Well the only successful strategy is to have a pitch that solves some sort of pain point that they are already having.

One of the hardest things to do is pitch something where the potential partner doesn't see a problem. And by 'a problem' here I mean 'is causing pain at the moment.'

You can tell a company until you are blue in the face that you will get them more leads, cut their operational costs, or streamline the experience the customers have when they deal with them. But unless the company 'doesn't have enough leads', 'has a problem with current operational costs', or 'has customers complaining about their interaction', all you will get is a thank you for sharing and nary a call back.

The fact is that the larger a business is, the more averse to changing they are. The reasoning is pretty simple, most larger businesses both don't know all of the variables that are going into their costs and customer experience, and they know they don't know all of the variables. Thus, if the system they are using is working for them (for their definition of working, not yours) then they won't change it. All they see is downside (change makes things worse), and little upside.

The only successful strategy that I have seen work with these folks is to find a way they can somehow canary your product with their own real data but without changing anything they currently have. That may take some extraordinary steps on your part to set up a completely parallel chain, but the payoff is that you can tell your future partner/customer, using their own data, how your change will help them and not hurt their existing system.

Start your pitch to the producers not the management. If you're pitching a hospital talk to the doctors/nurses. Bankers for a bank, and associates for a law firm. Don't ask for management or the person in charge. I've dealt with a lot of organizations at a high level. Trying to jump in line and go straight for the CEO will get you lost in the noise. The bosses are already bombarded with requests promising everything.

You need at least one good producer to back you. These people are a lot easier to reach. They aren't usually sold too, and generally are closer to the pain points ("pain points" flow downhill). Once you have someone on the inside to vouch for the idea, then start moving up the chain.

Take this advice! The people that are actually suffering from the problems your business solves are (usually) not managers, CEO, or anyone at the top. It is the people in the middle or bottom. They are usually also so happy to have something that solves their problems, that they will act as an internal champion for you during the sales process.

It's cliche, but Art of the Start http://www.guykawasaki.com/the-art-of-the-start/ explains this tactic very well.

Internal champions are an absolute must-have!

How about for companies that just sell products (Walmart, Bestbuy, Newegg, etc) who would you contact in a situation like that? The marketing team?

You haven't described the service you're offering, so it's difficult to know for sure where to send you. If your service obviates the need for a marketing team I wouldn't recommend it (even if it's marketing based).

For a walmart/bestbuy I'd try to win a single store first if that's possible. Or target a smaller competitor and use that as leverage. If you're trying to sell to an entire F500 at once, I'd probably say you need to change scope. Perhaps there is some way to piggyback without their permission? Making it so they can't ignore you.

I don't have a service at the moment, I was just wondering what you thought from the retail perspective as well.

Large retail companies have "buyers" or "merchants". You want to contact them. Product samples, schedule calls, and be prepared for face-to-face meetings which should be Goal #1 (that's where you will close the deal). If you don't already know - Ask them how they view their average Consumer, then prove to them why those Consumers will love your product.

Make the risk as low as possible for them. Fund the inventory, fund the advertising, etc. - these are things they will try and negotiate. In the end, business is business. If they think their Consumer may want your product and the risk of trying it out is low, they may just move forward.

Bonus: The chain typically goes like "assistant", "associate", "buyer", "manager", "vp" jump in the middle (or lower if you need to) and work your way up.

EDIT: Also there are Vendor Rep companies that have these relationships. This may be something you want to consider.

Be careful with this tactic. It is easy to have all your time sucked away by people who are easier to reach and convince because they have no influence. Expect to have a high level of non-producers but if a couple work out well you are in good shape.

I often go straight to the C level. Even if it is to get blown off and have them tell me, "John Doe handles that for me." I then talk to John Doe and say, "Hey, Mr. CEO told me to talk to you about..." They listen, but show value quickly before they realize the CEO just handed you off to them.

I feel I have to contribute a sob story from my younger days, which is peripherally related, but may have some relevance. This was back when applications were largely desktop based.

1.) See gap in market where the existing software is limited in functionality and difficult to use

2.) Develop software where everyone who uses it thinks it's amazing, easy to use, intuitive etc.

3.) Discover that although everyone loves it, it's really hard to market against the entrenched incumbents

4.) We got a salesperson in who after seeing the product agreed to being paid on an if-and-when the product succeeds basis

5.) Started looking for synergies and partnerships to help market it. Our salesperson had a lot of industry contacts and he used them to find out who the best people were to talk to at various organisations. He also managed to get introductions to some people. Other companies he found out who to approach just by doing some basic research, calling the company and asking around etc.

6.) Found an appropriate partner with huge customer base who was interested in providing it to their users

7.) They show interest, get NDA, legal agreement etc. drawn up, start negotiating

8.) Spend months demoing product, negotiating, graduating into meetings with increasingly senior staff etc.

9.) The main person we were dealing with is replaced with someone else, things go very quiet for a while

10.) After much deliberating be told that they've decided that the product wouldn't provide sufficient benefit for their users so they've decided not to go ahead

11.) Watch them launch a grossly inferior clone of your product a year later and win sweeping accolades

12.) Lawyer tells you initial legal agreement isn't worth paper it's written on

Then we considered open sourcing the product, but it turned out to be a nightmare because we'd used so many 3rd party components that it would've require huge amounts of work to get to a point where we could do so and we'd poured too much time and effort into it already.

