First, it is not for faint of heart. Second, if
you get in door, learn how to say no as not every corporate customer is a good
one - some can suck you dry and have you customize feature after feature so
you need to be strong.

As a previous commenter mentioned, understanding what your product is and your
go-to-market motion is super important. Are you a bottom up developer or user-
led adoption with ideas to expand or are you going pure top-down enterprise?
Either will take time but I've worked with many a company that successfully
went from bottom up and generated significant enterprise sales like
[https://Snyk.io](https://Snyk.io).

If you choose to go top down, find advisors or investors who have
relationships at some of your corporate prospects. Going top down super early
requires relationships to get in the door. Second, you have to figure out
exactly who in the organization you need to get to and understand what is
their pain and how you can uniquely solve it. I've seen way too many early
stage founders get in the door to explore and they end up hunting for dodo
birds - they're extinct and don't exist.

There is so much more on this topic and one method I advocate is focusing on
enterprise design partnerships vs. selling which has more of a partnering
model than a transatcional one. More on that here in a SaaStr podcast I was on
- [https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-190-ed-sim-founder-
gp-...](https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-190-ed-sim-founder-gp-boldstart-
ventures-on-why-saas-founders-should-not-sell-their-products-in-the-early-
days/)

------
muzani
Cold emails work. Find the best use case for the company. Attach a link or
screenshot why/how it would help them. Take a screenshot of their site or chat
box, then edit it with an example of your bot in action.

Follow up once. Not too many times. Sometimes people ignore the first time
because they're in their emails looking for something else.

Some people prefer cold calling, but I find the success rates are much, much
lower and you can't convey the same information. I think cold calling is only
popular because it's easy to monitor failure rates.

~~~
whalesalad
I’d love to see stats that this works. I don’t believe it.

~~~
muzani
A little anecdotal, but I get about 50% response rate. This includes selling
weird stuff, like once I tried to sell brownies to wedding planners.

In terms of job hunting, I got about 2 out of 4 responses this way, so it's
still a 50% rate. This actually landed me my first job.

This was from a few years back though. It might be harder now that everyone
has automated messaging and CRMs designed to look like they're from a human
being (probably illegally without an unsubscribe button).

It depends a lot on how you do it. I think the message has to hit well, it has
to look personal enough, hence the screenshots have to be designed for that
specific company. But done wrong, it can look a bit desperate.

You also have to find someone who can make a decision. A lot of people are
terrified of this, but higher ranked people can actually forward you to the
right VP in charge. We've cold contacted the CEO of the biggest media company
in the country this way, and he was very happy with the meeting.

Some people prefer a wider net, like 1000 messages a day, with a 2% success
rate. That's fine too. Sometimes it gets better results, because you end up
with people more desperate for a solution. I just think the personal cold
email method works better than cold calls, and it's a lot more fun.

For founders, personal emails help, because you can ask them why they rejected
you, and that helps in improving the product or strategy.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_This actually landed me my first job_

I'm late to the party, but thanks for reminding me. I got my first job out of
college (engineer) because of a cold call to a business.

------
bearcobra
As someone who gets sold to a lot, don’t under estimate the power of non
decision makers in the process. If you can get the person who admins the
website or leads the support team to buy in, you’ll have way more of a chance
of convincing a VP to buy something. Just remember when you talk to these
people, they aren’t the ones who can sign off and that’s ok. Give them tools
to help pitch internal and be patient

