HACKER Q&A
📣 slowenough

Advice on B2B Sales?


I developed a product that I wish to sell to business. I wouldn't say this MVC is 100% perfect. Still some issues (especially around typing on mobile), but it's nearly (or past) ready for reaching out.

Anyone who had experience on either side of that B2B sales process, please jump in a share what you think I ought to know.

I'm looking to be successful at licensing, selling outright or selling as a service this product.

You can try the service at https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz

It's developed with security in mind, but in reality there may be a better / more nuanced application.

If it helps, for background, this was about 6 months of FT work, self funded based on my previous contracting revenue. The idea came from a goal I have to build a web scraping platform with work reuse and this is a layer of that, that I discovered is also called "remote browser isolation". Finding out a particular layer could be factored out as a product gave me ideas about self-funding more runway, as well as possibly launching a side-business in and of itself. Right now, my TODO list is working out the remaining typing bugs on mobile, and providing some file upload/download support via a secure web gateway (basically displaying PDFs as PNGs).

I haven't done this before and there's lots of uncertainty so I think it's a good time to seek structured advice from people who know.


  👤 q-base Accepted Answer ✓
Quite the coincidence as I was just contemplating writing a bit about enterprise sales. So a few points after having been on both the buyer and seller side of the table.

People generally never understands: "This can be configured" or "This is a prototype, it will have all this functionality in x months". Investors trained in the act of spotting future possibility of very technical people MIGHT understand it. But never count on it. SHOW - don't tell, whenever possible.

Therefore always try to be as specific as possible and present a solution that is as close to the buyers pain-point as possible. Research the hell out of your potential customers and present your product in a way that solves their current problems. You can succeed in selling "future potential" but it is a lot harder, especially if the current proposition does not solve any pain-points out of the box.

If you get a chance to present your product then ask a lot of questions up front to tailor your presentation as much as possible to the audience present. Perhaps even prepare your presentation to be able to go more or less technical depending on audience. Or if the product can be used in several ways then prepare to go either way and ask at the presentation what the buyers usual way of working is and go that way.


👤 mtmail
100+ comments on "Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?" two weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21367151

👤 notahacker
The starting point is figuring out 'who might want to buy this, and why'

👤 haimau
I used to work at a company (they also dealt with stuff that required NATO clearance) that had extremely restricted internet access in order to protect the internal network. To access the internet each time we logged into a virtual machine controlled by IT and each file downloaded was cleared by IT separately. This obviously slowed us down a lot and since I was an external (student) consultant there we shifted to using laptops + hotspot to actually do our work.

👤 qnsi
https://www.holloway.com/s/syllabus-b2b-sales

Maybe this is helpful for you


👤 slowenough
Sorry, "MVP" in case it's not clear.