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!
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, but I worry that a lot of founders, especially technical ones, overlook staffing sales until later than they should.
That's how it works.
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.
Check out his thinking about “elephants” vs “deer” vs “rabbits”: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer...
Once you get a fish on, you'll need a professional sales person to carry the deal forward. Meeting, review, reply, next meeting, follow-up, etc.
Cold prospecting from directories and trade-orgs is another channel. Call,call,call. Then call some more.
And keep pumping the newsletter, opt-in only, keep content fresh.
I too am working on a chatbot startup, that's b2b: https://insideropinion.com/
The path I'm working:
1. Identify a clear problem / use case
2. Determine inside of a corporation who makes purchasing decisions to solve said problem / use case
3. Search LinkedIn for contacts at companies that fit into that role
4. Reach out over LinkedIn and / or use system such as Hunter.io to connect over emails
5. Goal is a video demo / discussion, pitch the product and show them how you think it can help
6. If you make a connection, ask if they know others that may be interested
7. Attend trade shows for your segment if possible
Main thing is follow up, follow up, follow up. Sometimes on my 3rd or 4th follow up I'll get a hit. Ask questions about their business and be as clear as possible. Conversions should be anywhere from 1% - 20% depending on the market segment (I'm not sure what yours is).
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...
1. Prospecting 2. Conversations 3. Closing 4. Promised land(revenue)
Slides of the talk: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9zlx72t9b4yk8d/Tyler%20Bosmeny%20...
If I had to choose one approach I'd say demo your service for months so they can get accustomed to it. Most companies I know give demos for very short time-spans. If you give a one month demo the client might not even get the chance to look at it because he has fifty other things to do. Let him get accustomed in using it, making it a part of his workflow.
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.
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-...
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, much lower and you can't convey the same information. I think cold calling is only popular because it's easy to monitor failure rates.
2 let your VC do the above
3 crowd favorite, let your VC force other companies he already invested in/sits on board to integrate your product and then do number 2
But in your case number 1 should be change your name and language, unless you are looking for government (NSA/CIA) contract.
For B2B it usually takes three months from first contact to closed deal. That means you need a healthy pipeline of deals to keep the cash flowing.
Crossing the Chasm[2] is a must-read and classic book about marketing and selling B2B software.
[1] As I say, make buyers want to pay: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/buyers/
It's not all roses; sometimes the extra layers of indirection between you and the actual customer can be a little onerous.
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.
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.
[0] https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/identify-sales-prospects-infl...
Major account sales by Rackham is a classic
How to sell from Entrepid is an algorithm you can follow https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...
Connections are important but in some areas you may have to hire a lobbyist to get them, while in other areas you just need to show up at a trade convention and chat people up.
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.
Big companies or .gov are too expensive to for you to work with unless they are coming to you.
Dead man walking.
- 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").
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/25/amazon_fails_to_sto...