Ask HN: How do you cut down long B2B sales cycles?
Can you help me with some examples of startups in the B2B space that had long sales cycles, which were later cut down to very short sales cycles. ? How was this done.
1. Adjust your target market. Large enterprises will always take longer than SMB's to make a purchase. However, if you build up a solid SMB market with a few Enterprises than the cycle shortens.
2. Adjust your price point and up-sell more. Large enterprises give managers and directors freedom to spend a certain amount of money each month without going through a procurement process. So one way is to adjust your basic price with enough features to get you in the door at the lower manager or director level. Then as they become dependent on your company and need more features you can get walked through the procurement much faster because it is already a vetted tool.
3. Networking is not necessarily fast on its own, but it helps drastically in cutting down the delays on sales. A good networked intro can save you 50-75% of the time you would otherwise spend getting in the door and past the gatekeepers.
4. Having a product that solves a serious pain point is critical. If you build a me to product it will take you 6-18 months to sell to large enterprises. If you build a product no one else is offering and is desperately needed by an enterprise it is crazy how fast they'll move. I had a fortune 100 firm sign a deal in less then 10 days from the first meeting when we solved a serious pain problem they were having, pricing was barely even discussed and we all kicked ourselves at that point knowing we were not priced high enough and represented too good a value.
I don't think there are "shortcuts" to take beyond working the larger businesses processes against itself.
What happened for us to sell it to this enterprise was we found out they (a large public firm) were trying to hold a conference but had been struggling to glue systems together themselves to make it work and advertise it etc (they disliked other in market products). We heard this as a pure rumor from some engineers that were bitching about it at a meetup we went to on mobile development. From there we researched the company, the conference and started cold emailing/calling the people who were responsible for the conference at the company. We were able to meet with them within a couple of days, did a few demo's and showed them it wasn't vapor and really existed (seems to always be an enterprises concern). Like all small companies, we had the normal "call for pricing" for "enterprise" clients (though we hadn't really had anyone this size), so pricing was on the fly customized for them. We screwed up a little on pricing because I bet they would've been happy to pay double the price and still feel they got a good value which would've given us a better margin.
In the end, no regrets just a good lesson for the team (me included) that pricing is relative to the client and while you should never rape a client you do need to make sure the clients expectations and your pricing are in line. In our case we made a profit, but it wasn't as much as even a standard client simply because of all the extra support we had to do, hence we should've asked for more. Enterprise clients are super needy and they know it so pricing it like they are is critical. Funny part is we came up with a price, then doubled it (thinking they would be needy) which also made them feel good about it (too cheap and enterprise clients will back away knowing you can't handle them), but we should've triple or quadrupled it to make better margins.