This is an interview with Rob Neivert, B2B partner at 500 Startups, on how to close enterprise sales. He has worked at eight startups and invested in 70 companies.
Rob shares some stories, like how changing a website's color helped him close a $2 million deal.
Key Points
- Use the acronyms and language of your customers — they will identify you as someone who has expertise.
- Know your prospect’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- The first three sentences are key when you’re cold-calling or emailing.
- While cold-calling or emailing, the best strategy is to offer credible, customized value upfront. Giving instead of selling.
- Contacting junior level people can help you create “internal champions”.
- Ask your lead specific, genuine questions and frame them with industry standards.
- Optimize your demo: Prepare for tech failures, read your audience, dress to the prospect’s culture, customize design, summarize past discussion, consider light humor, and admit what you don’t know.
- Contracts that terminate by default can set clear expectations, motivate eager salespeople, and make terminations smoother.
TechCrunch uses tags for companies and a few products. Android and iOS were so common that I included them to give a sense of what TC covers within those companies.
Sorry, TechCrunch asked for JPEGs instead of tables and that link stayed in the original table. The JPEGs are also low-quality so I'm going to try creating higher-quality ones next time.
Hi, I'm the article author. I agree getting in TechCrunch does not mean as much today as it used to. The SEO does help and if the article highlights strong growth, I've seen how it can attract investors/hires.
I do hope TC invests more in quality posts. Otherwise I think it risks being just a disseminator of news instead a creator of one.
I am not sure about SEO exposure from TC, it certainly helps, but I would guess it is not as important as it used to be.
More quality posts wouldn't be enough imho, they should probably have/use more sub sites for what we consider noise and have the main site only talk about startups and related stories (maybe try to limit the number of stories per day, working a bit like a real newspaper in this respect).
But it will probably never happen since it means less ad revenue.
Maybe it is too late anyway, I would guess the audience has changed a lot since it has broaden its topics selection, it wouldn't be considered a good judge of talent anymore, and I guess it isn't their primary goal anyway.
Rob shares some stories, like how changing a website's color helped him close a $2 million deal.
Key Points
- Use the acronyms and language of your customers — they will identify you as someone who has expertise.
- Know your prospect’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- The first three sentences are key when you’re cold-calling or emailing.
- While cold-calling or emailing, the best strategy is to offer credible, customized value upfront. Giving instead of selling.
- Contacting junior level people can help you create “internal champions”.
- Ask your lead specific, genuine questions and frame them with industry standards.
- Optimize your demo: Prepare for tech failures, read your audience, dress to the prospect’s culture, customize design, summarize past discussion, consider light humor, and admit what you don’t know.
- Contracts that terminate by default can set clear expectations, motivate eager salespeople, and make terminations smoother.