How to Get Big Corporate Clients (And Service Them Right)

Just because your business is small, it
doesn’t mean your clients have to be small too.

In fact, landing large corporate clients
can give a huge boost to a small business’s revenues. Small companies that were
suppliers to large corporations reported average revenue growth of 266.4% between
one year before and two years after their first sale to a large corporation,
according to a survey by
the Center for an Urban Future.

So how do you get those big corporate
clients? And once you’ve closed the deal, how do you manage such a huge volume
of business? That’s exactly what you’ll learn about in this tutorial.

After all, large clients present particular
challenges for a small business, such as: 

• The sales process is quite different from the
  approach you might already be taking to attract smaller clients. 


• It can be hard
  to know who to contact in the organization to try to sell to. Trying to navigate the confusing structures of large
  corporations can be difficult. 


• You'll need to learn how to comply with their specific processes and requirements. And service your new large client effectively while also not neglecting your
  existing customer base.

It require some planning and preparation to solve these complex issues. So read on to learn how to identify the
best opportunities, how to approach a large client right, how to put together a
winning proposal, and how to manage that client after a successful sale.

1. Identify Opportunities

If you want to go after a large client,
you’ll probably need to adjust your approach. Think less in terms of mass tactics,
and more in terms of an individual, personalized approach.

Why You Need to Switch Your Thinking

If you’ve traditionally been going after
smaller clients, you may be doing things like gathering email addresses and
contacting people en masse through an
email newsletter, sending them a mix of useful information and subtle sales
pitches. Or maybe you’re using social media marketing tools, or keyword
advertising, or content marketing.

Those things are all useful, and they may
even get you a corporate client if you’re lucky. But waiting for someone from
Walmart or Amazon to email you out of the blue one day is not a very enticing
prospect. A much more effective approach is to target individual corporate clients,
doing careful research and contacting them with a solid proposal geared to
their particular needs.

That’s one advantage of pursuing large
companies. If you land just one large contract, it could be worth thousands of
dollars to your company. That makes it worth investing more time in an
individual, personalized sales pitch.

The process we’ll go through in this
tutorial simply wouldn’t be worthwhile for an individual or small client who
may only end up giving you ten bucks in sales at the end of it all. But when
the potential payoff is much larger, you can afford to do a lot more work up
front. 

Even if you have to approach several companies before achieving a
successful sale, you’ll still likely to make more than enough revenue to justify
the investment of time and resources.

Draw Up a Target List of Potential Clients

So begin by researching companies you would
love to work for. At this stage, you don’t need to know whether they’re
actively looking to buy what you’re offering—that information probably won’t be
publicly available. You don’t need to know who to contact or any other
details—that will come later. Just draw up a list of companies you’d like to
partner with and that would have some use for the product or service you
provide.

If you offer a web-based or digital
product, you can theoretically approach companies in any location. But still,
it makes sense to start with local firms if possible. You already have a lot of
hurdles to get over as a small company approaching a large one, so adding the
difficulty of being on the other side of the world doesn't help.

Also, large companies often look for
opportunities to show they’re connected with and contributing to the local
community, so working with a local small business could be a good opportunity
for them. And being in the same area also makes it easier to find face-to-face
networking opportunities (see the next section) and to attend meetings if you
make progress in landing the deal.

However, if you don’t have any suitable
large firms in your area, or if you can see a good fit with a company based
further away, don’t feel limited by geography. Being neighbors can give you an
advantage, but it’s not a requirement.

2. Research Your First Target

Now it’s time to research the first company
on your list in more detail. Try to get a broad overview of what the firm does,
its strengths and weaknesses, its history, and its future plans. You’ll want to
present your product not as just a cool product, but as something that can help
the company achieve its goals. So the more you can find out about it, the
better.

If the firm you’re researching is a public
company, then the annual report should be easily available—it’s usually on the
company’s website, under “Investor Relations” or something similar. The annual
report is a goldmine of information about the company’s financial details,
strategic objectives, structure, priorities, and so on. It may not be the most
interesting read you’ve ever embarked on, but it will be rewarding. If you can
manage to read it from cover to cover, you’ll have a solid idea of the company
you’re targeting.

