Tatiana already has a first version of her solution. She is now conducting meetings with large companies in order to sell high-ticket access.
Today I’m going to answer a question from Tatiana, the founder of a SaaS platform that helps business owners in their marketing analysis. Her question is...
Before answering this question, let’s add a bit of context.Tatiana already has a first version of her solution. She is now conducting meetings with large companies in order to sell high-ticket access.The difficulties remain in the gap between the size of the clients (large companies) and Tatiana’s startup. Large companies have processes. They are used to extremely reliable software and are a bit afraid of using software from small companies.But the good news is that startups and small companies are able to innovate faster than most large companies.In a small team, whenever they discover something new, it takes less than a minute to ask the founder if they should test this new opportunity. In large companies, they often need to convince a manager. Then the manager needs to convince the board of directors which then has to decide whether or not to dedicate a budget for this unexpected experiment.That might be a bit of an exaggeration. But for most big companies, things work that way.This is why while Tatiana is closing her first sale, she now has to deal with the IT manager, the security experts, or the CTO.Of course, her client wants to first check if they can trust Tatiana’s company and whether they will be putting their confidential business information in a secure place.
For IT managers, when it comes to selecting a new solution, there are 3 main criteria:
So, to help Tatiana convince her clients, she just needs to anticipate these and provide answers to these 3 aspects.
And this starts by sharing the company roadmap.It will make the solution even more compelling by letting them know that they are one of the first clients so they will get the new features at discounted prices.
Then you provide the overview of the IT organization. They will want to make sure that you have a reliable team, and that you’ve built a secure software and that you also follow the basics of a reliable architecture.
Last but not the least, you need to show that you provide professional support access. If you are managing hundreds of clients, having a dedicated website for this like support.yourcompany.com, plus a hotline number that will redirect to the customer team is important.
On that last point, it’s pretty easy for startups to provide a customer service platform. For example, there are different services that can do the job: Freshdesk, Zendesk, Help Scout, Groove and even Salesforce.These are all very effective ticketing solutions that will allow you to provide great customer support. There are also plenty of others with live chat and phone number features.And finally, for the roadmap and the IT team organization, I suggest checking out the Startup Roadmap Definition course as well as another AskMyCTO video that will give you more in-depth information on the IT organization requirements for selling to large companies.
So, to conclude Tatiana’s question, to sell a product to large companies and convince not only their management but also their IT team, you need to speak their language: describe your IT organization, share your future development and give them access to a professional customer support.Now if like Tatiana, you have a specific question for your project, just go ahead and ask on myctofriend.co/ask. I will do my best to answer your question by video or redirect you to any existing content that will answer it.I publish a new video every week, so subscribe now and learn how to be better at tech management and build your startup successfully.Also be sure to go through our other content here at myctofriend.co to learn more from real startup growth experiences.I’ll be waiting for your questions, and I look forward to seeing you in other videos. Cheers.
