How did you respond to your first SaaS enterprise plans requests?
https://getslashdeploy.com/
Hey IH community!
I'm the founder of https://getslashdeploy.com - a chatbot to manage deployments over Slack. We've got simple per-seat pricing based on active users (people who actually trigger a deployment via our chatbot in a month).
So, today I've got our first enterprise plan request and tbh wasn't very sure how to handle it - def wasn't something I expected to come yet.
Should we be asking for a lump-sum payment or charge per mo? But then it means, we'd probably have to make invoices by hand (since of course all is now automated via Stripe) and what that magic number would be?
If anybody sells to enterprises with a similar business model, I'd appreciate if you shared how you approached your first enterprise plans requests.
Thanks a lot!
Connect with the person making the request.
Find out their motives (really big enterprises have people whose only job is to keep a pulse on the market with no intent to buy).
If they have burning headaches and want to use SlashDeploy, figure out who needs to sign on the deal (might be someone else than the person you are talking with) and how their payment of suppliers is setup.
If a manager has discretionary expenses below $X/month, then it is easy for him to put on a credit card. If any invoice need to go through an accounting ERP system, then you are going to do annual invoices (maybe on a multi-year contract).
Most bigger enterprises will require Professional Services (i.e. support) as part of the deal. They might have some checklist requirements from IT (are you connecting with their network infrastructure or not, are you GDPR-compliant, etc.).
The approval and payment of invoices processes at that big company is what you need to find out. The more complex, the higher your price tag needs to be, yet as long as your prices fit under the budget of the current level of management involved, the better.
Thanks, that’s a really good advice to connect with person and knowing who’s involved in the decision making process early on - now scheduling meeting 👍
I’ve had some experience with enterprise sales in the past, but back then the pricing was more or less established based on the license costs of competitor product we were replacing, so coming up with pricing from scratch is tricky.
Also worried about being able to provide Support since I am not full-time on this project.
Yep! This is the answer right here. Enterprise plans can be really profitable. They often fall through the cracks because so many people have to sign off. So if you can find a way where only one or two people need to sign off on the decision, you have a much better chance of closing the deal.
Consider offering an SLA as well - these can be ridiculously profitable if your software is stable :)
Not sure what your pricing looks like but I’d google around a bit to see if you can come up with some good numbers that pattern match an offering similar in monthly cost to yours
Cool, SLA is probably definitely would be needed - just trying to evaluate if I can manage it being part-time on this project. Thanks for the advice!
Don't customize the way you price. You already have value based pricing so keep it at that. If you are to drop the price because they have such high volume that is not the worst but it needs to be worthwhile for you ie. 2000 users = 2.50 per month. Or only drop the price over the first 1000 users for example.
Don't do any custom development! Be wary of security questionnaires. They can be a huge waste of time. Sometimes you can just get by sending them your own document that outlines your security / infrastructure and procedures.
Quick counterpoint to this. Large companies tend to hate usage driven pricing. Budgets are usually set yearly so whoever is going to be paying for you product will want to know upfront how much to account for.
If you normally charge per seat do a deal for the year based on their assumed seats. If expect 1,000 users give them a company wide license for the cost of 1,200 seats.
That's true, it's fine to fix it with a clause stating that if they go over the number of seats they have to pay more. The point is that, these pricing models are used today so that the pricing scales with the usage. As soon as you start compromising big companies will just take advantage.
I doubt Atlassian got to where it is compromising on their per seat pricing :)
Yep, should do yearly pricing with some projection and discount. They clearly stated they don’t want to pay per-seat tho and have a fixed cost instead. Let’s see if we get anywhere, thanks guys 😉
Hop on a call as soon as possible to figure out what they're struggling with and why SlashDeploy will help their development team.
During a call, you will several reasons why they want to use your product. But you will also bump into potential features they want in the future. You want to avoid spending a lot of time building enterprise features, as it will limit your available time for other tasks.
About the payment: enterprises have money. If you provide a good discount on a yearly plan, I'd go for the yearly plan. Sometimes they just want to try it on a monthly basis though. Things like these will come up during your call, so you get a better image.
Most importantly, just try to get as much information out of them as you can. As this is your first enterprise client, it shows your product has PMF in the enterprise world as well. Your first client(s) will shape your value proposition and marketing target audience to expand into the world of enterprises. By understanding why they want this solution, and most importantly what kind of problems it will fix within their company, you will have a much better understanding of how you can target other enterprise companies in the future.
Thanks Frank! Yeah, I am scheduling a call with them as advised a few times here. Let’s see where we get - fingers crossed.
Refused it, was so demanding ==> it can negatively impact your PNL. Do the math so you don't get stuck in the future.