Selling to Enterprise When You’re a Startup

In a startup, you’re either making bullets or shooting bullets. If you’re making the bullets, you’re part of the engineering team. If you’re shooting bullets, you’re part of the sales team. And even though you’re in a startup, you want to be shooting those bullets into enterprise-level targets. Because nothing is going to make you feel as good as being able to walk back to the engineering team, a signed contract in hand, boom, the deal is signed!

But how can your little, no-name startup get the attention of an enterprise firm that’s already doing business with the big guys—some of whom may be your competitors?

Startups Selling to Enterprise

Watch Part One: The Nature of Sales Has Changed. How to Deal

One key tactic is using the fact that you’re small and nimble to your advantage. You’re ready and willing to take on many challenges that a more established company is going to have to run through risk assessment first. You’re mostly cool with spending 18 hours writing code if it’ll land you this prestige customer because you’re betting it will lead to 10x others via word-of-mouth and a well-placed customer testimonial on your site.

Watch Part Two: Which Projects Do You Go For?

Watch Part Three: Warm Up to Cold Calling

Success in the startup-enterprise relationship takes much more than a can-do attitude, brain, and technical know-how. You have to deal with real objections, people who want to see you fail, and the daily worries of scaling your startup.

Watch Part Four: Selling to Darth Vader, or Zen and the Art of Overcoming Objections

We’ve compiled a video of real-world advice from our CEO Matthew Bellows on how to break through by Finding a Champion, how to Sell to Darth Vader and how to Assess Whether Your Proposed Project Is Worth the Effort.

Watch Part Five: Sign on the Dotted Line

Which aspects of Sales for Startups do you want to know more about? Let us know in the comments.