They treat procurement as a stage with its own owner, timeline and artefacts, not as an annoyance at the end. A CIO's process typically runs experimentation, then a business value analysis, then legal and procurement, and each phase has different people and different questions, so map your deal to it. Get security review, data residency and compliance material ready before anyone asks, because that is where weeks disappear. For India specifically, expect negotiation regardless of your list price and expect long tail customisation requests, which is exactly why Unicommerce's founder pushes back on the myth that Indian enterprises will not pay: they will, on their terms and their clock. Price with a negotiation band built in so you can give ground without bleeding.
4 resources, 2 India-specific, 4 link-checked.
A sitting CIO explains how he actually finds and evaluates startup vendors, including that roughly 80% arrive through outbound. Qualification advice is far more reliable when it comes from the person doing the buying.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia 62 min
Listen on Spotify open.spotify.com →The counterweight if you have decided Indian customers will not pay: Unicommerce runs 10,000 to 12,000 dollar contracts with enterprise customers, has been profitable since FY18, and IPO'd. Useful when you are setting India pricing.
On The Neon Show (YouTube) by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Kapil Makhija Full episode
The reference explanation of all eight letters from the people who own the methodology, free to read. Use it as a deal checklist: the letters you cannot fill in are exactly where your deal will die.
From MEDDICC long read
The pragmatic case for pricing so discounts are survivable instead of pretending you will hold the line: mark up by around 20 percent, automate the small predictable discounts, and model the procurement discount into big deals before they arrive.
From SaaStr by Jason Lemkin short read
How running a sales process and closing reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Money, pricing & model, our Starting Up track.
The same ground, over in Money, pricing & unit economics, our D2C track.
