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23 Comments

Closed an entreprise customer after 2 months

Two months ago we jumped on a call with a potential customer. He was a project manager at a big firm (1000+ employees) and was exploring different possibilities to extract data from hard-to-scrape websites. 🐝

It was the biggest account we were talking to, the vast majority of our customers being small and medium businesses or even individuals for their side project.

🕰 After the first call, we scheduled another one a few weeks later. And they started integrating our API for their tests.

🎉 Then after a few more weeks and emails follow up, we closed them!

Even if it is not a big contract we learned a lesson here. Selling to large companies is much much slower than SMB / startups because they don't have the same time frame and processes.

🤯 There is bureaucracy, lots of management layers (Manager N needs approval from N+1...N+X)

What's your experience with selling to large companies?

  1. 4

    2 months is on the shorter side for enterprise sales. 6-12 is more typical. Congrats!

  2. 2

    Congrats! Did you have any experience in selling to enterprises before hand?

    1. 1

      Yep a little bit. I worked at a startup a few years ago selling APIs big banks (12 months+ sale cycle)

  3. 1

    2 months is really good. 6 months is very common with Fortune 500 companies. My record was broken when I sold my product to Facebook. From the initial purchasing intent (an engineer from their side) to purchase order and wire transfer, it took 13 months.

  4. 1

    Kevin, as others have said on here, Enterprise clients can take a long time to close. They can also be really challenging and resource-hogging if you are not careful, in terms of support, so always ensure that you make enough from the deal. This is fair enough - usually these people have chosen you because they want YOU to do the work. Often smaller companies, with less budget, are able to do some of the work, but Enterprise usually want someone to do everything. You are also going to potentially deal with politics. Our lead-time with Enterprise is usually 3+ months and once legal have got involved it can go well beyond that. Wonderful though that you have secured this, but my main thoughts for you are:

    • Try to capitalise on this. Can you promote that they have chosen you. That might make others feel more comfortable in signing up with you if this large client thinks you're OK
    • Find out who your ideal customer is. It might be that super-small companies are a pain, but you might also find that really large are also. Getting Enterprise customers can sometimes suck a lot of your resources for little benefit. Just bear that in mind
      Good luck!
  5. 1

    There's a lot of great info in the comments here about enterprise sales. I [now] know it's a long sales cycle. Is there any additional insights you can share around enterprise sales?

  6. 1

    Congrats, this is a big step forward!
    Did they reach out to you or did you find and reach out to them?

    1. 1

      They find us with a blog post!

  7. 1

    Congratulations! That’s a big deal, enterprise clients can be a tough sell. But once you get them, they tend to stay.

    I have personally found our best fit are companies slightly under enterprise level: the 50-100 employee companies that still have $50MM or so in revenue. They’re a good balance between stability (enterprise) and flexibility (startups).

    1. 1

      Hi, how do you find quality contacts or leads of such size /dimensions... :)

      1. 1

        He said the client found them through a blog post. But that's not always the case😁
        For outbound you have to be creative, find the email structure of the company:
        Let's say you want Kevin Sahin who works at scrapingbee and their website it scrapingbee.io
        You need to know if the email structure at scrapingbee is [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected]
        You get the idea ...

        If you don't get a reply within a few weeks resend the same email but CC a colleague from the same department(Linkedin is a goldmine)
        Ask if the person still works there because you sent this email a while back.
        One of them will reply, that's how you get your foot in the door.
        And of course the good old call calling and pitching over the phone then asking to send more info by email.
        But brace yourself, it takes a lot of time and patience.
        Good luck

    2. 1

      I totally agree, and this is now the size we aim to reach !

  8. 1

    Way to crush it Kevin. I am surprised you closed the deal within such a short time frame. I have heard of Enterprise customers taking almost two years to close deals (even with vendors who they really like and need their product). My father-in-law does sales to Fortune 100 companies and their approval/accounting cycles can be up to 18 months long .

    1. 1

      Yes you are right, Kevin crushed it!

      Hopefully not every enterprise are fortune 500 companies.

      Our price are rather small compared so other services such as Cloud Hosting, or

      SalesForce or audit, I guess this speeds up the process a lot.

  9. 1

    Amazing! 2 months is great for an Enterprise sale too - well done! :)

  10. 1

    Bravo Kevin! Actually 2 months sounds like a short cycle, enterprise is really hard. We have been in negotiation with an airline company for 8 months now. It took 3 to get a reply to the first few emails 😅.
    Our product builds mobile apps using AI in seconds, airlines use it to generate websites and or apps for each destination with info such as things to do, where to stay, etc.
    But like you said it has to go up the ladder of command and it takes forever.
    We do smaller projects to compensate for the energy and time required to "catch the whale".

    1. 1

      Thanks 😀
      Waouh 8 months seems like forever!

  11. 1

    I haven't done much scraping, but how does the website you're scraping from know to block your IP?

    1. 1

      There are many different possibilities.

      Either the website has strong rate limits, for example, they limit at two requests per minute per IP address or 1000 request per 24h.

      Some websites also block requests that don't come from a real browser (They perform "browser-fingerprinting" to know this)

      If you want to know more about this, see this blog post: https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-without-getting-blocked

      1. 1

        Thank you, really interesting stuff.

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  12. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      Yep you're right.
      It was a small contract (but big for us), several hundred dollars per month that's why we didn't have to go through the whole budget approval process.

      I agree with you, selling to SMBs is a lot easier, but the thing is time will tell but I think enterprise customers are here to stay and have a very low churn!

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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