I am the technical co-founder of my startup with some marketing experience (AdWords, SEO). What should I learn on how to sell software to enterprise clients?
Our current customer base is mainly small businesses but we realize that to really grow our business we need to target enterprise sales.
Our current revenue isn't enough to hire a sales person dedicated to do this, so I would like to learn to do it myself. That will hopefully also give me more insight into how our future sales person will work once I know the ins and outs myself.
So what is the bare minimum I need to learn about the selling process and any tips for selling to enterprise?
Hard to be specific without knowing your product, but the theory of enterprise sales is simple enough:
Solve a real pain/opportunity problem that your client has, better than your competition does.
Assuming this is the case then you need to understand how much the pain/opportunity costs, and how your solution fits.
Then research who in the target company feels this pain/opportunity, who is responsible for solving this pain/opportunity and who are the decision maker(s). Then you need to know why and how each are motivated to solve this pain/opportunity, how high up their priority list this falls.
If that sounds easy, you're not the right person to pull this off.
If you happen to be one of those that thinks that "just $1 per user per month" sounds like a great price no company could refuse and just 10k users would be enough to make money, you're not going to succeed.
tl;dr - understand how people at different levels in companies are differently motivated