How Startups Close Million Dollar Deals

Dalton + Michael

Summary

In this discussion, Dalton and Michael from Y Combinator explore the transition from selling simple, self-service SaaS tools to closing massive, enterprise-level deals. They emphasize that while building tools for developers is common, scaling to high-revenue contracts requires a shift in mindset: moving from selling features to selling outcomes. Founders are urged to avoid 'reinventing the wheel' regarding pricing, by aligning with standard vendor practices, and to focus on how their product creates tangible revenue for corporate clients. Ultimately, they suggest that the path to big deals involves persistent upmarket sales attempts, managing long sales cycles in parallel, and understanding that selling to non-technical decision-makers requires prioritizing business impact over technical details.

Chapters

  1. 0:00Understanding Large Deal Cycles
  2. 2:00Strategy for Enterprise Pricing
  3. 4:30Tools Versus Outcomes
  4. 8:00Developer Mindset and Revenue
  5. 11:00Marketing Products to Customers
  6. 14:00The Reality of Sales Teams
  7. 16:00Managing Sales Cycles

Topics covered

  • The challenge of big deals
  • Self-service vs Enterprise sales

+5 more topics (full content when you follow the channel)

Transcript excerpt

And so, if you charge a similar amount as a startup, and it sort of resembles the way the other vendors charge, the customer like, "Oh, that makes sense. It'll fit right in." Yeah. Versus when you're a founder and you try to price it in a totally weird way, it'd be like if you were if you were like a hotel and you're like, "Oh, you pay with seashells." You know, you're like, "We don't take money here." >> This is Dalton plus Michael. Today, we're going to talk about how do startups get big deals? Six-figure deals, seven-figure deals, eight-figure deals. How do they get big deals? And the kind of subtitle here is, are you selling tools or are you selling outcomes? I think a very common >> first office hour topic for companies that get accepted into YC is some version of them saying, "Dalton, how do I get big deal?" >> It's like >> Like they they they haven't even Googled it, right? This i…