The Wisdom in Doing the Opposite: Why to Pursue Enterprise Accounts First

Jody Glidden

Defining your sales model is arguably one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a founder in the SaaS industry. When we started Introhive in 2012, I knew I wanted to boldly confront much of the conventional business wisdom on market strategy and, like usual, do the opposite. Traditional MBA curriculums worship at the altar of lowering customer acquisition cost. Pursuing enterprise sales – that costly, lengthy and bespoke process of wooing large company contracts – flies in the face of such doctrine. But to eschew enterprise sales outright in the initial launch phase of your business is to grossly overlook the advantages of such an approach. Here’s why you should consider seeking out enterprise customers from the outset.

Starting big allows you to stay stealthy.

The number of enterprise businesses is limited given their sheer size and scale. Having a smaller list of target clients means that you can stay in stealth mode longer, allowing you to fine-tune your product and market fit before scaling to a broader, more traditional customer base. Think of your first enterprise account as an idea lab or “soft” opening for your market debut, but one with plenty of nuance and healthy pressure to get your teams to think creatively and perform their best.

Enterprise clients help you grow faster.

Your teams will learn quickly when they are solving enterprise-level problems, and they will be able to use that knowledge to acquire more enterprise customers. After that, you can develop your ideal customer profile to include mid-size and small businesses. Remember: It is always harder to move up-market than the reverse. Starting with enterprise clients ensures that by the time you broaden your reach to smaller businesses, you have already encountered the most challenging solutions and can engage with confidence. Molding your product “down” to fit smaller businesses is a much less daunting endeavor.

An enterprise mindset builds great teams.

Targeting enterprise accounts necessitates building a team with an enterprise mindset, and this is golden for team culture. The enterprise mindset requires a steadfast commitment to the client and a willingness to embrace and endure the complexity of juggling multiple stakeholders throughout a long sales cycle. A team that sustains and supports large accounts is a team that brings a kindred unflappability to the team culture, a valuable feature in the often chaotic milieu of business.

Larger clients are outcome-driven.

Enterprise customers are solely focused on one thing: outcomes. If your product can provide significant value, quickly, nothing else matters. Once you understand the outcomes that matter to your customers, you can focus on the two most important metrics: time to value and average revenue per user (ARPU). Time to value is the amount of time between when a user becomes a customer and when they begin to use your product in an impactful way. The more ways you provide value through your product offering – and monetize that value – while also providing the right user experience to drive adoption and usage, the greater the ARPU you’ll see. Because bigger companies are more focused on the outcome, versus the experience, it is easier to test, learn and perfect the user journey with this segment.

By pursuing enterprise clients from the beginning, you can give yourself room to perfect your product, tackle your hardest challenges and build a company culture that values agility in the face of complexity. For my company, the most important benefit was that seeking enterprise clients meant we could embody our own product solution: building the best business relationships possible. The enterprise sales cycle is a long one, and as a company marketing the importance of business relationships, we could demonstrate this commitment to our enterprise clients over the long haul, too. As you examine your business model, rethink conventional wisdom and consider doing the opposite: How might pursuing enterprise sales first benefit your company and team?