Selling Your Software To Businesses - TwilioCon 2012 presentation

The video was very good here is what I wrote down from it:<p>- Pricing page with 4 plans. Try to price each plan to a different customer in your targeted market what it is worth to them, not what it costs you.<p>- Annual billing: Ask via a 1 time special email after the person has started using it and likes it<p>- Have live chat to make more sales<p>- Email more during the trial period at least 6-8 times in the first month<p>- Offer a free month "course" via email, on the 4th email or so start working in how your product solves the pain/problem.<p>- Send a "rescue" email if the person seems like they have become busy and might fall away<p>- Some bigger organizations will want a sla &#38; support agreement even if it is just you already working on the system fixing things anyway.<p>- Offer a Service Level Agreement if someone asks for it, charge more ask for a 1 yr commitment<p>- Offer a support / maintenance contract, ask for a 1yr commitment on the regular fee to lock customer in.<p>- Offer industry options, HIPPA, etc charge more<p>- Practice saying "I can do that with a 1yr commitment" when customer ask for something special<p>- Highly consider getting errors and omissions insurance<p>- Don't negotiate sales based upon your cost. Don't even mention your cost it is not relevant. What matters is how much the customer will 'save' or 'make' with your product.

I think the presentation does an amazing job informing entrepreneurs how to sell to companies once they're in your sales pipeline. How do you get their attention in the first place? I asked Bill Campbell and Ben Horowitz this question at an entrepreneurship forum and they responded press and business connections. I imagine that SEO, search marketing, conferences, trade shows, print ads, and viral marketing could be helpful. Has anyone had success using other marketing methods to sell to large companies?

Patio11 is kinda cute in a geeky kind of way (woman in the closet about her predilection towards nerdy types...excuse the lack of PCness Patrick)....<p>Anyhoo, on a different note, the material on hybrid sales was most interesting.<p>I believe it was David (Skok) who mentioned how much adding just one additional touch balloons customer acquisition costs considerably.<p><a href="http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/business-models/the-touchless-conversion/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/business-models/the-touchles...</a><p>IMHO, an unaccounted touch in the sales process is probably one of the hidden costs that harms new businesses the most. The fact is, many business owners just don't track these steps in their workflow or sales process (failing to understand that when they want to scale, they'll need to add more staff and HR costs considerably)

Are there any twilio based businesses left to start? It always struck me a cool technology.<p>Perhaps a service to automatically call customers when something is cancelled due to weather, etc?