------
Existenceblinks
Reading answers on this thread makes me wonder are those sales techniques
really healthy to industry as a whole? No one questions that, and yet
normalize probably unhealthy ways of selling utilities. "who golfs with the VP
of Procurement" .. that's how corruption works as well, isn't it? Is that
natural?

~~~
namdnay
I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the thread suggests. Keep in mind that most
people are talking about relatively small deals here. Anything big will go
through such a complex and regulated RFI/RFP process that Golf plays no part
whatsoever. I doubt there is much golf going on between VW and Bosch execs

------
rasz
1 Call up your old Ivy classmates, they work in corpos

2 let your VC do the above

3 crowd favorite, let your VC force other companies he already invested
in/sits on board to integrate your product and then do number 2

But in your case number 1 should be change your name and language, unless you
are looking for government (NSA/CIA) contract.

------
gk1
Usually some combination of marketing and high-touch sales. Marketing makes
buyers want to buy the product[1], and sales converts interest into a
contract.

For B2B it usually takes three months from first contact to closed deal. That
means you need a healthy pipeline of deals to keep the cash flowing.

Crossing the Chasm[2] is a must-read and classic book about marketing and
selling B2B software.

[1] As I say, make buyers want to pay:
[https://www.gkogan.co/blog/buyers/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/buyers/)

[2]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC119W/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC119W/)

------
thrower123
Getting connected with some VARs (value added resellers) can be helpful. If
you can provide some piece that enhances their package, you can often get
included in as a part of some big deals that you might not otherwise have any
shot at, and build up some connections that way. Once you're in, and people
know you as somebody that does work in X niche, they can start coming to you
to do additional customizations or follow-on work in that area.

It's not all roses; sometimes the extra layers of indirection between you and
the actual customer can be a little onerous.

------
haleymbryant
you need content. if you're not sure where to start, checkout this article on
movement first content: [https://www.animalz.co/blog/movement-
first/](https://www.animalz.co/blog/movement-first/)

Wistia's CEO recently posted about mistakes made early on, and a better
approach to building affinity vs awareness through relationships.
[https://twitter.com/csavage/status/1180148970825437191](https://twitter.com/csavage/status/1180148970825437191)

Sales matters, patience matters, but content brings people already seeking a
solution to you...and/or agitates a pain point they've forgotten.

------
ttul
Don’t think of sales as a “funnel” process. Think of it as a process of
education and patience. Your job in sales is to get to know the right people
at all the customers you want to sell to and to then nurture them patiently
until they are ready to buy from you.

Big companies can be sold to by tiny startups. Finding the right person is a
grind - no easy way about it. Once you’ve found them, it is truly about
building the relationship and then letting them guide you through their
purchasing process.

------
vmurthy
Like many have told , hiring a good sales person is going to work wonders. If
you must sell stuff yourself , do yourself a favour and ingrain this [0]
before you go wasting time on folks inside a megacorp. We wasted 9 months
focusing on the wrong person in a big sale ..

[0] [https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/identify-sales-prospects-
infl...](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/identify-sales-prospects-influencers-
decision-makers-ht)

------
yread
You already got some great answers. If you need more book recommendations:

Major account sales by Rackham is a classic

How to sell from Entrepid is an algorithm you can follow
[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd400b/t/5b0b4dc68a922dbfa263b389/1527467516482/Entrepid_How%2BTo%2BSell.pdf)

------
DenisM
You will have easier time if you narrow your market to a more uniform group,
like "large hospitals", or "small law firms" \- approaches that apply to one
group will not work for another.

Connections are important but in some areas you may have to hire a lobbyist to
get them, while in other areas you just need to show up at a trade convention
and chat people up.

------
curo
As a related question to this: we're successfully selling into corps but it
takes 6-12 months. Has anyone figured out the under $500 credit card thing
with seat pricing or know good examples of it (where the ACVs are still high)?

We'd like to land-and-expand since our product has to be used by teams but I'd
love to get the sales cycle shorter.

------
chrischen
From my friends who’ve started B2B SaaS, most startups leverage connections
and introductions from their investors.

------
matthew3015
I'd recommend taking a look at G2.com (where I work), the world's largest B2B
Software and Services review platform....they've almost got 1 million reviews
on the site and is a great way to get your product out there in front of
buyers, alongside trusted reviews from users.

------
known
Should have intimate connections in the Industry

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/25/amazon_fails_to_sto...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/25/amazon_fails_to_stop_exstaffer_working_for_google/)

------
Spooky23
Find a partner.

Big companies or .gov are too expensive to for you to work with unless they
are coming to you.

------
ahmedaly
This is my chatbot sign up and support me :)
[https://mapletechno.com/landing.php](https://mapletechno.com/landing.php)

------
uchman
One tip that I see folks use. Encourage or enforce business email addresses
for your trial accounts. This helps you target your cold emails (especially
after trial expires).

------
vinay_ys
Curious question: what's the name of your chatbot and how does your chatbot
offering differ from what's offered by big players like Microsoft and Google.

------
Maxtylor
Use all possible contact methods to approach the finalist! Like "The third
door"!

------
sjapkee
>chatbot startup

Dead man walking.

------
campfireveteran
Some terms to get you started:

\- outside sales executive (e.g., the person who visits the customer, they
typically work from coworking or home-offices)

\- inside sales executive (e.g., a sales support person, typically doesn't
travel and works at coworking or home-office full-time)

\- outside sales engineer (e.g., a customer-facing technical person who
answers questions and helps sell solutions with the sales exec)

\- master agreements (generally-agreeded terms and conditions)

\- Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

\- Letter of Intent (LOI) - before final quote & contract

\- Purchase Orders (PO's)

\- Request For Proposal (RFP)

\- Request For Quotation (RFQ)

and lengthy sales cycles that often take 6 months to 2 years, depending on the
product or service

Another way to get in is start immediately under a master agreement and do
consulting-ish tasks, and gradually sell more solutions and temporary staff
roles as they come up ("building a beachhead").

~~~
namdnay
I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about the RFP process. For a small
product (maybe Jobs would have called it a feature) like a Chatbot, your best
hope if you want to hit the enterprise elephants is to find a “digital
transformation” RFP, give a really strong reply for the inevitable chatbot
feature in round 1, then get rolled in as a “joint proposal” for future rounds
with one of the big boys (Accenture, IBM etc). They get to look modern and
open to teamwork, you get your foot in the door and the proposal has better
chances. Then if it goes well, you’ll get roped into future deals

~~~
yread
This is interesting. How do you find open RFPs in your area of interest?

~~~
namdnay
Trade publications/newsletters, word of mouth (useful to know people, even low
level), and of course for anything regulated or public, they’re published on
dedicated directories

