Government is totally different than enterprise. Government is extremely price conscious, and may even have regulatory requirements that dictate a purchasing process. There may be formal request processes, approvals, public hearings and comment processes, etc. There can be formalized criteria that dictate who wins an RFP. If you try to lump enterprise sales and government sales in the same boat, you will be in for failure.<p>And the whole limit that this article is talking about exploiting, of sticking under a specific amount... That is called frequently called "DOA" - Delegation of Authority. And the trick stated, to keep your price under a specific DOA level, is questionable. People who aren't trusted to spend more than $500 also likely do not have a large budget, so your $500 a month would kill their yearly budget, and you would lose the sale anyway, or at best become a target for cost reductions in the future.<p>Sure, using tricks like that might quicken a sales cycle and avoid annoying bureaucracy. But in the long run, you will still lose. You are a pain point in the budget of a 1st line manager, instead of a prized vendor in the large budget of a higher manager. When the day comes that the corporation challenges all its managers to shave 15% of their yearly budget, guess what list you end up on? Trust me, you do NOT want your monthly bill to be falling in the budget of a low-level manager.<p>Instead, Deal with the pain. Put up with the bureaucracy. Do the PO process. Get in as a line item on a budget higher in the hierarchy. You then are really considered a cost-effective solution, and higher-level leaders don't like admitting mistakes, so they will put their political clout behind keeping you in that organization.
> Stop thinking like a human. Think like a corporation. Corporations are like humans whose smallest increment of currency is the largest paycheck you've ever received.<p>This is a pretty important point. The financial scale that a company operates at can be hard to reason about if you aren't involved in that part of its operations. Buying $500 licenses for an IDE in my department seems prohibitively expensive from my perspective, but for the company it probably costs less than the furniture in the office.
I did a few enterprise sales, e.g. to Deutsche Post AG or Siemens, and I have to disagree to point 7 here. At first German companies do not sent a check in an envelope, but use Germans much better banking network for wire transfer. Unlike US direct debit and direct credit are free of charge and execute within a day between two banks, and nearly instant at same bank. The other thing about point 7 is a "trick" I learned more then 30 years ago: Offer 2% discount, if customer pays within 7 days. Everybody who can count will do, even enterprise.
I have ZERO CLUE and or social skills to seal the deal with Fortune 500 companies.<p>I am basically a solo founder (have a tech partner, but he's 25% in vs. me 500% in) whose work grabs the attention of the biggest companies in the world. I publish my work on the iNet and or demo it and in doing so VP and higher ups of Fortune 50 to 500 companies reach out wanting to do business and or it could be just flirt and or figure out how my partner and I achieved what we have accomplished.<p>Examples...
1. Two months after announcing our work we were invited out to the valley to demo our tech to an entity out there. They were total jerks to us and baited us to tell them how we accomplished X. That was a low day .. felt like we flew out to the valley to get kick in the stomach by a giant.<p>2. Fast forward 16 months later and just about every massive tech company has reached out to us showing some level of interest. Not sure how they find out about us (a east coast start-up), but they do and we get excited but then demoralized as nothing happens.<p>3. Most recently I demoed our tech at a hackathon. After my demo a VP of Fortune 500 company was super excited and said i want to use this at my end of the year board meeting. Ok, awesome let's make this happen I thought. Though first big wig you will need to sign a document and half licensing agreement. Oops that small document that protected us killed the deal and well NOW I AM CRAZY TIRED OF DEALING WITH THESE UPS AND DOWNS.<p>We can and have a history of making cool things, but totally lack the social skills and business acumen. It time to hang things up and possibly open source our work. Many companies bottom lines will hurt once we and if we open source it. Though of course we will remain living our meager lives.<p>Done starting up after 10 years, broke, in debt, 4o years old and family-less (she is tired of waiting for it to happen too.. back to the corporate world so i can have that family ive always wanted).
<i>A typical phrase you will hear from customers at this point is "We don't want to be your biggest client."</i><p>This is not something you can get around easily. Some companies have strict rules such as "we can't be more than 30% of your revenue".<p>The reason behind that is that if a customer represents a very large amount of your revenue, you can be considered as a <i>de facto</i> subsidiary.<p>The real way around it is to work with a larger intermediary company.<p>Patrick's story is interesting but it won't work against hard formal processes.
