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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?

#81

Post by elorant »

sandstrom wrote: post #79
elorant wrote: post #71

Contrary to the main sentiment in this thread I've done B2B sales with no prior connections whatsoever. My approach is threefold. Build something that either doesn't exist or is considerably better and cheaper than competition. Give amply time for demoing, like six months free with no strings attached. Be patient. If I had to choose one approach I'd say demo your service for months so they can get accustomed to it. M…

I guess this assumes that the product can be used by a single person, or a small group of people, and don’t require a lot of setup. For example systems monitoring, or a group-wide collaboration tool, makes things harder. I still like the idea though!

Yes, that's true. I should also mention that it applies to product/services in the region of a few hundred bucks annually. I guess you can't sell a $30k/year contract just by showing a demo.

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

#82

Post by louisswiss »

I've built and sold a few companies doing enterprise sales. Now I run a small course teaching founders the basics of early stage sales.

Won't plug that here, but I think you'd get a lot out of this interview I did with Stephanie Hurlburt, cofounder of Binomial, where she explains how she learned to close 6 and 7-figure deals as a technical founder with no business background: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to-close-7...

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

#83

Post by unionpivo »

elorant wrote: post #68
Spooky23 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And why would that guy work for you/me and not for another big corp with deep pockets that can hire him for top dollars? I mean I get it that sales are all about connections but let's not pretend that everyone in here can go sailing with a 10M sailboat in order to meet the guy who knows a guy who knows a guy.

you don't need to start selling to Citibank to suceed. there are many smaller corrporations, where man to know is just CEO and maybe 1 or two others.

And then build from there.

Edit: Also your existing clients are your best "comercial". If you can get one CEO/CTO/(...) to make a phone call for you, this can help a lot. For above your product kind of cant suck (90% of IT related stuff getting sold to enterprises is overpriced crap)

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

#84

Post by majc2 »

uchman wrote: post #62
cloudking wrote: post #2

Go on LinkedIn, find contacts, email/call them to explain why your product would help them and their business, set up a demo over video chat. Pitch them your product, why it would benefit them and try to secure a deal. After you've got some sales under your belt, sponsor a booth at a tradeshow relevant to your market. Demo your product in-person, collect leads and follow up for more sales. Rinse and repeat.

Skeptical about LinkedIn these days as it might be overused. Even I tend to receive lot of pitches these days and generally distrust the medium.

Like you, I distrust cold linkedin (and cold emails).

But - we are not everybody.

If you're targeting someone you think has got a specific pain that you can credibly help with - a well crafted, unique and relevant pitch, with appropriately timed followups does work for a significant amount of people.

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

#85

Post by brey »

siruncledrew wrote: post #37
markbnj wrote: 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…

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.

I've been through deals with large financial institutions that have taken 2-3 years from an initial incredibly positive demo and PoC and strong buying signals, through to a signed contract.

IMO going through that successfully is also sending a signal that you have sufficient endurance - there's a large risk for a corporate to sign up for a long contract with a startup, they don't know how long you're going to be in business for. If the startup doesn't have the appetite to spend 2-3 years to get a contract over the line, then they aren't going to be a stable partner for the long term.

You need to also have sufficient numbers of small/medium scale deals so you're not 100% relying on elephant hunting.

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

#87

Post by ohples »

vinay_ys wrote: post #74
crmd wrote: post #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,…

Most big corps have anti-corruption policies that prevent decision makers or key influencers from letting sales people take them to golfing or to concerts.

No they have policies against paying for those concerts or golf games.

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

#88

Post by user5994461 »

rakkhi wrote: post #58
markbnj wrote: 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…

Agree with this and it seems like a really hard process. How is it that every enterprise I have worked at then seems to have one of everything and so many redundant tools. Is it just accumulation of crap over time? Good relationships that cut short this process? Straight up corruption?

If you were talking about 20 different companies, would you expect all of them to use the same tools? Of course not.

A large corporation is like many small companies, under one umbrella with more or less cohesion, so they often have different tools.

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

#89

Post by user5994461 »

Androider wrote: post #45
not_a_moth wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How exactly does that work with the reseller? This is a person you pay ~15% to, and then technically your product is sold under their brand to the big corp? If so, how are they found typically? New to b2b and figuring things out.

You don't need to find them, the decision maker in the corp tells their procurement people they want to buy your product, the procurement people tell their approved reseller to reach out to you (someone like these fine folks https://www.trustradius.com/value-added-resellers-vars ) for the purchase order. The VAR gives you the PO, you bill the VAR, and the VAR just hands over the license key or whatever to the corp, a…

Was surprised to find out from that page that CDW is a VAR. I used to buy network equipment from them. https://www.cdw.com/

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

#90

Post by user5994461 »

sandstrom wrote: post #79
elorant wrote: post #71

Contrary to the main sentiment in this thread I've done B2B sales with no prior connections whatsoever. My approach is threefold. Build something that either doesn't exist or is considerably better and cheaper than competition. Give amply time for demoing, like six months free with no strings attached. Be patient. If I had to choose one approach I'd say demo your service for months so they can get accustomed to it. M…

I guess this assumes that the product can be used by a single person, or a small group of people, and don’t require a lot of setup. For example systems monitoring, or a group-wide collaboration tool, makes things harder. I still like the idea though!

Counter point: I've been doing integration for system monitoring things, this can be fully integrated in a few days.

The new trendy (and really great tool) is datadog, a HN company. They went out the window when the trial expired after 1 week and their asshole sales were at war against any extension. How am I supposed to demo the tool and sell it internally when it can't even be accessed?

As if it were not enough, they kept calling day after day to try force the sale. Then they got banned soon afterwards, after some mid level folks got a hold of both of these practices. Nobody wants to deal with that.

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