

How to sell to large customers - ananddass
http://blog.filepicker.io/post/35137916087/how-to-land-a-big-fish

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jonnathanson
_"The competitor had done all this work by going around the organization,
interviewing the stakeholders, putting together presentations and data dockets
that addressed their needs. This was work that Richard would have had to do
otherwise. Thus, the competitor had helped Richard help him!"_

This can actually backfire if it's not done very carefully and tactfully.
Reaching out to multiple people in the same organization can also make it
appear that you are just blindly going fishing. Those people will triangulate,
and they'll talk, and they'll compare notes. You'll need to make very sure
that you've actually tailored your pitch and conversations to each of the
people you're approaching.

If you're just sending the same, cold-intro email to different folks in the
same company, they'll find that out pretty quickly, and you're dead in the
water. By the same token, if you've been cultivating a relationship with
Person X, and then you reach out to Person Y, Person X might feel that you've
circumvented him, or gone over his head, and then you've bred some resentment
with him. Instead, try this: if you've made decent headway with X, ask him if
he thinks speaking to Y or Z would be a good idea. He may say yes, and
actually give you the permission. He may even broker those introductions for
you, provided he really believes in your pitch. Or he may point you in a more
productive direction, with different people that hadn't occurred to you.

I'm not suggesting that the author is recommending a clumsy, cold approach to
multiple parties. Nonetheless, I've seen it done so many times -- both on the
buy side and sell side of consulting -- that I feel it bears mentioning. The
general advice in the article is sound, but putting it into practice takes a
fairly deft touch.

~~~
aiham
He does suggest you ask a few questions to the person you've developed a
relationship with, including: "Who are the other individuals in your
organization that you suggest I meet?".

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Spooky23
I guess that works for this guy, but as someone in a big enterprise, I'd be
really annoyed with a vendor that is venue shopping. An an outsider, you have
no idea what the internal politics of the organization are. Getting blindsided
because some salesman took my colleague to lunch is a great way to get a
project derailed. (The conversation can shift to "how do we implement product
x" instead of "how do we solve problem y")

The sales teams that I've worked with for years (as opposed to the sales teams
that aren't around anymore) have something in common -- they focus on building
a relationship, figuring out wtf is going on, and bringing solutions to the
table.

Other anti-patterns:

\- Hyper-aggressive (ie Oracle): Their mission is to be a pain in the ass and
sell your CEO a bill of goods. Your relationship is by definition adversarial.

\- Mistargeted (ie Dropbox): Friendly people call every now and again. They
never answer my question ("Is Dropbox on a state procurement contract?"), and
don't understand why the answer they don't know is important to me.

\- Wheeler-dealers: I ask for a product demo, we get it, followed by a cold
quote for $3M for an off the shelf product. I don't respond, and get an
unsolicited quote that is now $2M. I usually reply with an email that says
"Not gonna happen."

~~~
nahname
What is a state procurement contract?

~~~
zrail
A contract that a state budget office signs with approved vendors. The budget
office vets a set of vendors for, say, copy machines. Every office in the
state then has to purchase from one of those vendors for their copy machine
needs.

It's a fraud protection thing. It prevents one of the many many tiny offices
from funneling money through a phony vendor.

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AndyNemmity
This is part of my job, buying from the side of large companies so I will
provide some input.

This is talking from the direction of actively engaging a large business and
selling to them. I work on the side of large business actively choosing which
startups we want to work with.

"Lesson 1: In larger organizations there are multiple individuals with
separate motivations involved in the buying process "

Without question this is important. I am sort of a gatekeeper in the process.
It's my job to validate the companies that are seen by the real decision
makers (not me). I am the technical grunt in front of the process allowing the
C level decision makers to only make good decisions no matter what they decide
to do.

With me, you can discuss tech on a geek level, and I'm most comfortable and at
home.

To my C levels, you better be high level and respectful. We've lost the
ability to work with several startups simply because they weren't able to
discuss on a C level.

If you are a founder and can't discuss on a C level, hire someone who can. You
could lose a tremendous level of money and momentum simply because you have no
idea how to talk to someone who leads a large business.

~~~
ananddass
Andy-what are the key skills which give you confidence that a founder has the
ability to discuss on a C level?

~~~
jordo37
I've done those sorts of sales talks when I was a tech consultant at Accenture
and continue to do some now as a technical founder. I have also heard the
pitch from vendors when I was at Accenture wanting me to bring their wares to
my clients.

In the end it comes down to being able to communicate and listen well. Be an
active listener and find out the problems that the C-level customer has. This
could mean the actual business problem (sales needs to grow 10% and it hasnt
for 3 years), logistical problems(my teams don't communicate), a political
problem (I can't deploy a solution without getting the Network Solutions team
invovled) - all are things 1) You should know about and 2) You may be able to
fix.

That sounds simple, but it's really very hard to not get too wrapped up in
what you and your company are focused on, rather than what this specific
customer in front of you right now cares about. The best salespeople of ANY
kind are very good at getting in synch with their customers - seeing the
world, and their product from their customers POV and then seeing how their
product fits into that worldview.

~~~
AndyNemmity
This is great advice. There's a strange reality that the C user has some
agenda you couldn't envision, and you could fix some problem they have you
aren't even aware of.

