Ask HN: Describe your first enterprise sale
About six years ago I set up a Dropbox-like service for real estate brokers to handle the paperwork side of the sale and purchase of condominium blocks.<p>I built the product, which was basically a service for storing and authenticating access to PDFs.<p>I&#x27;d previously built a news portal for the industry and had a mailing list of around 8,000 professionals.  I emailed them all and got nothing back.  At the same time I researched a few flagship developments and contacted the parties involved.  Eventually one agreed to use the service as a trial at zero cost.  I was excited - this was a big business.  But they weren&#x27;t interested in continuing and I saw nothing back.<p>About a month later I received a phone call from the technology manager at a top 5 national firm who&#x27;d seen our product being used by this company and thought it was exactly what they needed.  I flew for a meeting with them, I copy and pasted my way through a template SaaS contract.  They made me fill in a disaster recovery questionnaire and quite a bit of other paperwork - no-one ever checked anything.  They wanted the source code for this website in Escrow but in the end they never made any arrangements.<p>They signed the contract and six years on they still use the service, are the only client, and absolutely love it.<p>My only helpful advice would be that enterprise sales are actually way more personal than consumer stuff.  Me and this technology manager get on well, and have worked well together for years.  As the client, they expect to be bought lunch and dinners - that&#x27;s just the way it is.  After all, they sign the checks.  Over time my contact has gradually realized that this is a one-man operation. At the same time he&#x27;s risen high in this company because his initiative has delivered a service that really works for them.  Meanwhile all their competitors spurned my &#x27;simple&#x27; service to do it in-house, and most of them still haven&#x27;t built anything. My client merged with another company who had sunk $220,000 into developing the same system and it didn&#x27;t work.  They scrapped it and now just use mine.<p>I don&#x27;t want to talk about the service (or grow it) - I keep it going because the monthly check is good, and because they rely on the service.