How Startups Close Their First Big Sales

After more than 6 years working with enterprise organizations and startups, I found that the effort that you put for a small $2k deal is pretty much the same as $100k deal. So, why not going big?!

There are different reasons that you, as a startup founder is going after bigger deals. First, ideally you had very good progress with your run rate business and average size managed deals.

Run rate deals are those opportunities that you win without putting any effort. In B2B world, these are deals that your partners and distributors will bring for you without you doing anything or influencing the opportunity. This is good. You want those run rate business no matter how small they are.

At the same time, you should put together a strategy for mid size managed deals as well. These are deals that your sales team manage on a daily basis and normally are bigger than your run rate.

Your field sales team should have a achievable target and compensation plan that can drive their behavior to pursue these opportunities.

After you fix these two areas, you can start have a look at how to ace very large million dollar deals and opportunities. Remember, you never can perfect any facet of your business. Meaning, there will be always challenges with run rate and managed opportunities and based on seasonality, market trend, competition and other uncontrolled condition, things will change. However, in terms of processes and sales forecast maturity, you should be in a position that are not hand holding everything so you can start thinking and planning large deals.

The reason for this is to win enterprise large million dollar deals, sales team needs your support and attention. You, as a startup founder should be available to help and even close those deals since you are the best person in the world who can sell your own product or service. No body can do this better than you.

This means you need to have enough bandwidth to be able to go to the field and influence buyers decision.

In addition, I also saw how much effort you should spend on larger deals as well. In terms of effort, winning $100k deal is somehow as same as $2k deal as well depending on buyers purchase process. So why not go big from the first place?!

Go after one industry one at a time

There is a famous saying that how do you eat an elephant?! The answer is one bite at a time. If you want to nail bigger deals, you need to be focused as well. Chances are your resources and your time is limited and there are always fire fighting in startup environment.

So, pick a niche vertical that you feel you have a higher chance of winning and go all into that vertical. In terms of content, Press Release, ads, influencer marketing in that space etc. and even account based marketing which you target specific companies which you are sure you can help.

Put together a solution and not just a product

One of the key things when it comes to bigger deals is how to approach potential customers. You simply rarely can sell a stand alone product to a large organization as part of their problems. You, ideally should come up with full blown solution with the delivery plan end to end.

Now, there is a high chance that you are not have that solution end to end and your product is only part of that big picture. In that case, you can partner with a solution provider or system integrator and draft a reference architecture for full solution and your product already built in.

The other way, is for you to take initiative and build up the end to end solution plan as well which is quicker and you are in full control of the process.

In addition, make sure that you are not making these mistakes too.

In general, there are different ways you can target big sales. It all comes to have a proper plan and execution capability.

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