You would have companies where you have existing relationships, they love what you offer, and really want to work with you, but the deal just gets delayed by some other priority or reality of their business. The solution they already have is good enough (even if it’s barely good enough), and sticking with it is not actively putting them out of business for the time being.
It’s just reality… just like VC investing, selling into 100 small companies and growing along with some of them is waaaaay more likely to pay off than landing one whale
I'm currently at a seed-stage startup with a few Fortune 500 companies as users. We're lucky to have a great sales team that can bring that business in. If we're solving a problem for them, they're willing to use us regardless of our size, though they do care about some small particular issues around size.
- It saves all the details needed for 1-click, not only your card (which is just PayPal). So: shipping address, name, possibly even 'pre-done' age or fraud checks, etc.
- It 'maps to' the business's API far better than a browser's autofill can do, which only has some random HTML tags and a helluva lot of guessing. (In other words, users won't have to keep filling in the, like, 4 out of 9 inputs that it didn't understand.) Your advantage is that the merchant itself does the integration work themselves - though ideally your API/SDK will make that as easy as possible.
(Essentially, it's just: "user has a third-party cookie for your site, comparable to SSO, and you charge their saved details and call the merchant's API on the backend [or, for small businesses, a Shopify integration or whatever fresh hell the Fast engineers must've gone through]".)
It's an enormous potential market, though that's also true of the shipping industry and it doesn't guarantee big margins. I'm interested to see what comes of it all. I expect something boring like "Yeah, eventually [company X] got big enough, that's why Apple released the Apple Pay Checkout Fields API for JS".
As a footnote: Amazon has actually offered this as a service for ages, which I know because of the precisely one website I used which happened to offer it. If it weren't for the terrible antediluvian UX and the lack of any evident marketing, it probably wouldn't have been such an open goal for these startups. Here, this is what Fast was trying to sell a shittier version of, without a user base: https://pay.amazon.com/what-is-amazon-pay
The reason this is possible for us is because our tech isn’t mission critical for them.
I doubt the CEOs/CXOs of any of these companies even know we exist.
We’ve just been fortunate that a lot of ops teams in these companies need our thing.
So - that has really changed my paradigm of enterprise sales.
Sometimes, if you’re SAP, you need to get whole of company buy-in. But if you’re SurveyMonkey, you don’t
The companies I know that succeeded with that strategy either have great starting relationships with insiders in their first sales, and had contracts signed before committing to a big staff, or got into said companies when they were small: If one of your customers turns into a rocket ship and you are tied to their revenue stream, their growth is your enterprise-sized company.
Enterprise sales might not even be all that profitable when it's all said and done: How many other companies are going to try to bid on their business? With their large size, how good is their leverage to squeeze down the profits of the winning bid.
You might have a relatively unique product, the right connections, and end up being Palantir, but it's a very narrow road with steep cliffs everywhere.