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Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

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Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#21
post #17

I do this for a living for other companies (no I do not want your business) but the most overlooked aspect of B2B selling is patience. Your prospect has many suitors vying for their attention, many bosses that must sign off an the sale, and a legal department and IT department that all want to feel included. Measure your pipeline/sales by quarter, not month. Patience. Patience. Patience. Build rapport, be useful and…

Depending on how big they’re talking, year long cycles are not uncommon.

Absolutely.

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#22
post #6

Never underestimate the capability and connections of a good sales person. There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to avoid them, a single experienced professional sales person can work wonders, even for a startup that is still a few pivots away from its final shape. This may not be the most HN-compatible opinion, and there are certainly many additional ways to sell to big companies, bu…

> There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to avoid them Do you have any tips?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to avoid them Do you have any tips?

I do. Don't shop price when hiring sales people. Hire the best available at the market rate.

Agreed. In most cases, you can afford to not hire the absolute best tech talent (assuming you aren't trying to break ground on new tech frontiers), but you should get the best sales talent possible, almost always.

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#24
As someone who gets sold to a lot, don’t under estimate the power of non decision makers in the process. If you can get the person who admins the website or leads the support team to buy in, you’ll have way more of a chance of convincing a VP to buy something. Just remember when you talk to these people, they aren’t the ones who can sign off and that’s ok. Give them tools to help pitch internal and be patient

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#26
The advice I'll give is based on my experience as cofounder of an early online banking technology company back in the mid-90s. We started with three people in rented class-C space and over seven years did high six-figure deals with large and small banks including Fleet, Bank of America, Citi and others.

There's not really a "how it works" for this. If I had to tell you how it works I'd say: it works by you making friends inside a corporation and convincing them to buy your product. Did that help? :). Probably not, so here's a little more: you preferably start with a member of your founding team who is articulate, outgoing, amiable and enjoys meeting and talking with people. That person needs to know the product and competitive environment cold, and it helps if they are passionate believers in the value prop. They need to have an identified list of target companies. They need to start calling and emailing and working contacts to get meetings. Eventually, if you actually have a value prop, one of those meetings will result in a relationship with someone who is willing to champion the product internally.

You then work outward from that contact, meeting with their colleagues, eventually identifying decision makers who control actual budget that can be used to pay you for something. If you do all this skillfully then you may get them to commit to a purchase. They will then have to shepherd you through a potentially long series of internal policy and legal hurdles. You may need to get on a qualified vendor list, or meet certain business stability criteria. You will likely need approvals of the deal from different departments, and their legal team will review and try to negotiate any agreements you request them to sign. You can see why developing internal champions is absolutely critical. In every single successful deal we did, by the time we got to the second or third round of meetings our internal champions were doing most of the selling.

The last thing I'll say is that it can be powerfully tempting to think you can purchase success at this by hiring the right magic person who can work their little black book and make sales happen. I tend to doubt it, and it definitely never worked for us. A founding sales person can make this happen. That's the person I'm talking about above. But just bringing in a hired gun is unlikely to result in success imo. I think you need to believe in your own thing enough, and be good enough at talking about it, that you can land your first few deals. Then when you do bring aboard professional sales people you'll have some actual idea of why people buy from you and how to systematize the approach. Good luck with it!

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#27
I am the CTO of a “unicorn” B2B tech company that focuses almost exclusively on the global 2000. Sales are 95% about relationships and 5% about Product. If you want to sell into Citibank, you go hire the one guy or girl who previously sold $20M of X to Citi, who golfs with the VP of Procurement and goes to Billy Joel concerts with the VP of infrastructure operations. Once you hire this person it feels like cheating, like playing super Mario brothers hitting warp zones, but alas I learned this is how business gets done. To get a PO you have to build a coalition: procurement, architecture, operations, finance. You almost certainly will also need a reseller who has an MSA (master services agreement) with the firm, so you don’t have to spend 6 months in due diligence with their lawyers. You have to give up ~15% to the VAR just for that facilitation, but it’s part of the cost of doing business.

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#28
post #12

Cold emails work. Find the best use case for the company. Attach a link or screenshot why/how it would help them. Take a screenshot of their site or chat box, then edit it with an example of your bot in action. Follow up once. Not too many times. Sometimes people ignore the first time because they're in their emails looking for something else. Some people prefer cold calling, but I find the success rates are much, mu…

I’d love to see stats that this works. I don’t believe it.

It seems unbelievable unless you’ve done sales. I used to do B2B sales for a VAR when I was in college in the 90s.

I’d spend about 30% of my time doing cold outreach. I’d get a conversion 2-3 times a week. One day I sold about $250k of high margin training vouchers (it was MS Office user certification iirc) through a single phone call. It literally paid for that year of college.

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#29
post #26

The advice I'll give is based on my experience as cofounder of an early online banking technology company back in the mid-90s. We started with three people in rented class-C space and over seven years did high six-figure deals with large and small banks including Fleet, Bank of America, Citi and others. There's not really a "how it works" for this. If I had to tell you how it works I'd say: it works by you making fri…

> But just bringing in a hired gun is unlikely to result in success imo.

A thousand times, this is right on. Hired gun sales folk are generally going to follow the path of least resistance--they will try to get other people at your startup to do the boring/hard work they themselves ought to be doing. Or try to push through deals with lousy margins to get their revenue commission, or a dozen other pathological things. Plus, if you (founder) can't sell the thing, it's going to be super, super tricky to identify someone else who is even capable.

Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

#30
post #17

I do this for a living for other companies (no I do not want your business) but the most overlooked aspect of B2B selling is patience. Your prospect has many suitors vying for their attention, many bosses that must sign off an the sale, and a legal department and IT department that all want to feel included. Measure your pipeline/sales by quarter, not month. Patience. Patience. Patience. Build rapport, be useful and…

Depending on how big they’re talking, year long cycles are not uncommon.

12 months from first contact to first dollar--nevermind first dollar above recouping costs--seems a deliriously optimistic goal in certain industries.
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