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Arish Ali
@arish · 1:07

3 Lessons for Enterprise Startup Sales

article image placeholder3 Lessons
In my previous startup, Scawa, I spent a lot of time selling to enterprise customers. Scawa was a mobile commerce platform vendor, and we had to sell it to large retailers and convince them to use our platform. We were an kind of an unproven early stage startup at that time. With the new technology when people were not even convinced of mobile commerce, will it even be a big part of ecommerce down the line?

Based on my personal experience selling a mobile commerce platform to retailers in the early days of mobile. #sales #statups @build

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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 2:23

1. Be an Elephant Hunter

So the very first lesson is to be an elephant Hunter, which means to go after the big name customers, not the small ones. While smaller customers might seem easier to sell to as a small startup, the sooner you convince a large customer to trust you, the sooner you get credibility and it significantly simplifies the subsequent sales process
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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 1:57

2. Let your founders do the selling, not a VP of Sales

So if you get that one meeting with them to make your pitch, you'll have to make it count. They will ask you questions about technology that only your CTO will be able to answer. And if you cannot answer those questions on the spot, it's over. The sales cycle is over. They will also want to know that they're talking to a team that is really passionate about the problem space and that this team will make it their own problem to help them
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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 1:34

3. Focus your sales outreach to business and not IT

But to make headway to get even to be heard properly, it is always a better idea to reach out to your contacts, to your network, to your sales process on the business side of the documentation that you're targeting and not the It side to start with
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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 0:13

Let me know what your experience has been with startup enterprise sales?

So those are my three lessons from my days doing Enterprise Sales. I hope you find them useful. Happy to answer any questions about them or have a further discussion. Just reply below and let me know. Thank you
@Howie
Howie Rubin
@Howie · 0:44
Try and bring the room to a point where they're asking you questions and determine based on those questions what you think their needs could be so that you could very quickly show whomever you're presenting to that you have solutions to fulfill their needs
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@Dwarak_V
Dwarak Varadarajan
@Dwarak_V · 1:30

It's a really nice Swell from you Sir #motivated

It's great to hear from you. Sorry, because it's been a long time we haven't met. I'm sure that Scott is the most company which I have made aid internship, and it's seriously unfortunate for me once I come internship in Scaven, you guys have left Skava and I totally missed. And I heard so many tales of you and Suzanne from the person who are working there
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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 4:47

@arish But what if your founders don't understand sales well?

And we weren't really able to get back into those companies after we had done that proof of concept. So I thought that was a major error on their part. And I think had they known a little bit more about the sales process, then we would have done a little bit better. I would have come back, and I would have personally said, okay, we need to set expectations
@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 2:11

@Phil - a POC can be then kiss of death for a startup. Stay away from it!

Hey, Phil, I agree with you. I think a proof of concept in enterprise sales is basically a failure of sales. When you're not able to actually sell the product, the service that you're offering, then it's kind of like a consolation prize. Okay, we'll image do it for free, or we'll do something very small for you. And if you like it, then you can take it for a startup
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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 1:06

POC = we didn't sell well. BRILLIANT!

Something you said there I think is really brilliant for anybody in a startup when they're approaching the clients. And that's to think of it, if you get pushed into a POC situation that it's really a failure to have communicated the value and the technical know how of what the value of your product or service would be in the visualization. Honestly, I agree with you
@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 1:26

Going through IT can mean a trip through the RFP process.

And they could just bog down the entire company for two or three months while you guys put together a cohesive RFP response to business, you're not guaranteed to get. So for me going down that it route and getting that RFP was sometimes it's a necessary evil to go through. And other times it's just a waste of time and energy and resources. And like I said, just bogs down your company for three months at a time
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