[bmelton]

Having been on both sides of the Fortune 100 sales cycle, it was always a fun game, as a buyer, to see how close we could get to being written off during the courtship process. Drinks at lunch are the norm, but maxing out the champagne costs, getting box seats at games, etc.

Once (if) the sale closed though, it was down to business, and doing our damnedest to maximize both our time and the vendors. I've never worked with or for banks, but I can't imagine them being TOO terribly different from federal IT, so I definitely sympathize with your plight. It seems as though all they really want you to do is acknowledge, in every way possible, how happy you are to have their business, and how lucky you are to be in meetings with them all day every day.

[Rickasaurus]

Funny thing is, we're a 25 person company and most of our competitors are much much bigger. However, they're so slow, inflexible and outdated tech wise that we just blow them out of the water with our offering (we charge 2-5x the going rate).

The biggest insight that contributed to our success came from our CFO who realized that big corporate IT is where dreams go to die and that we should route around them as much as is possible.