As you can see, plenty of mistakes were made. I learnt a lot in the process though. I don't regret a moment of it.

if you don't mind, what exactly did your service do?

User friendly accounting automation for the personal/SME space, localized for our country. Pulled down transactions from banks, credit card and other sources and did as much work as possible for you, generated a lot of the necessary paperwork for tax and other compliance things etc. It did a lot of stuff around data analysis and memorization so that the user didn't have to do much work.

At Topguest, we’ve signed many deals with big companies such as Hilton Worldwide, IHG, Virgin America, Wyndham, and others despite being in business under a year and not having prior experience in our industry. First, before you even start trying to get a meeting, these 2 things must both be true:

• You have a strong hypothesis of what Company X’s specific pain point is, informed by research

• If your hypothesis is right, there is a >50% chance that your product can actually solve their pain point

If both of the above are not true, do not proceed. You will waste your time and theirs.

If both are true, you’re in luck. The sequence I propose assumes that you are starting from scratch, just like we were. No flashy connections at the target Company, no warm intro, no impressive track record. This sequence will not result in a meeting every time, but in my experience it has had about a 75% success rate:

1. All emails to the prospective partner should be sent by someone with a very impressive sounding title, ideally the CEO. This is annoying, since generally titles are cheesy and can be really problematic at startups. But unfortunately titles are important for business development. If nothing else, the email coming from the CEO could make BigCo Manager Y think “Oh well, even though this will likely be waste of 30 minutes, I will get to meet the CEO of Cool Startup Z which could possibly help me somehow in the future”.

2. Avoid agencies. Do not try to get to Company X through their advertising agency, social media consultant, hairdresser, or other service provider. Your goal is to get a meeting with a decision maker as fast as possible. Going through an Agency will both put your starting point far away from a decision maker, and at minimum will 2X your timeline.

3. Develop an unhealthy addiction to LinkedIn. Utilize the Advanced Search function to find people at Company X that can serve as entry points for your quest. Here are the characteristics you are looking for:

i. Have one type of common thread with you that you can use as an anchor. Same college, used to work at same company, played same sport in college, were at same conference X years ago, etc. Use Google to augment their LinkedIn profile to help identify a common thread. Note, LinkedIn connections in common does not = common thread. Generally I never use weak LinkedIn connections to get an intro because a. odds are that your in-common connection does not have influence with your prospect, so you’ll just get jerked around, and b. I personally have far more respect for ambitious people that smartly reach out to me directly vs. having intermediaries I don’t know well facilitate introductions.

ii. Are likely in a “Decision Making” role. Guess what? Very few jobs at big companies are actually “Decision Making” roles! It is hard to tell who can make decisions and who can’t, and even titles can be very misleading. But generally, Vice President of X, or Sr. Director of Y have at least some decision making power.

iii. Work in the department who would most likely be purchasing (or testing) your product. Use your sleuthing powers to figure out what the right department is. If you have researched your market this should not be that hard. iv. Their online footprint indicates they are ambitious. Beyond LinkedIn, check Twitter, Quora, blogs, news articles, Facebook, etc. and make a judgment call on whether the person appears to be ambitious or not. Ambitious people become champions of new ideas and introduce them to organizations. Un-ambitious people do not.

4. Obtain the email address of anyone you’ve identified at Company X who meets at least 2 of the 4 criteria above. We will call these people your “prospects.” Do not message prospects over LinkedIn, that’s amateur. If you can’t find the email address of a prospect, find the email address for someone else at the company and insert your prospect’s name into that format. Works every time.

5. Email only the best person based on the Criteria from #3 above. Crafting this email is an art, and you must get it just right. There are many great blog posts on how to cold email people, I suggest reading them. For the purposes of this sequence, here is what I suggest:

i. The subject line must contain the single most impressive thing about your Company to Random person X. Not the most impressive thing to you or your team who know about all the goodies under the hood, but the must impressive thing to a random person from the street. If you have backing from ‘top tier’ investors or a star advisor that your prospect will have heard of, use in your subject line

ii. The first sentence of the email must establish your credibility. E.g. “I am the CEO of Startup Q, recently featured in The Wall Street Journal [link]. We are building X for Y”

iii. The next sentences must exploit your common thread, or subtly hint as to how you could help this person get ahead; preferably both. Here is an example: “I am also a graduate of Georgia Tech (Sci ‘08!), and am reaching out to you since our Product is delivering 200% ROI for Vaguely Competitive Company Z.”

iv. The next sentences must illustrate that you get what is important to the Company and have an idea of how you could help. Here is an example: “I’m impressed by your efforts to grow Brand Z’s Facebook fan base. I read about Initiative X in AdAge and it seems like you’re at the cutting edge. That’s why I believe a simple tool that lets Company X sell products to Facebook Fans could be useful and interesting for you.

v. Close the deal with a specific request for an “introductory conversation” and suggest a few dates.

