3 ms·

Awesome content with actionable tips but I have to say they are less applicable at “enterprise prices.” Once you exceed the corporate card buying pattern, risk

Awesome content with actionable tips but I have to say they are less applicable at “enterprise prices.” Once you exceed the corporate card buying pattern, risk and budget enter the picture. Sometimes the department needs to wait for the next budget cycle. Sometimes you have the better solution but another vendor has SOC2 compliance and without it, the enterprise won’t take the risk.

lmeyerov 5y ago
Yep. Some magic questions more at where enterprise pricing begins: - "Oh budgeting isn't until end of year.. what can we do until then?" Then you do a 50K thing for 5mo until thing under their personal or direct bosses authority and work to get into budget thereafter at a higher rate. It's not surprising to find ~personal authority at $50-100K/yr for lowest level managers (the team who wants you and whose manager has someone trusted doing the picking), with only a quick informal/formal ok of their boss. - Procurement often gets involved early and want to get their 5% or whatever discount. "Yes we can use discounts as part of rightsizing you.. how about multiyear, with X+Y licenses in year two and X+Y+Z in year three, and as long as you prepay, we are good." - Security compliance people are often people ;-) Questions here to work around product gaps often just require you to align with whatever journey they need you to be on and identify some workarounds till then. (But you must be on that journey for this to work) - "what would 10x how useful this is? What feature would be a game changer for your team, and for the org?" Part of the enterprise trick is steadily enabling them to pay more and more over time. - "We don't do this for our smaller customers , but would you feel less at risk with a bundle where add training and support at $$$/day, with 1 week / qtr prepaid? Or any integration + feature services like for important system X?" What's ho-hum and easy for you may significantly derisk + increase value to them, and their sense of cost is different from yours. It's to see 5-10% of a SaaS's customers be enterprise yet half the revenue be from them, and 20%+ being around these funny service add-ons. Early on, they can even be your main revenue ("design partner") while the tinySaaS revenue builds up. A good hack early on can be to get an enterprise sales or product advisor / consultant to sit in some calls with you for the most embarrassing basics like these, and same around your product + pipeline process, until you can get dedicated folks.

lmeyerov 5y ago

Yep. Some magic questions more at where enterprise pricing begins: - "Oh budgeting isn't until end of year.. what can we do until then?" Then you do a 50K thing for 5mo until thing under their personal or direct bosses authority and work to get into budget thereafter at a higher rate. It's not surprising to find ~personal authority at $50-100K/yr for lowest level managers (the team who wants you and whose manager has someone trusted doing the picking), with only a quick informal/formal ok of their boss. - Procurement often gets involved early and want to get their 5% or whatever discount. "Yes we can use discounts as part of rightsizing you.. how about multiyear, with X+Y licenses in year two and X+Y+Z in year three, and as long as you prepay, we are good." - Security compliance people are often people ;-) Questions here to work around product gaps often just require you to align with whatever journey they need you to be on and identify some workarounds till then. (But you must be on that journey for this to work) - "what would 10x how useful this is? What feature would be a game changer for your team, and for the org?" Part of the enterprise trick is steadily enabling them to pay more and more over time. - "We don't do this for our smaller customers , but would you feel less at risk with a bundle where add training and support at $$$/day, with 1 week / qtr prepaid? Or any integration + feature services like for important system X?" What's ho-hum and easy for you may significantly derisk + increase value to them, and their sense of cost is different from yours. It's to see 5-10% of a SaaS's customers be enterprise yet half the revenue be from them, and 20%+ being around these funny service add-ons. Early on, they can even be your main revenue ("design partner") while the tinySaaS revenue builds up. A good hack early on can be to get an enterprise sales or product advisor / consultant to sit in some calls with you for the most embarrassing basics like these, and same around your product + pipeline process, until you can get dedicated folks.