Also look for mentions of the company in
the press, which can often provide a different perspective. Check out trade
journals as well, where you’ll find some of the more detailed industry-insider
information that may not have a broad enough appeal to make it into the general
news. And reports by analysts and consultants can also give a detailed insight
into the industry and the company’s place in it.

University of
California, Berkeley lists some good resources for researching companies on its
Career Center website.
The information is aimed at people researching potential employers, but it
could work for your purposes too.

Don't forget your local library either.
Most libraries have a business section where you can find some useful reference
books that would be expensive to buy yourself (such as the £715 tome, Who Owns Whom).
Tell the librarian about the research you’re doing, and you may be surprised at
the wealth of information you receive.

3. Get Personal

Corporations may be huge entities, but
they're composed of thousands of individual people, and it's those individuals
who make the decisions.

So the next stage in your research is to
find out who to contact within the company you've targeted. Some of the sources
above may help with this, and some companies also provide details of at least
the senior employees on their websites.

But you may need to get creative to figure
out exactly who the right person is. Check out some of the company’s
publications or press mentions to see whose name comes up. Work your way
through LinkedIn, mining your existing connections to see if perhaps you know
someone who knows someone at the company. Search Twitter and other social
media. Or you could even go old-school and call the company switchboard.

Then look for ways to introduce yourself. Social
media provides easier opportunities, but in-person meetings are more effective
and memorable. If you can dig up information about a speech the person is
giving or a conference they’re attending, that can be a wonderful opportunity
to break the ice.

For more networking tips, read the
following tutorial:

• 
  Small Business
  
  
  How to Professionally Network as a Small Business Owner
  
  
  Marc Schenker

Once you’ve made contact, follow up with
either a phone call or a professional email explaining what your company does
and how you can help. Mention some of the things you’ve learned about the
company in your research, and show how your product will help it meet its
goals.

Keep in mind that it may be better to wait
until you’ve developed more of a relationship before sending the sales
pitch—it’s up to you to decide that based on how the contact goes. You can find
more sales tips in the following tutorials:

• 
  Sales
  
  
  The Five Elements of a High-Quality Sales Technique
  
  
  George N Root III


• 
  Email Marketing
  
  
  How to Write an Effective Email Sales Pitch
  
  
  Allen Taylor


• 
  Sales
  
  
  How to Overcome Your Fear of Sales and Rejection
  
  
  Celine Roque

4. Put Together a Professional Proposal

Although the initial contact may be personal,
you'll need to put together a super-professional proposal to actually win the
business. Large companies often have set procedures and may need approval from
multiple people within the organization, so you'll need a winning proposal that
can be shared.

Laura Spencer wrote an excellent guide to
writing business proposals:

• 
  Proposals
  
  
  How to Write a Winning Business Proposal
  
  
  Laura Spencer

You can also find some professional proposal
templates on GraphicRiver—here’s curated selection of the best one's: 

• 
  Proposals
  
  
  15 Best Business Proposal Templates: For New Client Projects
  
  
  Marc Schenker

Some additional points to keep in mind:

Step 1. Show Your Credibility

Large companies can sometimes be
risk-averse. And the same sometimes applies to the people who work for large
companies (I know; I used to be one of them!). They’re often used to working
with other large companies and proven providers with long track records.

So if you’re approaching a large client, some
key questions you’ll need to answer are: 

• "Why should we choose your small
  business?"


• "How do we know you’ll be professional and able to handle the
  business?"


• "How do I know this won’t blow up in my face and make me look bad in
  front of my boss?”

If you have any history of working with
large or even medium-sized companies that your target client may have heard of,
then make the most of that. But if you’re approaching your first corporate
client, you probably don’t have much track record in that area.

