From my friends who’ve started B2B SaaS, most startups leverage connections and introductions from their investors.
Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#32I 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,…
100% this - seeing it first hand. It's truly like magic or some kind of cheat code.
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#33Don’t think of sales as a “funnel” process. Think of it as a process of education and patience. Your job in sales is to get to know the right people at all the customers you want to sell to and to then nurture them patiently until they are ready to buy from you.
Big companies can be sold to by tiny startups. Finding the right person is a grind - no easy way about it. Once you’ve found them, it is truly about building the relationship and then letting them guide you through their purchasing process.
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#34I 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,…
100% this - seeing it first hand. It's truly like magic or some kind of cheat code.
People don’t realize that big orgs are not markets, they are planned economies. There may be 500k people there, but 6 make the decisions for any particular thing.
You need the magic salesperson or lobbyist because they know the right 6. Some things get sold to the CEO, other things can’t be because the people downstream have another agenda.
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#35you need content. if you're not sure where to start, checkout this article on movement first content: https://www.animalz.co/blog/movement-first/
Wistia's CEO recently posted about mistakes made early on, and a better approach to building affinity vs awareness through relationships. https://twitter.com/csavage/status/1180148970825437191
Sales matters, patience matters, but content brings people already seeking a solution to you...and/or agitates a pain point they've forgotten.
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#36Like many have told , hiring a good sales person is going to work wonders. If you must sell stuff yourself , do yourself a favour and ingrain this [0] before you go wasting time on folks inside a megacorp. We wasted 9 months focusing on the wrong person in a big sale ..
[0] https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/identify-sales-prospects-infl...
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#37The 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…
This is all good advice.
A note jumping through the legal/paperwork hurdles with large companies: be prepared for it to take a long time. A very long time in some cases.
It all depends on who you’re working with, how big the company is, and how much money the deal is worth.
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#38Some terms to get you started:
- outside sales executive (e.g., the person who visits the customer, they typically work from coworking or home-offices)
- inside sales executive (e.g., a sales support person, typically doesn't travel and works at coworking or home-office full-time)
- outside sales engineer (e.g., a customer-facing technical person who answers questions and helps sell solutions with the sales exec)
- master agreements (generally-agreeded terms and conditions)
- Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
- Letter of Intent (LOI) - before final quote & contract
- Purchase Orders (PO's)
- Request For Proposal (RFP)
- Request For Quotation (RFQ)
and lengthy sales cycles that often take 6 months to 2 years, depending on the product or service
Another way to get in is start immediately under a master agreement and do consulting-ish tasks, and gradually sell more solutions and temporary staff roles as they come up ("building a beachhead").
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#39I took a peak at the OP's post history (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945426), it seems this is their chatbot (for FB): https://mapletechno.com/landing.php
Unless you have moved the chatbot to a different website since then, based on the product as is, it would be better to focus on a) translating the website into English and b) finding some beta testers and users.
I guess most of the replies here are based on your use of the word coporation, hence they're sharing advice about lanfing multi-figure deals but realistically, the target market for FB chatbots are small to medium business owners.
Re: Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?
#40As a related question to this: we're successfully selling into corps but it takes 6-12 months. Has anyone figured out the under $500 credit card thing with seat pricing or know good examples of it (where the ACVs are still high)?
We'd like to land-and-expand since our product has to be used by teams but I'd love to get the sales cycle shorter.