6. If this person gets back to you within 5 business days, awesome. Prepare a brief presentation, and try your hardest to have the meeting in person. Real connections between people are developed in person not over the phone. And the hardest part of selling is a developing a real connection with the prospect.

7. Most likely, your first email attempt will not elicit a response after 5 business days. Do not despair! Rather: i. Move on to the other prospects you identified from LinkedIn, using the same email format as above. Email each of these people separately, at the same time. ii. Forward your initial email back to the initial prospect attaching a new and interesting relevant news article, a statement to the effect of “I know how busy you are”, and a new request to meet with your updated availability

8. If you have one person willing to meet with you by now, awesome. Proceed with step 6.

9. Most likely, you’ll still have no response. So follow up with each of the additional prospects you emailed in Step 7 with a similar follow up note.

10. If still no luck about 15 business days from when you started, email your initial “best” prospect and “second best” prospect together in the same email. Say something to the effect of “touched base with each of you and wanted to follow up. Do either of you have availability to connect? We have made progress X, Y, Z since my initial note and I’d love to update you.” Emailing both the people puts a competitive dynamic at play where neither person wants to look like a slacker to the other person, therefore making at least one of them more likely to write you back.

This sequence should help you get your initial meeting. But the real work starts after… From initial meeting to “sale” could take months… or years. Unfortunately my post is way too long as is, so will save the rest of my business development advice for another time ☺ Hope this helps a bit!

--Geoff

Great information Geoff thanks so much for posting this. Out of curiosity, is this the approach that you took to secure each of the partnerships that you have with the large companies? What was your success/fail rate like before you finally had some biters?

When we first started, I used this approach to contact execs at about 7 of the largest loyalty programs in the world. Of those 7, 4 are now Topguest clients. The lead times from initial contact to live integration have ranged from 3-8 months (patience and structural ability for the company to deal with long lead times is really key with enterprise sales)

This is a really great post. Have you considered posting this as a blog post and submitting it?

Thanks for the suggestion; working on a post now!

Awesome, can't wait to read it!

Thanks for detailing out your approach! I wonder how many times you zigged when you should have zagged to get to this point of clarity...

There was lots and lots of zigging... still is :-)

Blog post is up on Business Insider. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444263

Really glad this was so helpful. I will do a follow up post soon on how to close sales.

great post man. Please turn it into a blog post.

Thanks. working on it!

Few tips:

This is based on experience working with large tech companies - not sure how similar this will be for your targets

- Be ready not to hear back (looks like you already are)

- Use linkedin. It will help you understand the org structure and who is between the people on the management page (CEO, etc) and who picks up the phone when you call their 1-800 number. The people you want to be talking to at first are probably somewhere in the middle. With a lot of companies you can start to guess what their pattern for email addresses is. If not InMail works occasionally

- If you are reaching out to someone cold or semi-cold, try to connect what your company is doing with some hot button issue or topic in the industry (as they are likely already thinking of ways to work on this). Offer up something that would be interesting to them (e.g. info on how companies similar to them are approaching the problem - ideally something that they couldn't find out by surfing the web). This is often a way to start up a conversation and understand if there really are opportunities to work with the company

- If you are working with their customers, partners, competitors (even peripherally) - leverage that. In the end you are going to have to show them how your product is going to drive more revenue, gain more market share, cut costs for them (or whatever your value prop is)

- Make it easy for them to say yes i.e. be flexible. don't ask for them to drive 2 hrs to see you. offer up some some possible times for a call, etc

- Sometimes it helps to start lower down on the chain. It will give you a lay of the land and maybe some introductions to the right people. Leverage your connections (friends, investors, etc) - its worth talking to anyone in the company rather than not talking to anyone.

- Conferences can be a good place to try and corner people :)

- If you really have no way of getting to someone in the company - customer service reps will likely be a dead end. Sales people will be slightly more help, but mileage will vary. If the company has some sort of partner program try and join it. At the least it will get you connected to someone in the company

- Its a process. You will likely talk to 10 people before you get to the right one

- Timelines are always longer than you expect. Nothing is done until its done.

Good luck!

I am very interested in seeing where this discussion goes. I don't have much to add per-se BUT I do, however, remember seeing this some time ago: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/10/how-to-get-g...

Perhaps you will find it a bit helpful.

I actually read this post earlier today when searching for tips/ideas. I'm interested in stories of people from HN and what they did to get a response too, so I look forward to where this discussion goes. Thanks for posting the link!

By a mile, the best way to get my attention is to send me business. I've got nearly infinite patience for people who have already "shown me the money".

If you're really a good biz dev partner this shouldn't be hard.

Find a product manager in the business to champion you. There are many regional meet ups for product management professionals such as this - http://www.svpma.org/

One thing that has worked for us is following them around. I mean literally. Find out what conferences the CEO is speaking at and approach them after they get off the stage. Sounds scary-stalkerish but it works. Even if you just get their card and make a quick connection. I've done this before for FeeFighters and gotten many meetings/partnerships out of it.

The other thing is LinkedIn. A warm introduction counts for a lot. Build your network, you never know who might help.

I like your outside the box thinking on this instead of sticking with the typical email/phone call.