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Selling to a large company is no cakewalk. If anything, it needs patience, perseverence and a very well planned out approach. If you’re one of the smaller companies or startups which has a large fortune company like Microsoft, Walmart, Oracle or Cisco on your client list, you’ve gone through the whole process of getting registered as a potential vendor and your inside sales team has probably been spending sleepless nights trying to get a foot in the door. Most of those who finally did break in, bag a contract and get registered as a certified vendor with these companies would have probably kicked back a few beers and thrown a little celebration for the marketing and sales teams little victory. The next day it’s sights set on another coveted large account. In any large account contract, the sale itself is just a foot in the door. The real reason to celebrate would be because your company is now registered as a certified vendor and by this event, a whole new world of opportunity has opened up within that account. 

Although some aspects of management and deceision making in large accounts may be centralized, by and large, these companies are made up of several smaller units put together. Each of these units managed and run by different decision makers, each with their own agenda, requirements and budgets. To make the most out of a sucessful sale into a large account, you need to be able to repeat that success within other areas of the same company and develop business within that account. To do this, you need to start by identifying where are the simlar departments and who are the decision makers who head these units similar to where you had sucess selling into the first time? Build a list of these units along with the other decision makers and reach out to them consistantly to understand whether you can help them solve a problem similar to how you were able to help another unit within their company on a previous occasion. Developing more business within an existing account can be far more rewarding than pursuing new accounts especially when pursuing large companies which have longer sales cycles.

An ISV we worked with, providing cost effective application development to fortune giants used this strategy very effectively. Deciding to leverage their “certified vendor” status in some of these very big fortune 500 companies, we worked with them to expand relations and develop more business within these companies and the process started with mapping the various units within the US locations of these companies. Each of these companies had several offices all over the continent and each could be divided into several operational units which would each have their own requirements. The next phase was to identify the specific decision makers within each of these hundreds of units who in this case were those responsible for application development or software engineering projects and simultaneously do some basic lead qualification to ensure each was a good potential customer for our clients development services.

The inside sales and email campaigns which followed were very productive and revealed how much easier it is to connect with and sell into other parts of the same organization once you already have internal references and you are listed as a certified vendor. References are no longer a problem, decsion makers look at you as an insider rather than someone selling to them and you’ll find discussions happen a lot more freely. After all,  once you have a foot in the door, you may as well map the rest of the organization, build a list and squeeze yourself in.