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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?

#91

Post by Amygaz »

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.

I don’t know about that. I am think they call it a business meeting, and they’re all set...

There are certainly some restrictions for audit purpose, and a bunch of loopholes to make sure business people can keep doing business stuff the way it as always been.

Most places have no alcohol on premise policies, but that doesn’t include the CEO suite.

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

#92

Post by bayesian_horse »

rolltiide wrote: post #55
bayesian_horse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious: Did you ever strike on any iron?

Yes and because of past product launches and revenue numbers and exits people pay me to hear what I have to say So the economical nature of that reality became the idea behind our “advisory” business, exhibit a

Thank you for your reply.

For me it's unfortunately the case that I have lots of ideas and don't execute on them. Mostly, I think, because of doubts about getting to something profitable.

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

#93

Post by edsim »

All great answers thus far. First, it is not for faint of heart. Second, if you get in door, learn how to say no as not every corporate customer is a good one - some can suck you dry and have you customize feature after feature so you need to be strong.

As a previous commenter mentioned, understanding what your product is and your go-to-market motion is super important. Are you a bottom up developer or user-led adoption with ideas to expand or are you going pure top-down enterprise? Either will take time but I've worked with many a company that successfully went from bottom up and generated significant enterprise sales like https://Snyk.io.

If you choose to go top down, find advisors or investors who have relationships at some of your corporate prospects. Going top down super early requires relationships to get in the door. Second, you have to figure out exactly who in the organization you need to get to and understand what is their pain and how you can uniquely solve it. I've seen way too many early stage founders get in the door to explore and they end up hunting for dodo birds - they're extinct and don't exist.

There is so much more on this topic and one method I advocate is focusing on enterprise design partnerships vs. selling which has more of a partnering model than a transatcional one. More on that here in a SaaStr podcast I was on - https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-190-ed-sim-founder-gp-...

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

#94

Post by grepthisab »

Briel wrote: post #39

I 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 base…

Paradoxically if this is the OPs business, in my experience they should greatly, greatly increase price to increase chances of selling to an enterprise.

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

#95

Post by Jorge1o1 »

Lordarminius wrote: post #78
wolco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish I could offer more votes. Having the right sales (not marketing) person can be the difference between success and something else. The right sales person can target and create a relationship the wrong person will just waste resources. The most successful companies founders I've seen combo of sales and technical. If you are a technical solo founder get an experienced sales vp and give them 20%. Marketing is usuall…

Just curious because I've come across differing definitions of this. How would you define the differentiate between sales and marketing ?

The way I was taught is that Marketing is really about communicating the value that your product creates for the customer, and then capturing the company’s portion of that value created. Some textbooks call this Dual Value Creation.

Sales is a part of marketing, in the theory, and they actually do a bit of both, communicating and capturing value. Communicating when they talk to prospects, capturing when they close deals.

The typical responsibility of Sales is to guide prospects/customers through the “sales funnel” or if you want to be really snazzy, the McKinsey “consumer decision journey.” Actively pushing new clients closer and closer to a deal, cross-selling and upselling current clients, etc.

But you wouldn’t expect salespeople to be writing advertising copy or making webpages, that’s the job of the broader marketing team

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

#96

Post by jimnotgym »

codeisawesome wrote: post #70
jimnotgym wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the above, plus vanity projects. If certain people want a system, in many enterprises everyone below will bend over backwards to get it for them. I will give you an example. A few years ago every c had a BlackBerry. IT ran BlackBerry business server alongside Exchange. Everyone was happy. One day a non-exec got an iPhone from his other job and wanted his emails from your co on the same device. There is no way…

How do these people become so powerful..? What do they have to give in exchange?

In the case of non-execs, they are often insisted on by investors. They are seasoned board members to keep the execs in order, that kind of thing. They have little operational interest in the company, and instead bring 'corporate governance'. They have a part to play in managing the board, not the company. They make investors feel better about investing in a company run by some technology upstart with no track record. In the UK they would probably be senior (perhaps semi-retired) auditors or corporate lawyers. They may also be people with a track record in that industry, designed to open doors.

Institutional investors tend to be pretty conservative, and these are their sort of people.

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

#97

Post by tixocloud »

user5994461 wrote: post #90
sandstrom wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

Across the plethora of system monitoring apps who all claim they can do everything, how do you decide and identify what fits?

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

#98

Post by tixocloud »

louisswiss wrote: post #82

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/epis…

Thanks for sharing.

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

#99

Post by soumyadeb »

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…

While this is broadly true, how you sell also depends on the buying persona you are selling to. If you are selling to IT you absolutely need to have a deep relationship. IT people are generally risk-averse and hence relationships matter a lot. On the other hand, if you are selling to some business units like marketing, you can actually pull off a sale by just marketing (not surprising) to them. A lot of marketing folks are young, have budgets and are used to buying things online with CC. And if you are lucky, they might be owning the website and can get things deployed without ever talking to IT. This is the exercise you need to do. Understand your buyer persona very well. Accordingly, you need to decide to invest in hiring a traditional enterprise sales guy (high touch wine-dine selling) vs a marketing-driven sales process (emails, ads, inside-sales calling etc)

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

#100

Post by tarsinge »

soumyadeb wrote: post #99
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…

While this is broadly true, how you sell also depends on the buying persona you are selling to. If you are selling to IT you absolutely need to have a deep relationship. IT people are generally risk-averse and hence relationships matter a lot. On the other hand, if you are selling to some business units like marketing, you can actually pull off a sale by just marketing (not surprising) to them. A lot of marketing fol…

Interesting, this is also my experience. I would add that in addition to marketing teams what also worked for us is selling directly to innovation/digital teams, or even core business ones, because like you said young folks are used to buy SaaS online. The key is bypassing IT, because as soon as it goes through them you are in for that big sale process greatly described by the GP post.
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