How we secured the first large company customer in six months

I want to share our milestone at Releem — closing the first sale to a large company after a six-month process! Our usual business model involves a self-service process that concludes payments in seconds, so this was a new journey for us.

The journey began when an engineer from a large company recognized the potential of our product to streamline their MySQL monitoring and management across numerous AWS RDS instances. We gave this engineer a free trial for a few months. He installed and tried the product to manage and tune his databases.

Next, he introduced our tool to their CTO, and what followed was the start of collaboration.

Here are the steps we did:

We prepared a few new documents like a Master service agreement. Thanks to Y Combinator for the templates.
The customer conducted a security review to ensure our product met their standards.
To handle invoicing and remain tax compliant, we used Paddle Invoicing. Actually, I'd like to discover other solutions for that)

This engineer was not just a contact but a true partner throughout the process, guiding us until the final payment. I thank him for his collaboration and support.

While six months looks so lengthy, it's advantageous:

We approved that the product is valuable for Enterprise customers.
We can charge much more money for such customers in the long term.

Enterprise sales differ from self-service. Let's see what it will be like with support and whether we could reuse documents in future sales. We already have a few feature requests that might be valuable for all enterprise customers.

I'm curious to hear from others who've made similar transitions from selling to individual users to managing large enterprise clients. What have your experiences been like?

Also, I'd love to hear about your preferred invoicing tools that help with taxes in different countries!