Large enterprises often make better first customers than small companies because they know how to manage vendor risk. Build an internal advocate, document your security and compliance plans, and show what you already meet on day one.
Chapters
As a startup founder, if you're in B2B SaaS and you're in a non autonomous business, as in you're not a website, people come to swipe their credit cards, sign up, do everything, and the biggest interaction they have with your team is via a chatbot for support. If you're actually in the business where you're going to have a deck and a presentation, negotiation, implementation, contract, all those things, two really big things to understand. Number one, big businesses, as in the logos you think you're dreaming and are out of reach for you on, are more likely to take your solution and be your first customer. Those Fortune 500 companies know extraordinarily well how to do business with you. You're not going to be there first and all it normally takes is an advocate of a senior enough level willing to sign their name to your risk profile. So make sure you have a coach and advocate inside the organization you'll talk to make sure you're building a strong relationship so they'll go to bat for you. It is easier to get a monster client name than it is to get a mid level client because a monster client name again knows how to do business with you, knows how to build remediation, their risk team knows how to manage and what to look for. And they're willing to put stuff in contract that you commit to over a period of time, they're not scared of you, much the opposite. And they are happy to get in early. They know they can negotiate with you, they know they could probably get you a solution for pennies on the dollars and they recognize the kind of mutual value. So do not discount going big first and starting at the top of the market. The second thing though is if that is your market, do everything you humanly can in advance of the conversation to make yourself ready and show you understand what it means to do business in the enterprise. Talk to your security compliance roadmap, Talk to your SoC2 and ISO roadmap to talk to your GDPR compliance, talk to your privacy policy, your cookie settings, all of these things up front. That should be the first page of your deck is we understand how to do enterprise business, we understand what you need. This is what we've got now. This is what we're building towards. Of course if you had more different or more alternative different priorities, we can play those. But show that you understand what it means to mitigate your risk profile. And if you do that really really early, these big companies have no problems doing business with you because they know that you know where you've got to get to and when you've got to get there. And if you've got an implementation process, very often as companies, these companies will say, okay, we're going to sign with you, we're going to implement. But before we go live, we need 1, 2, 3, and 4. So the final step of all of this is you should read up on SoC2, you should read up on ISO so you can work out what you can be doing in your organization today from day one to put yourself in a good position, period. What can you do regarding onboarding, offboarding, encryption stuff, bits, things? Where can you already be compliant from day one? And by the way, it's a hell of a lot easier to start as a compliant organization than it is to try and roll it back in two, three years when you actually go for your compliance. Good luck.
