Why is it so hard for startups to close deals? The Portuguese Reality!

It’s been a while since we founded Invisible Cloud and back in those “old days” we decided to apply things learned in business schools like, for example, take very good care of your costs, don’t spend more than you earn, limit non-core investments or target a vertical and stick to it. In sum, don’t go wide, go deep.

Back then we only had InvCloud Sales on the market, a communication platform that allows companies to pursue sales by rent databases or by sending messages to existing clients, and, despite all competition we thought we still had a shot on this market, so we went to the floor with our hearts full of motivation. First times were tough as expected but eventually we started to acquire some costumers. Happy days!

Despite the happiness of closing deals the time and money spent was huge so we started focusing on the reason behind that. It was only then that we realized that ones in charge of the decision-making structure of a company are not the directors as one would expect but rather the entry level employees. They are the ones that decide whether their superior is on a meeting, vacations or simply too busy to answer a simple call. This is the easiest way to not be tied to any future decision that might arm their comfortable position inside the organization. This is the harsh reality of roughly 90% of the companies. While writing this, two examples came across my mind and made me smile:

1- A company based in Lisbon was once finishing its contract period with a provider and decided to enquire us about our services. They sent us all requirements for the service and ask us for a price. We checked every single requirement asked and sent back a proposal that was 46% bellow our competitor’s. Later on, we had a meeting where we were told that our proposal, though way better, would not be presented to the board because some IT guy said he didn’t want to spend time switching endpoints. He said” I’m happy with the current solution and I don’t care about the price”. In other words, we lost a deal because some entry level guy did not care about the company he worked for.

2- Because of Invoice Capture, Virtual Collections Agent, we were contacted by a multi-national that wanted to buy the solution in order to better collect from their clients. In Portugal, their collections department was integrated with the financial department and it had a single person dedicated to that duty. On our 1st meeting we explained all the benefits of our solution while being interrupted every 5 minutes by that same person saying to the board member that the meeting should end because “they had other things to do”. Despite all that the board member liked Invoice Capture and decided to implement it into their collections flow. It was crazy…. that person did everything…. really everything. from reporting unreal problems, not setting up notification strategies, to not replying to emails during the CEO’s vacations, and so on and so on…… 6 months later we still haven’t finished the integration……

These are only 2 examples among several we have been experiencing throughout our daily struggle to stand out from the crowd….

We have to be fair, not all examples are as bad as these ones. We also experienced situations where we were pushed up by same level employees!

“secretaries” are the ones that are running nowadays companies…!

Invisible Collector

StartUp — Cloud SaaS -> invisiblecollector.com, is a receivables relationship agent, that puts creditors, and debtors on the same page.

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