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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

This problem gets even worse with enterprise sales. How to validate a market or use any of that "Lean Startup" wisdom when the sales process for a single customer is 6 months+, requires multiple meetings and getting 10's of the customers staff, across multiple departments, on-board? It's very hard to find any single, concrete measure of success.

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Try adding a hardware product into the mix. Not only do you have to deal with super long sales cycles, each iteration of your product takes months, if not years, to release. You can't just whack together an MVP and make it better over time unless you're happy to keep doing upgrades in the field. B2B hardware products and the "Lean Startup" ethos are very hard to marry!

Or in biopharma, where selling a product requires 10 years and $200M of r&d. The model is to sell your company or go public long before that point

In this case, your "customers" are venture funds and pharma companies, and your MVP is a well thought out experimental plan. You get more customer / investors by doing the experiments and using that data to design another experiment

They tried adapting the lean startup to life science with mixed success. For biopharma as a specific life sci sector other models work better than lean

There are books available, and people who have experience doing this. Learning to navigate an organization is an essential skill.

One example is you can arrive at a simple and focused problem that has enough value that the customer would be willing to sign a paid pilot.

This is a skill I want to develop. Could you give us the name of the book please?

I recommend Solution Selling or The New Solution Selling. I was an engineer with limited sales experience and it gave me a good base for enterprise sales.

But I'd advise you try your best to shortcut the long and complex sales cycle unless you have lots of upfront cash to burn.

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