How do B2B startups sell to corporations?

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!

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.

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, but I worry that a lot of founders, especially technical ones, overlook staffing sales until later than they should.

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 valuable. Be prepared to do this for a long time.

That's how it works.

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 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.

If you haven’t come across his writings already, you might be interested in the insights from somebody named Mark Suster— he has experience has done a lot of thinking out loud about this kind of stuff

Check out his thinking about “elephants” vs “deer” vs “rabbits”: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer...

We sell to a very narrow segment. I've got Google alerts for loads of phrases and trade show names. We try to attend as many shows as we can. Sometimes with a booth, mostly without...just rocking our own gear and handing out cards. Some have a cheap way to add your logo somewhere to get awareness going.

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.

Hello!

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).

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...

This was a pretty good video on selling B2B from startup school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZi4kTJG-LE

1. Prospecting 2. Conversations 3. Closing 4. Promised land(revenue)

Slides of the talk: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9zlx72t9b4yk8d/Tyler%20Bosmeny%20...

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. 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.

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.

Read this

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...

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-...

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, 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.

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

Reading answers on this thread makes me wonder are those sales techniques really healthy to industry as a whole? No one questions that, and yet normalize probably unhealthy ways of selling utilities. "who golfs with the VP of Procurement" .. that's how corruption works as well, isn't it? Is that natural?

1 Call up your old Ivy classmates, they work in corpos

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.

Usually some combination of marketing and high-touch sales. Marketing makes buyers want to buy the product[1], and sales converts interest into a 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/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC119W/

Getting connected with some VARs (value added resellers) can be helpful. If you can provide some piece that enhances their package, you can often get included in as a part of some big deals that you might not otherwise have any shot at, and build up some connections that way. Once you're in, and people know you as somebody that does work in X niche, they can start coming to you to do additional customizations or follow-on work in that area.

It's not all roses; sometimes the extra layers of indirection between you and the actual customer can be a little onerous.

you 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.

Don’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.

Like 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...

You already got some great answers. If you need more book recommendations:

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...

You will have easier time if you narrow your market to a more uniform group, like "large hospitals", or "small law firms" - approaches that apply to one group will not work for another.

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.

As 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.

From my friends who’ve started B2B SaaS, most startups leverage connections and introductions from their investors.

I'd recommend taking a look at G2.com (where I work), the world's largest B2B Software and Services review platform....they've almost got 1 million reviews on the site and is a great way to get your product out there in front of buyers, alongside trusted reviews from users.

Find a partner.

Big companies or .gov are too expensive to for you to work with unless they are coming to you.

This is my chatbot sign up and support me :) https://mapletechno.com/landing.php

One tip that I see folks use. Encourage or enforce business email addresses for your trial accounts. This helps you target your cold emails (especially after trial expires).

Curious question: what's the name of your chatbot and how does your chatbot offering differ from what's offered by big players like Microsoft and Google.

Use all possible contact methods to approach the finalist! Like "The third door"!

>chatbot startup

Dead man walking.

Some 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").

Should have intimate connections in the Industry

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/25/amazon_fails_to_sto...