How to sell for enterprises, by Clever CEO Tyler Bosmeny

Clever makes it easy to use technology in the classroom, as is used in half of the schools in America, which required a lot of sales to reach.

• (6:30) Sales is nothing like is represented in movies and shows, with sales people that are funny, charming etc. Most founders say that they’re building the product and will later hire sales people…but the sales people should be you. Paul Graham said that you should be spending all your time either building the product or talking to users, and talking to users and understanding their needs is selling.
• (8:50) As a founder, you have the advantage of being very passionate and having industry expertise, and this is very powerful in sales.
• (9:43) With Clever, they decided that one person would own sales (Tyler) and the other two would build the product. He spent 100% of his time on it, and says that it should be a founder to own it.
• (11:55) Step 1 is finding prospects, people that might be interested in the product or even in just taking your call. In the “Innovation Adoption Curve” by Everett Rogers, innovators (companies that can consider buying an unproven product from a startup with no revenues) are just the 2.5%. While many founders find this depressing, for him it’s motivating, because it’s a numbers game, he knows he has to talk to 100 companies to find 2.5 interested ones. Hot to do it:
  # Find prospects in your network (friends of friends)
  # (14:00) Conferences. Don’t go to huge events like CES, but small ones with a bunch of executives in a hotel room (at least if you’re selling to corporate buyers) and try to know in advance who’s going to be there so that you can email them in advance to schedule a meeting. Book as many 30-minute meetings as possible, to fill up all day.
  # (18:50) Cold emails: be short, to the point, personalized and actionable (shows an example).
• (21:00) Step 2 is conversations with the prospects, to figure out if the product is right from them. When you’re on the phone with a prospect, shut up and listen. Build a relationship and understand their needs, refrain your enthusiasm about talking all time to get across your points. This is the most important tip from the presentation. Good questions are: what’s your problem? how do you solve it today? why did you take my call? what’s your ideal solution? UberConference at the end of a call tells you how much you talked and how the other person talked, which is useful.
• (25:08) There are a lot of steps of the process, including mails, pricing calls, sending references, talking with different executives etc. (a slide in the presentation shows a real example of the follow up process). It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of follow-ups. People might not respond to your emails for 2–3 times at every step even if they’re interested in your product, because they might have a lot going on. Being persistent is not being rude but being helpful, if done well ((38:38) wait for something like a week before contacting again someone that hasn’t responded). If they haven’t told you no, don’t feel like you’re pestering them.
• (27:39) Getting a quick no can also be very helpful, so that you can move on and focus on someone else.
• (28:28) To close deal with an enterprise, have an agreement ready to be sent out once they ask it, not after a month. Expect revisions to go forth and back and be reviewed by lawyers. Y Combinator has a Sales Template Agreement that you can freely download. Don’t drag the process over for months over the smallest details but try and close it quickly, especially if you need the first customers. Here are some other traps:
  # (31:18) When a customers asks for just another feature before closing the deal, it sounds promising, but it’s not, it’s probably going to be a pass. If it is your first or second customer, do what it takes but otherwise just say you’ll do it if they sign the agreement first. If you built a good relationship before, it might work. And even if you say that you’ll build it if other customers request it, they might still buy the product without it if they need it.
  # (33:11) Free trials doesn’t give you commitment, validation and revenues, which is what you need. Say you can’t do it, but offer an annual agreement that they can cancel in the first 30 days if not satisfied.
• (35:27) Read this blog post by Christoph Janz about the “Five ways to build a $100 million business” from a sales perspective. It makes you think you much your customer must pay to reach your goal ($100K with 1,000 customers? $10K for 10K customers? $10 for 10M customers?) and how sustainable it is if it takes time and money (to take flights, go to conferences etc.) to get these customers. A low price can be ok in case of self-service sign-ups, if the market is big enough. You must know this as you approach sales and build the sales team.

Questions:

• (40:35) You don’t learn about product market fit from NOs (there might be multiple reasons for them), but from YESes. But if you can’t get YESes, that if the signal you don’t have market fit.
• (42:10) Talk to big and small companies, understand which ones are going to move faster, and optimize for speed.
• (43:31) At the beginning they did some estimations to come up with a price to propose to customers, but it was mostly guessing. You can try with a price and if you close, double the price the next time as see if you can still close it, and go on doing that. But in general, you can try with a price, be bold when you go out with that, and listen to the feedback.
• (48:22) When learning about sales there is no replacement for actually doing it and testing different messages, but one recommended book is “How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling”.
• (49:55) When hiring sales people, you won’t know what skills they need (eg: travelling, doing phone calls etc.) unless you’ve already done it on your own for a while. Look for energy and passion more than many years of experience.