Don’t Get Burned on a Big Sales Deal
Whether or not you make money depends on these four factors
One of the biggest hurdles to startup success is the inability to sell in large quantities.
If you plan on selling your product one customer at a time, you’re probably going to spend more than 50% of your time selling and less than 50% of your time producing. Selling is expensive.
There are several ways to sell a lot of product at once, but they all rely on a single common catalyst. You need a partner, an ally, an entity that acts as a megaphone for your business. You sell through them, they expose your offering to a whole lot of customers you can’t reach. You pay them for this access, usually from the revenue you generate from those sales.
In this post, I’ll run you through some of my best practices for approaching a big sales deal with a large partner — including examples of how I did it both right and wrong.
First you have to get in the room. Here’s how.
The first mistake most startups make is the one that keeps them from getting the meeting in the first place — they try to sell their product to the partner.
While a partner might be interested in using your product themselves, that’s not why you’re…
