Enterprise Sales for Hackers
- Champion – Find someone inside your target company that deeply knows the problem you are solving at their company. Find them early and build strong relationships with them. The will champion your product at their company.
- Detractor – Avoid people that don’t want your solution deployed for whatever reason. You need enough champions to overrule any detractors influence.
- IT – IT guys are usually not the people you want to talk to unless the product is directly something they’ll be using. They usually don’t have a good pulse of the needs of their company’s customers.
- Procurement – After convincing the right stakeholders, you’ll most likely be passed on to procurement where they’ll negotiate price. Usually, enterprise level pricing is marked up so you can discount heavily. 80% is standard practice. Factor that in when you’re developing your pricing point.
- Legal – They’ll mark up your contract. Expect it. Let go of issues that aren’t important to you and have a frank and authentic conversation about areas that are important to you.
- Finance – Generally won’t deal with finance guys but they generally care about CAPEX (Capital Expenditure – Considered asset and depreciated) or OPEX (Operating Expenditure – Considered ongoing expense)
- Map out the key stakeholders in the target company.
- Build strong relationships with your champions.
- Hire the right type of salespeople. There are enterprise experienced sales executives and there are gritty sales hackers that are used to uncertainty and “figuring” it out.
- Use different people in your company to match with the same type of people in your target company. I.e. engineers with their IT and security. Your product people with their business unit leaders. Have one person (account exec) overseeing everything.
- Nurture relationships. Companies are just made up of people.