Business Developer
Selling to businesses can be quite the challenge. Fear not! We tell you how and why you should do it
In the past two decades the licensing business model clearly gained a lot in popularity and became the standard way to do business in the B2B world.
There are now more software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies than ever before, be it in HR, marketing, finance, project management, you name it.
Major companies shifted from legacy products generating perpetual revenue to cloud hosted solutions generating recurring revenue (think Pack Office, Sage, Adobe).
It has become so popular that large corporations can use up to 250 different SaaS, and sometimes even more.
The rapid growth in SaaS adoption by big corporations brought some issues along the way.
Firstly, a visibility problem, each business unit or department has its own SaaS and it is difficult for the IT administration of your company to know whether all the licenses the company is paying for are used to their maximum.
Secondly, as access management is often managed within the SaaS, there are lots of shadow licenses, meaning employees that left the company but are still able to access the company’s resources as their access has not been removed. This causes major security threats and is also a waste of money for the company.
Fortunately, over the past few years, SaaS governance companies like Beamy emerged, allowing companies to track all the SaaS they are using, to improve budget allocation and security.
As a founder, your SaaS solution is usually firstly used by a small group of tech savvy early adopters, that allows you to have feedback and iterate on your product.
Hopefully, your users love using your app, and you start having product market fit.
Thanks to word of mouth and sales efforts, you are then starting to have a few paying customers that allow you to fundraise, hire great talents and consolidate your product.
At some point, your product becomes robust enough that it might convince bigger, and Enterprise clients to buy it.
Everything is awesome and so simple, right?
In reality, crossing this border from early adopters to Enterprise customers is no easy task.
In this article we are going to cover why you should do it, what makes crossing this border difficult, and how you can prepare your app to be ready to be sold to Enterprise clients.
There are many reasons why you should make selling to large companies a priority:
If you are not ready fast enough to sign Enterprise deals, you will basically educate and evangelize the whole market with an innovative product, but a competitor can appear on the market and capture the lucrative Enterprise segment.
You have done all the work that has made it possible (think Slack vs. Microsoft Teams) but a competitor is getting free lunch.
Selling to Enterprise clients is much different than selling to SMBs. Let’s discover the main key challenges you will face when selling to large accounts:
In addition to the above, Enterprise clients typically have several persons involved in the buying decision, with well defined (and slow) buying processes, and are more looking for a long-term fit rather than quick results (unlike SMBs).
As we have just seen, by moving upmarket the buyer (which is now the CISO or the CTO) of your solution is no longer the user.
You will have a new mindset that you will have to deal with, and new objections that you and your sales will need to cover.
So what do you need to do to get the approval of this new category of buyer?
CISOs or CTOs generally have the same type of requirements, that is:
Finally, they need to trust that your business won’t go down, especially if the task you are performing for them is sensitive: you might need to offer an SLA.
If you are selling an API product, you need to have up-to-date documentation about how your API works and a sandbox mode to allow your client to run tests on his own.
Of course it takes more than this to fully fulfill all the expectations of large accounts, you could also add analytics on the usage of your app (solutions like Cumul.io), a proper invoicing process, integrations (APIs) and so on.
Enterprise sales are challenging as they take time and involve several interlocutors.
However, if you are ready soon enough to sell to them, you will be able to 10x your revenues compared to your self-service application.
Being SSO ready is a good way to start as it will enable you to expand your market quicker and start selling to Enterprise customers by meeting their security requirements.
Moreover, it is a feature that you can upsell (companies like Asana, GitHub or Dropbox typically upsell the SSO connection) as large corporations are ready to pay for this pledge of security, and it enables you to focus on product development to ship exciting features quicker, rather than reinventing the wheel.
The good news is that there is a simple way to be SSO ready: right here, at Cryptr. And don't forget to follow our latest news on Twitter and LinkedIn!
And to chat with our teams, you can book the slot of your choice by clicking here: Meet Cryptr