Some of the worst complaints I've heard is that the startup comes in all cocky
thinking they have the best technology in the world, and doesn't actively
listen.

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steve8918
This is why you need a dedicated and experienced sales person. Selling to a
small company is one thing, but selling to a larger customer is an entirely
different skill set. And then selling to enterprise is even more different.
The sales cycles differ tremendously depending on how large the organization
is.

If you are targeting SMBs, you can get away with direct sales, etc. But once
you get into the "bigger fish", the sales cycle lengthens incredibly, as do
the requirements from the buyers.

One of my previous employers made the transition from selling from SMBs to
enterprise, and it was a difficult transition. Our product was usually bought
by a department head that required it, and it would spread across the
organization organically. However, once we entered enterprise companies,
instead of talking to the department heads, we needed to talk directly to the
CIO/CTO, who would make the decision on behalf of the entire company. This
required a lot more patience, and a completely different skillset from our
salespeople.

So in the case of the OP, trying to land a big fish by talking with contacts
like this is likely a huge timesink, because experienced salespeople will eat
guys like him for breakfast. If you're going to target bigger fish rather than
smaller shops, it's best to get someone who knows exactly what the process is
and is actually focused on sales. The charm of working with a startup is lost
on bigger customers, who have bonuses based on uptime, SLAs, etc.

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lmkg
The first point hits close to home; I have twice been in the position of
losing happy, paying customers due to other decision-makers getting involved.
I work for an agency, not a start-up, but it's the same process: convince
someone within an organization to pay you large sums of cash for services.

In both cases, we were providing services to a single product group within a
company large enough that those product groups can act nearly autonomously.
And in both cases, the corporate office came to the (quite rational) decision
that having ten product groups using ten different agencies was inefficient.
In one case, corp's pet agency became the agency of record; in the other case,
they actually built an in-house department from scratch and stopped using
agencies altogether.

If there's a moral to this story, it's to scale that ladder. If your
product/service/whatever only has one customer within a large organization,
your use is vulnerable to consolidation moves. But, if your one user is happy
and satisfied, you can often use that to gain wider traction within a company.
In addition to more customers, it's a much safer position to be in when
someone from on high wants to start standardizing across the organization.

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pchaube
Great post! An oft heard question, we get as a start-up selling to large
enterprises is - How will you meet our need for these N custom features? Being
constrained on the software development side, we've found it helpful to triage
the client needs and lay out a phased plan for development. Also finding a
champion for our product in the client organization, usually a mid-senior
level executive, who can coach us through their decision making process has
been helpful

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tacoman2
There is an interesting tidbit in the article about the other vendor doing a
proof of concept. I work for a large enterprise and I’m working with a company
that has gone to great lengths to facilitate a proof of concept. We're using
~$250K worth of their equipment and weeks of their time, not to mention travel
and all the expenses that entails. As far I know, we haven't given them a dime
yet.

I don't know how a smaller company would be able to do this.

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drumdance
For complex sales, one thing I've found that really helps is to create a
worksheet and use it during the sales call. It asks things like:

Who is involved in the decision? What are their primary pain points? What are
some reasons they may _not_ buy? (Paradoxically, asking for objections instead
of waiting for them to pop up makes you seem more trustworthy)

Etc.

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granto
Nice summary. That's what makes enterprise sales challenging and time
consuming and why Steve Blank spends a lot of time in his book explaining how
to navigate it. What are some other common objections/challenges you've run
into and how have you overcome them?

~~~
ananddass
I'll keep the response specific to sales objections that a growth stage
startups face

Scalability objections: can you scale to our volumes? Respond with suggestions
for a phased roll out. Take your backend expert in to the meeting and present
credibility on why you can scale.

Company objections: will you be around for long? What if you get aquihired?

Reiterate vision behind why are doing your startup (hopefully the right
reasons). Talk about your investors and the expectations/commitments made.

Control objections: "We are uncomfortable giving up control over this part of
our tech stack"

Try to create analogies. Understand other parts of the stack that they have
given up control over and why they feel comfortable with those. Feed those
expectations back as contractual commitments that you are comfortable making.

~~~
granto
Yes, I was wondering about sales objections, thanks. Those are good ones. What
about resource constraints to integrate? This is one of the most common I've
run into. Even if integration is as simple as a copy/paste of some code, it
still requires moving ahead of their pipeline. To help here, focus on making
it as easy as possible to integrate and also help the customer see why it
helps them to make it a priority by showing the benefit of adding now vs.
later (ROI data). Have you heard similar objections or are you only pursuing
customers that have already reached out to you and have thus, presumably,
already determined file upload is highest priority?

~~~
ananddass
We intentionally chose to focus on making the integration as easy as possible.
The key is to get the customer to try a proof of concept as easily as
possible. We still need to do a better job of it.

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mattmaroon
I'm always partial to any post in which a start up actually admits that a
bigger competitor did something better, even if it's lowly sales.

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known
You _partner_ with large customers.

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yakshay
Also as a side note:

For anyone to think that Filepicker.io is not a side project, do not use the
stock themed Bootstrap.

Right now, it looks straight out of RailsRumble.

