Selling to enterprise is death
Thought I'd share a story from Cloakist life.
We got an inbound lead from a massive (I mean, seriously massive) American bank.
They use a public Confluence for the documentation of a software product that they sell to other finance companies, and needed to put it at their own domain.
Naturally we were beside ourselves with excitement. Got on a first call with them, and it was obvious that they had the problem big time, and we had the solution.
We started fantasising about charging huge $$$ for this. After all, it would be peanuts to a company of that size. I started looking up which yacht to buy (settled on this one).
We ran the huge $$$ price by them. They were fine with it.
We had another call. They needed us to send over a detailed spec of the architecture of our custom domain solution. We did that.
Another call. They wanted to know more about Cloakist. Other customers, where the business is registered. What exact AWS technologies do we use to implement our solution.
Another call. They told us that to bring us on as a supplier there would be multiple different committees at their organisation who would need to sign off on it. Those committees would have to sign off on each of the AWS technologies that we use! They said we should wait to hear back.
Months passed.
Finally, I assumed that they were no longer interested and sent them an email. I offered to do their custom domain for our regular price. I got a reply: 'We're still deciding'.
Enterprises buy stuff extreeeeeemely slowly, and will often drop out because of the tiniest thing along the way.
Don't make selling to them a key part of your strategy in the early stage unless you want to die a slow, horrible death.
Yes, it is a long process, and one must front-load a lot of the efforts. You need process. Lots of process. Also, if you are selling to any regulated industry (healthcare, banking, or publicly traded firms) you will want to have ISO or SOC-2 type audits.
It may feel like a big bureaucratic hassle, but those frameworks really help you to mature your organization from all sides. And if you are healthcare, you will need to pass customer audits as well.
In my day-job I'm in the middle of a massive, multi-year multi-million dollar migration from on-prem to cloud. I deal with external vendors who have been in process with us for almost a year. They act like startups and lack the processes and right questions for customers our size. But, they have the sugar we want.
Not to point the finger back at you, but you don't know what you don't know. The process frameworks like SOC-2, ISO, and other help you to at least mitigate a lot of that. Also, if armed with that you can educate the client as well. I'm sure the only people in their org who understand that are their compliance folks.
These are some great tips, particularly around getting the audits done - thanks a lot. I guess my point is that a startup in the early stage can't afford to/shouldn't spend time on doing these kinds of things, unless they have a ton of funding and time.
It is a gray area. If startups have taught me anything it is the importance of focus and learning who your customers actually are.
I originally thought my little one-man-SaaS would have been good for tech teams, but that was wrong. Instead I had lawyers and homeschooling parents pinging me all the time.
Have you considered talking informally to some other enterprise customers?
I would be pretty keen to talk informally to other enterprise customers, just not sure how to find them. Spending time trying to generate leads from enterprise feels like a low priority.
Yeah, you need someone on the ground (maybe try linkedin sales navigator)? Or try some very niched content marketing?
I like the sound of very niched content marketing. Will give that some thought. Thank you!
very welcome. Best of luck, and hit me up if you want more insights on getting inside the heads of Enterprise.
Yes, this is true. Usually companies work their way up before selling to the largest of enterprises unless you sell something very very niche and you don't need to take hold of sensitive data (think a corporate gifting solution).
Having sold millions of dollars of software and services to the enterprise... yes, I can confirm this is true :-)
There are ways to speed it up with some of the questions others have posted, but then comes procurement whose sole job is to save the company money on their purchases.
Also take note that enterprise sales is a group-selling process. Even if it looks like it's progressing for you, there may be someone in the higher-ups who is not down with everything that's happening. But that's something to be expected - you can get in the habit of always asking "Who else needs to see this" or "Who would you like to involve in this discussion" after every demo to your prospect.
In general, I think someone already commented - it's a step up from SMB sales and you'll get there when your org matures :-) Best of luck!
Group-selling is a good way of putting it. Tons of stakeholders who need to be satisfied. Thanks!
Not only do they buy slowly, but also sell. It took me three weeks, a video call and a few emails to get pricing for premium access from Twitter.
Really interesting. Didn't realise Syften uses premium access to Twitter! What limitations did it get you past?
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