So do any name-checking you can. If you’ve
been featured in the media, even if it’s just a quick quote in an article, then
mention it. Some of the credibility of the newspaper, website or TV station
will rub off on you and give the client some comfort. (If you haven’t been
featured, then work on that: see my tutorial on How
to Get Journalists to Write About Your Company.)

Also throw in any credentials you have from
recognized institutions, any industry associations you’re a member of, and
major events you’ve been involved in.

Credibility can also come from your history
of working with smaller clients, so any statistics you can give about things
like the length of time in business, number of clients served and satisfaction
rates will be helpful. But mentioning some large, recognised names will
definitely give you an extra boost.

Step 2. Refine Your Approach

If you’ve put together a fantastic
proposal, sent it to the right person and landed a huge contract,
congratulations! You’ve hit the ball out of the park on the first attempt. You
can now read the next section on how to keep that new large client.

More likely, however, is that you’ll have
to approach several companies before being successful. You may also have to
wait for months before even getting a definitive reply, because large
corporations tend to have complex processes involving several layers of
approval.

So when you’ve finished the process with
one company, return to your list of opportunities from Section 1 and start all
over again. You probably learned something from the process, and perhaps you
got some useful feedback from the first client you approached, so you can put
all of that to use in your next attempt. Keep trying, keep improving, and you
should be successful in the end.

4. How to Manage a Large Client

Now that you've won the business, what now?
It's easy for a large client to overwhelm a small business. How do you deal
with the huge increase in volume? Here are some quick tips:

Tip 1. Dedicate Resources to the Relationship

Remember what we discussed earlier about
switching from a mass approach to an individual approach? It applies
particularly strongly here.

With smaller clients, you can deal with
them en masse, but that won’t work
for a large client. They’re giving you a large amount of business, and in
return you’ll need to give them a lot of individual attention.

It may be worth hiring a new staff member
or reassigning an existing one to focus specifically on making sure that things
go smoothly with that client. A large client will want a go-to person whom they
can contact if they have a problem—and they'll expect that problem to be
resolved quickly.

Tip 2. Adapt Your Processes

Large companies have certain ways of
working, and they generally won’t be receptive to the idea of upending their
processes for the sake of a small new supplier. That means that you’ll be the
one who has to adapt.

That may mean big changes to your
manufacturing processes or the way you deliver your products. Or it might mean
changes to the payment process. Consider this example from Patrick Weir, the
owner of MyDigitalDoorman.com, as told to the Center for
an Urban Future:

In the beginning, we weren’t at all set up
to deal with the big guys. Our whole model was to charge small businesses
monthly by credit card. Big customers want to pay by invoice once a year. We
had to create a mechanism for that.

Sometimes, large companies take much longer
to pay their bills than smaller ones, as reported in this Wall
Street Journal article. That can lead to cash-flow challenges, so you’ll
need to factor that in. You can find out more about managing your cash flow
here:

• 
  Finance
  
  
  How to Manage Cash Flow More Efficiently
  
  
  Andrew Blackman

Tip 3. Keep Your Balance

Dealing with a large company can be quite
demanding, and the danger is that you spend so much time keeping your new
client happy that you neglect the old ones.

That can be very dangerous, because if you lose too many of your smaller clients, you can end up depending too heavily
on your new corporate customer. If they decide to stop doing business with you
one day, your business could go under.

So when you dedicate resources to the new
client, make sure you’re not taking too much away from the existing ones. And
in your new product development, don’t make it exclusively aimed at the large
customer—build in something to help the little guys too.

Planning carefully and keeping things
segregated is the key here. Devote enough attention to the large client, but be
sure to keep some time and resources free for the rest of your client base too.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you’ve learned how to get
large corporate clients and then keep them. We’ve covered the process from
start to finish, beginning with researching targets and establishing contact,
and then going through the sales and proposal stages, before looking at how to
manage a large client successfully.

As you’ve seen, approaching a large client
can take a lot of time and effort, and managing that client may require making
changes to how you do business. But the increased revenue will more than make
up for it, and the credibility and possible referrals you receive from serving
that large client can lead to many more opportunities in the future.