You’re probably wondering when is your company ready to go from small business to large business.
Whatever your current target is, from very large companies, Fortune 1000, Fortune 5000 –huge companies- or even companies over 6 to 7 hundred employees. When do you know that you’re ready to move to that next level?
3 Easy ways to move from small business to the next level
There are 3 things to look for when you’re trying to decide how to move to the enterprise and your path forward and I’m going to run through them on this post.
Check my video and keep reading below!
The first step is…
1. Have a Solid Business Already
There are two main advantages for selling your small business:
- It has got really big ticket items, increasing the chance to make a worldwide impact.
- It could help you close more business –although that’s kind of a BS excuse because you can close business even without enterprise clients.
Nevertheless, the downsides of the enterprise are the very long sales cycles: it might take six to seven months, 2 to 3 times longer to close an enterprise deal as it would be with a start-up or even with a small business or medium business.
The other downside is that there’s going to be a lot more stakeholders, that means you’re going to talk to one person, you’re going to sell them on your system, they’re going to have to go their boss, –if you’re good at this you could coordinate a meeting with their boss- then you’ll meet with them and engage in some kind of ‘tribunal’.
In short words, they’ll look for whoever has the budget to approve it, which takes forever.
I was just on an enterprise call with a pretty large agency and we had to go through the account manager and he was asking all these tough questions that somebody that wasn’t the business owner wouldn’t ask and it’s so interesting when you start going to the enterprise.
That’s basically the first thing you want to keep in mind, make sure your small business is in a good enough spot where you don’t need enterprise clients to survive.
If you’re not in that good of a spot yet, go out and get some SMB clients, get some startups that are going to convert on the first or second meeting.
2. Look at Your Past Clients, Target a Specific Industry
Pick a case study in their specific industry. Basically, when going towards the enterprise I recommend doing what we’re doing on our quest to get bigger enterprise clients.
We only focus on one vertical, we only focus on professional services specifically, mobile app development UX, UI design, branding and some advertising firms. All of our targets are in the advertising marketing or the software category. You can do the same.
We can help your small business to take the next level. Feel free to contact us!
We have the case studies to back them up, we’ve got case studies from our clients in similar spaces to them, smaller companies but people that we’ve succeeded with in the past with the same type of projects. That’s what you need to have.
Look at your past clients and keep an eye on the most successful type of clients you’ve worked with and how were the results and their reactions to your work. Take those types of companies and clone it out.
Basically, zoom out and see what type of Fortune 5000 companies or even large 1000 person companies match similar criteria.
You should use that case studies to cold email the same we’ve talked about before so you can get them to respond, at least.
The reason of why this works is because enterprise companies always have an eye on what the up-and-coming companies are doing.
3. Pick One Case Study for That Industry
This is what case studies should you focus on. I recommend picking only one specific case study, one you mastered, and pitch that case study to companies that very match that case study.
For instance, I was pitching non-profits about 2 years ago and we had a non-profit company that we have worked with where we did website development so I was pitching website development to other non-profits.
The other one was the University of Oklahoma where we developed this app Dom&Tom for OU and I was pitching other universities, showing them or telling them a little about the app and that would get them interested enough to book a meeting.
For you, it could be any specific case study that shows off what you do. If you’re in more of a product-mobile app development type of space, I recommend showing them an app that one of their competitors or even one of the much smaller companies built with you and try to sell that to a larger company.
That’s when you should ready to go to the enterprise! Have a solid business model, look at you past clients to figure out what type of industry you want to be in and then pick one case study to move forward with.
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