- outside sales executive (e.g., the person who visits the customer, they typically work from coworking or home-offices)
- inside sales executive (e.g., a sales support person, typically doesn't travel and works at coworking or home-office full-time)
- outside sales engineer (e.g., a customer-facing technical person who answers questions and helps sell solutions with the sales exec)
- master agreements (generally-agreeded terms and conditions)
- Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
- Letter of Intent (LOI) - before final quote & contract
- Purchase Orders (PO's)
- Request For Proposal (RFP)
- Request For Quotation (RFQ)
and lengthy sales cycles that often take 6 months to 2 years, depending on the product or service
Another way to get in is start immediately under a master agreement and do consulting-ish tasks, and gradually sell more solutions and temporary staff roles as they come up ("building a beachhead").
I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about the RFP process. For a small product (maybe Jobs would have called it a feature) like a Chatbot, your best hope if you want to hit the enterprise elephants is to find a “digital transformation” RFP, give a really strong reply for the inevitable chatbot feature in round 1, then get rolled in as a “joint proposal” for future rounds with one of the big boys (Accenture, IBM etc). They get to look modern and open to teamwork, you get your foot in the door and the proposal has better chances. Then if it goes well, you’ll get roped into future deals
Trade publications/newsletters, word of mouth (useful to know people, even low level), and of course for anything regulated or public, they’re published on dedicated directories
- outside sales executive (e.g., the person who visits the customer, they typically work from coworking or home-offices)
- inside sales executive (e.g., a sales support person, typically doesn't travel and works at coworking or home-office full-time)
- outside sales engineer (e.g., a customer-facing technical person who answers questions and helps sell solutions with the sales exec)
- master agreements (generally-agreeded terms and conditions)
- Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
- Letter of Intent (LOI) - before final quote & contract
- Purchase Orders (PO's)
- Request For Proposal (RFP)
- Request For Quotation (RFQ)
and lengthy sales cycles that often take 6 months to 2 years, depending on the product or service
Another way to get in is start immediately under a master agreement and do consulting-ish tasks, and gradually sell more solutions and temporary staff roles as they come up ("building a beachhead").