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Comment by kephra | Hacker News Reader

Let define "enterprise customer" first. This is someone for whom the terms, conditions and prices of your website do not apply. Enterprise customer = Ask for quotes. So you might delay the question of how they pay you, once you have an enterprise customer ready to sign.

An other distinction is, that you might charge accounts of normal customers, but you always just send an invoice to an enterprise customer, and they send you the money. German customers could use the old BLZ routing, European the IBAN routing, and US will use ACH. But I don't care, as long as I get my money on my account. Big companies are slow payers. My trick of getting the money fast is to offer 2% discount, if they pay within 7 days.

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> My trick of getting the money fast is to offer 2% discount, if they pay within 7 days.

Great tactic. The reason this works, in some cases, is NOT because the company cares about a measly 2% of whatever they're paying, but because they may have a policy that says they _must_ accept discounts if available.

You know you're dealing with a very enterprise customer when they automatically give a discount of this nature to themselves when you bill them using their own billing system (I seem to recall MS's vendor system does this).

it did (or does). Sun did the same thing - nice discount for sun if they pay within 7 days, so everyone raised rates by that much. It was nice getting paid so quickly

Then 1% for 4 days should work equally well, right?

The other common game is the "our fiscal quarter/year is about to end and if you sign by X date we'll be able to give you Y discount." Since most of the time enterprises don't accelerate for anyone, especially a small contract, this bluff is pointless and if your sales guy gets called out for bluffing, they'll be disinclined to do business with you in the future. But, on the other hand, it can sometimes work, and work VERY well. One of our suppliers negotiated with us to sign a 3yr, $5m+ deal rather than a 1yr, $1.8m deal simply by telling us we could lock in pricing if we committed to the longer term. Since it's a SAAS service, they'll getting a ton more money up front, at no extra cost to them. ... Or are they... this is the customer I mentioned in a different comment, where we negotiated quarterly instead of annual payments. It's a great example of a BATNA: we got favorable terms that impact our cash flow much less, plus guaranteed pricing for 3 years on a large opex budget item, and they locked us in for 3 more years with guaranteed on schedule quarterly payments. Everyone loves smooth (as opposed to peaky) sales forecasts.

Marking invoices with 2%/7 NET 30 or any variation thereof is definitely a great practice.

The shorthand means X% discount if paid in Y days, with full amount due in 30.

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