[lefstathiou]

We provide SAAS to financial institutions and their corporate clients (so the below may not be relevant to your market):

1) make sure your service is a pain killer not a vitamin. This industry does not believe in vitamins and we didn't have the resources for such a long closing cycle. Our tech can be deployed in minutes, is easily understood and requires very little to no backofdice Support 2) Cold call to get meetings. I can't emphasize enough how powerful a cold call is. People on Wall Street get hundreds of emails a day but they are trained to always answer their phone. Be nice, be genuine, solve a painpoint 3) "ask for the order". Sales cycles can drag on, at some point you have to draw line in the sand and ask for the order. Do it humbly and respectfully and be prepared to hear no. The will almost always say yes

Final thought: we never took VC funding. In the beginning friends and mentors said we should as it would "add to your credibility", anecdotally I believe the opposite has happened. I've sat across from many entrepreneur CEOs who chose us not just because we were good at what we did but out of a desire to pay it forward. It's the unwritten code among founders: you grinded to get where you are and people who had no need to helped along the way, you do the same when the time comes. Point of this story is find these people as early as possible, they will become your champions.

[Tharkun]

Interesting. We haven't had much luck with SAAS in financial institutions. In our experience they want everything on site and running on their own hardware and software. How did you manage to convince them? Or are you limiting yourself to smaller players where it's less of an issue?

[lefstathiou]

Answer here depends on what you're hosting and doing for the bank but generally...assuming you do not require complex integrations into BBG or proprietary tools you should be able to host off-prem. We fought hard for it and eventually got through and our clients greatly appreciate it (we can update very quickly). The key here is selling through the front office instead of the back-office. The golden rule of selling software to a bank is that clients value making a dollar more than they value saving a dollar so do your best to position your solution around that and target the front office. They'll ram it through the system if it indeed is true. PS: happy to chat further "offline/hn". Email me (in profile)

EDIT: Assuming your service is SpiderOak, from my experience/perspective this would be a very hard sell to a bank. They have (albeit inferior) solutions for this and will not trust a third party to do it easily. I wouldnt even know how to go about selling it given you would have to go through the COO and vendor department. We offer a "similar" service in that we host virtual data rooms that contain tons of proprietary / confidential data. The difference is we do it in the context of a transaction (a front-office P&L event) which makes it a much easier sell. It's also not permanent.

[Tharkun]

Thanks for that!

Oh and for the sake of completeness: I'm not in any way affiliated with SpiderOak, though I suppose some of my post history mentions SO quite often as I'm a rather heavy user of their services.

[slantaclaus]

What's your product/website?

[lefstathiou]

See profile.