7 Tips For Startup Business Development: David Vs. Goliath

culled from:forbes.com

1. Swarm the org

You need as many contacts in your target company who know what you’re offering as you can get.

This is essential. You have no idea which groups will ultimately have decision-making power on your product or service. Could be procurement, product management, engineering, business development, or any number of other “hidden deciders” in the organization. The more chips you have on the table, the more likely that one will pay off. By the way, this is terrible Vegas advice.

You also need to be able to ride out the churn. So, you found ten solid contacts in all the right departments, but by the time the deal is getting done eight of your ten contacts left for greener pastures and your sponsor had to take some time off to deal with an arson charge.  Tough luck, big companies have long lead times and heavy churn. One large company we ultimately closed had 5 re-orgs and 6 people resign over the three years I pitched them. The more contacts and sponsors you have, the more resistant you are to this kind of unavoidable change.

2. Get your Sponsor:

You need someone who is willing to stick their neck out to push for change in a company notoriously resistant to change (read: every big company), in an environment where raising their head usually gets it chopped off. Once you’ve found a potential sponsor, you have to be on that person’s team both personally and professionally from that day forward. Ask your sponsor directly about their goals, and ensure you and your product are what helps them meet those goals. Ultimately, it is your job to help them make an air-tight case as to why partnering with you makes sense. In some cases, I have gone so far as to personally write a powerpoint for my sponsors to show to their bosses using their corporate template.

3. Do their work:

Every company, big and small, is resource constrained. When every large company’s project backlog stretches 20 years into the future, how do you squeeze in? The same way smarter kids have kept bullies from stuffing them in lockers for generations: do work for them. Guarantee your target engineering hours. Provide references of how your API was integrated in a lunch-hour by a one-armed intern. At my last company, we had our engineers fly all over to sit at client sites and basically read a well-documented API…literally travelled weeks on end to read publicly available words off a screen…just to make sure that any little questions were answered (and it served as a forcing function for the engineer to complete the integration).

4. Tier Up and Peer Up:

Carefully consider your “pitch team” before walking into each pitch meeting. Even if you’re just a few people, you need to match your tiny org to the byzantine pyramid of the target company. Don’t forget, in special cases you can leverage your team of advisors and investors to be a part of your pitch team pyramid. Always “Peer up.” CEO’s don’t attend every meeting. VP’s meet the VP or CEO, product meets with product, and so forth. This also provides you with a great opportunity for an escalation path when the time comes to bring in heavier hitters.

5. Bring the product and engineers to the table

If you’re too small to have a sales engineer, make sure to get some time allocated from your prod/dev team to come along to the important meetings. Be sure to train your engineers in the art of “yes” (e.g. “Does your cloud service sync with an obscure widget from an out of business software company?”). The answer is almost always “yes” because just about anything is possible with enough time, money, and motivation.

6. Sell on fear

Selling on fear that your target will “miss out” is a great way to get a slow moving big company to move. Set an artificial deadline where the company could be left out of a fast-approaching, high-visibility opportunity (conference, big announcement, press article, etc.). Hint that a competitor may be entering the arena or that they’re in danger of missing a trend.  Play to the fact that they’ve all read Innovator’s Dilemma, but still can’t figure out how to innovate their way out of a wet paper bag.

7.  Hold an offsite to launch/close

Create some sort of celebration that people can look forward to once the deal has closed. Everyone deserves the chance to celebrate the hard work and kick off a great partnership.

Final thoughts

Above all else, never forget that, even after all of your maneuvering, your sling and a handful of rocks are still your best weapon. Know your product, believe in your team, and pitch honestly and aggressively about your small startup’s ability to create real change for that massive corp. Who knows, one day your company may be thirty feet tall and staring down at the little guy slinging rocks. When that day comes, don’t be surprised if you find me “in the neighborhood”.