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Comment by euix | Hacker News Reader

I am having thinking about doing a startup for a while, whatever trips me up is how to go about acquiring customers short of cold calling. Are incubators helpful in introducing you to potential clients? Especially if your product is b2b or enterprise, having worked in large corporate enterprises I can't imagine how it works to get your foot in the door.

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If your product is Enterprise or B2B, you need a few things (in my experience):

1) A first client to take a chance on you, because no one wants to be the first client, very few companies will buy something that no one else has bought. In my experience your first client (or first few) is the result of some existing personal connection to the client (i.e. a favour/referral), and expect to be at their beck and call for a while, and probably take a bath on the price.

2) You need an experienced sales team that knows how to sell to enterprise/B2B. This is not something you can "pick up" or learn on the job (or at least is very difficult to do). You need to hire someone who has done it before, otherwise you will stumble and spend your way through months-long sales cycles only to have them fail at some late stage because you didn't know how to prepare.

3) You likely need standards certifications and third-party testing. Look into ISO 27001 and other similar standards if you're a software company. Get third-party security testing done up front. Have pre-written answers and "white papers" around privacy, data governance, scaling, deployment, etc..

I've been on both sides of selling into enterprise and medium/large B2B and it's a solid 50/50 mix of your actual product capabilities and your company's ability to navigate procurement and due diligence.

#2 and #3 are probably true for enterprise but definitely not true for SME B2B. Source: we’ve been targeting that niche (15-500 employee companies) for 8 years. Have made two experienced sales hires both in the last year, and dont have any standards certifications. Most businesses are very reasonable and just want you to solve their problems.

Fair enough, I was definitely thinking medium-size B2B and up, where the people you're dealing with while trying to sell the product are (probably) not the internal stakeholders who want to buy it (i.e. procurement, IT/security, etc)

It also depends on what you're selling of course. My experience is in data management solutions (including PII data), and standards/requirements can be pretty demanding in that world.

You forgot the most important thing - a 2 year runway.

There is a trick to speed things up a little with Enterprise sales - find out who is an approved supplier for the enterprise you want to sell to and get them to “sell" your product for you under some sort of licensing deal, but where you actually do all the selling. This cuts out a huge amount of pointless activity dealing with said enterprise’s lawyers and purchasing people.

You definitely can get in the door without ISO 27001, but you'll spend way more time on due diligence for each deal because you can't just point at the badge. Whether that's a trade off you're willing to make probably depends on your exact company, but ISO 27001 itself is a painful process to get certified for, especially if you're a young company without any established internal processes.

100% agree, but even if you don't go through the whole certification process (which is painful and expensive), it's worth spending the ~$1,000 on a "cert-in-a-box" kit to understand the framework of the standards and what kind of processes your company will eventually need to put in place as it grows.

Also in my experience, being able to produce existing docs around your standards and processes, versus producing them on-demand, helps inspire confidence in the prospect's due diligence team, because it shows them you've thought of this before they asked about it. :-)

It's a connections game. I remember last year I was trying to get an internship in an industry where I literally knew no one.

So I sent 100-200 personalized emails throughout a 4 month period to every single person I could find in the space. Eventually I got one and made a ton of connections just with that alone.

Now I'm also doing a startup and am talking with some big corporations just with getting to the right people and climbing my way to the top to sell my product.

Tyler Bosemany did a great talk about how to sell, i'd reccomend you watch it.

Is this the talk? Thanks for the recommendation, I forgot I was even subbed to the Y Combinator YouTube page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZi4kTJG-LE

Yes.

Another tidbit: Distribution kills a company, not the product.

Learn to sell (and make your product great) and everything will work out.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, so they say. It’s moving it from my hand to yours where the magic happens.

We blew about 10k per event to be an exhibitor at trade shows. It was like speed dating for customers. We landed one good customer that way and scrambled to deliver, but ultimately it was a worth it. You learn what the customers care about and how to pitch very quickly.

Also, it was a consultant with that first customer who brought us in, he could see the value despite the rough edges, and was willing to take the risk.

You should cold call. If you tried to make a website without coding, you'd also get tripped up.

These are all great tips. I didn't expect such great feedback. Thank you!

It's called advertising. You have to spend money to make money. No one cold called you about a pair of Nikes and yet you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Advertising to businesses for a b2b startup is very different from advertising to consumers. Perhaps all it is is having targeted ads for company management, but its not a trivial difference.

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