| I worked at a company that had similar situations, so here are some thoughts. Make sure you really understand what it is they want and how they will use your product. Our company would speak with companies and it turned out that our service wasn't exactly what they wanted, it just sounded like what they wanted. Basically the value prop wasn't understood. Or they liked our features, but really wanted a competitor feature we didn't have. In these cases we spent time across multiple teams trying to close these deals and it led to nothing. Also, make sure you really understand all of their requirements. We spent a bunch of time speaking with one company, spent time during a trial to impress them, then at the end it didn't close because they wanted us to have a specific industry certification that we didn't have and weren't planning on obtaining. They went with a competitor. Another problem we would run into is that we would trial with a company, then whoever our contact was would quit. Then whoever replaced them either didn't think our service was needed, or just couldn't continue speaking with us because they had to get settled into their new role. Pricing was also an issue sometimes. Make sure you speak about it upfront. Again, we had companies not close because pricing came up at the end and they didn't want to pay. Personally I felt like we spent too much time chasing big companies because the business side always thought closing one would open many doors. We did close some big companies and the revenue was good, but it never really led to more business. |