Dear SaaStr: How Can You Land Big Customers If You’re a New Startup No One Has Heard Of?
Solve one of their top pain points, for real — that no other vendor is solving.
If you haven’t sold to the F500 / Global 2000 before, you’ll be somewhat surprised to learn that between the CIO’s office and functional heads, at most huge companies, there is a clear goal to bring in a handful of new “innovative vendors” into the company each year.
In fact, almost all the best run large enterprises know they have to seek out new gems in software to help their businesses run faster and better. Otherwise, their stack and approach will ossify. So they have budgets and often even innovation departments to work with emerging vendors.
But here’s the thing — they can only process so many each year. Each new vendor means a lot of business process change, even for a small deployment.
So that means big enterprises often only being in 1 new vendor per year per department, and maybe another handful at the CIO level. More than that is too many and too much to process.
So be honest and ask yourself — do you solve a super-important problem that existing vendors don’t solve well? And if so, is there a particular GM/SVP or member of CIO’s Office that cares about this problem?
If so, call them. Email them. Reach out. With the best subject line and pitch you can. No spam, no random mass cadences. Call and email the exact buyer, and aim high.
If it’s an acute problem for them and the pitch is amazing — you’ll probably hear back.
Often fast.
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