Insights, Marketing
founder of Rocket SaaS
Selling your product or service to a corporate business can smash your sales targets in a single deal. Once you acquire this experience and case study, it will be much easier to land other corporate clients, which can utterly transform your revenue and business.
In this blog, I’m going to outline some strategies and tips to help you find these deals and land those whales 🐋.
😁 The good news is that they are willing to spend big money.
😥 The bad news is that they take a long time to make decisions.
On average, you are looking at 3 – 6 months to close a corporate deal.
One of the reasons why it takes so long to close a deal is that you have to sell to and convince multiple people within the business.
With corporates, you won’t immediately be selling to the CEO, COO or any other ultimate decision-maker. You‘ll be selling to someone at a lower level. It will then be their job to sell your offer to the senior management. This is a concern because now the role of sales is out of your hands. What if your contact is terrible at selling your product?
You need to mitigate this risk by providing them with a series of assets which does the selling for them.
Corporates make decisions as groups. You need to make it easy for the whole group to be able to find, digest and understand your value. You don’t want the group to be scrolling through some 20+ email thread. Your value needs to be organised and easily sharable.
📹 A personalised video
Make a personalised video of you/your team as a quick summary of your business and your solution. This should not be a full product demo. Introduce yourself, tell your story, outline the problem you solve and introduce your solution. I suggest you keep it below 5 minutes. This video will likely be shown during a group meeting where your agenda slot is limited.
A video is also a great way for you to get your personality across to those who have not met you before (likely the most senior people).
📃 A personalised PDF
Your general sales brochure may be sufficient. But if the opportunity is there, put the effort in to make it hyper-personalised to their business and their problems.
📊 Data report PDF
If you have data that can help articulate the problems you solve, opportunities in the market, competitor analysis or market research that are relevant to this pitch, I suggest you put it together within a PDF.
🤝 Case study PDF
You should have these already. If not, now is a good time to get new case studies. I suggest you create them as PDFs, not just web pages. I’ll explain why shortly…
📜 Whitepaper PDF
If you have a whitepaper which is relevant to this project, make sure you share it rather than presuming they will find it on your website.
Put all this together in a Google Drive folder (or another cloud server). Provide everyone with the access link.
Remember, corporates are old school. They like to print stuff. That’s why a physical PDF, printed and handed to everyone at a meeting that each person can take away and pop on their own desk, is much more powerful than a link to a web page or email thread, which will quickly be lost and forgotten about.
If you really want your pitch to sparkle, offer to print your documents and mail them to the office. Ask your contact how many they will need.
If your contact pitches your solution to their bosses with beautifully presented and organised assets, the bosses will be impressed, which will make your contact look good, meaning they will push hard to get your deal over the line.
There are two main routes to finding corporate clients. One is searching for tenders. The other is Account Based Marketing (ABM), which I’ll briefly dive into…
ABM is a focused approach that targets specific, high-value prospects rather than mass marketing.
One approach to finding target companies would be to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Use the filters to find around 50 companies that fit within your target demographic (location, revenue, headcount, etc). Create a list of individuals from those companies who would be a good initial contact. Put the names, companies and LinkedIn profile URLs into a spreadsheet. Circulate this spreadsheet to everyone relevant in your company and ask:
“Hey, please click on each of these LinkedIn profiles. Let me know if you are already connected with anyone and how you know each other.“
Odds are, you will get a few positive responses. Hopefully, there will be a few ex-colleagues, acquaintances or even friends. Use this person’s account to reach out to them, asking if they are suffering from X problem and are open to exploring a solution. Or ask for an introduction to the right person.
By Ryan James
Founder @ Rocket SaaS
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Insights, Marketing
Insights, Marketing
Insights, Marketing
By Ryan James