So where should you draw the "Call for a quote" line? I'm a few months from launching a B2B tool with a great value (improve telco tech support efficiency by a good factor - I've had a prototype install running at one company for a few years and they simply cannot operate without it).<p>I'm thinking of SaaS at launch. My lowest monthly plan is probably $250 to 490. (In addition to a free "personal" edition for people playing with projects.) My average price point I think will be in the 2k to 5k a month. I have a verbal commit from a medium sized customer at $10k.<p>How much do I publish online? Do I run the risk of alienating one segment by simply being available to another?
I'd say there are many different levels of "enterprisey" sales, depending on the deal size and whether you're selling to a small, medium, or large entity, and whether it's public or private. A competitive bidding process is nothing like a discretionary purchase.<p>Pros:
* Sometimes they're not spending their own money. Especially if they're spending grant money, simply price your package for the amount of the grant. They may have no incentive to save money if it's use-it-or-lose-it.
* Enterprises or gov't sometimes have plenty of money to throw around, especially in the above scenario. Come up with as many frivolous "add-on" features as you can, put ridiculous price tags on it, and watch clients inexplicably check all the boxes. SMS notifications for only $5000/year? Deal!
* Big government contracts may be for 5 years of service paid upfront. Think about what that does to your cashflow.<p>Cons:
* Your soul withers away.
I like the bit about reacting to sign-ups from boeing.com emails, I wonder if anyone out there is curating a "whale list" that gives the domains you should care about.
Nice piece, but selling to enterprise customers and selling to the government only tangentially overlap. While most of the advice is transportable, the number one rule of selling to any government -- federal, state, or local -- is <i>get on the approved vendor list</i>. Getting on GSA is fundamental; getting on as many state-level purchasing schedules as possible is the next step. Unfortunately, this almost certainly means you'll end up giving a chunk of revenue to companies whose sole business model is "we're a GSA-certified vendor" and who will handle the regulatory runarounds for you. But the rewards are significant -- schedule vendors are often exempt from RFP requirements, so you can skip the usual pain point of writing RFQ responses and bidding for business, and get right to the selling.
"common engineer misapprehension that BFE sales requires playing golf, inviting clients to steak dinners, and having budgets beyond to reach of small businesses."<p>Can engineers not play golf? I'd like to read a post on how to get in on <i>this</i> sales process -- ultimately, that's always where the money is!
The UK government is trying hard to remedy a lot of the issues raised here for software development. GCloud (catalog of SaaS services - once you are an approved supplier theoretically your "ally" patio11 suggests merely has to click and purchase is real. A similar setup for software development is underway right now.<p>What I am saying is, the essential problem of sales to enterprise is still making something someone wants, and finding that someone and persuading them to sign.<p>Edit: not disagreeing with anything patio11 says - in fact I think I am supporting the main point - government and enterprise sales ain't so different and they are gettin more similar each day.
I didn't see where he says "don't sell to them, sell to the organizations that sell to them". There's an entire ecosystem of resellers/VARs/distributors/etc that, for a cut, will shield you from many of the issues you'll face in the Gov or Enterprise world.<p>For example, I've been "sold" as a consultant via a government subcontractor(1) that took care of bidding, billing, contracts and renewals, etc and simply paid me the rate I asked for. Similarly, I've had products that a distributor took on and did all the legwork to get on the GSA lists so all we had to do was fulfillment and support. They would even structure the financials such that it met whatever DOA requirement the end customer needed, but paid us up front.<p>(1) FWIW, the entity that subcontracted me was another small biz that was taking advantage of the "8A" category of small business set asides. If you fit in one of the categories, it might be an option as well. This is obviously a US-centric option.<p><a href="https://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/8a-business-development-program" rel="nofollow">https://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/8a-busines...</a>
How about not selling to these guys, period. I just have this feeling that once you take money from a Fortune company, you are their employee. Same goes for the government.
Wow, running a business in a third-world country without ~zero-cost over-night electronic money transfer between banks must suck... sending paper checks, by snail mail, in 2014?<p>"they will ... send a check to an address picked randomly from the set of them printed on the invoice. (Make sure you give them one easy, obvious option for where to send the checks, and that that mailbox is monitored for discrete envelopes containing paper worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars. You can get a check reissued but it will be extra pain and take another several weeks.)"