Validating Your Proposition With Large Enterprise: Momentum London
“Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers” — Gabriel Weinberg
The mentality here has always been customers over funding. Being able to prove you can sustainably acquire customers will make funding ‘easier’ to come by.
But getting customers, and doing so profitably isn’t simple. The biggest problem is the growing pains that come as startups look to start selling & expanding into large corporates. It’s natural for companies to sell into small & medium sized enterprises at their infancy, due to less procurement barriers & shorter sales cycles (better cashflow) — but strong enterprise sales is critical to capturing market share. Selling into enterprises is more than having a great product — even the best products can’t influence the buyers procurement process.
The Momentum London programme, aims to solve that by connecting B2B startups with leading corporate companies to validate markets, accelerate engagement and build pipeline. The relationship between startups and corporates are accelerated as founders engage directly with gatekeepers and decision makers from some of the UK’s largest companies during the course of the 12 week programme.
This week marks the start of our Momentum London Spring Cohort.
The first 4 weeks consists of masterclasses led by experts made up of experienced professionals from within some of the UK’s biggest corporates, which allow them to offer startups with a better insight of procurement processes and how to navigate the internal complexities of a large business
The second 4 weeks startups will connect with corporate ambassadors over a series of industry focused market validation sessions. Startups get to engage closely with corporates from target verticals on a one to one basis. Sessions help validate the product or service with industry verticals, understand corporate pain points and start conversations around commercial opportunities.
This ensures startups identify opportunities or roadblocks within industries, shape future product iterations and accelerate relationships with key stakeholders.
The final 4 weeks are made up of introductory meetings with decision makers at the corporates identified as potential customers. During this period startups will rapidly build pipeline and begin shaping commercial conversations. The programme finishes with demo day, investor lunch and a press breakfast.
Corporates can also develop their own innovation strategies via engagement with a range of sector agnostic companies that have a value proposition for their market. This helps corporates identify innovation opportunities first and see innovation they would not otherwise access.
All together this offers startups the knowledge and capability to validate their proposition and establish their enterprise pipeline, speeding up the sales process post programme.
This isn’t an accelerator; there isn’t any funding and you don’t give up equity, there is just a one-off service fee.
If you’re interested in joining the Momentum London programme, take a moment to read our FAQ and then fill in your details here to be notified of when our next round of applications open. If you’d like to recommend a company that may be interested do intro them to krishna@momentumlondon.com & cc rishi@momentumlondon.com
In the meantime follow us here on Medium or our varies channels below to see the latest from our Spring cohort.
A variation of this was originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on February 28, 2017.
