How the best do it

How do the best teams sell into large Indian and global enterprises where procurement runs the show?

The short answer

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.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checked India Free Advanced

Why we picked it The buyer's side of enterprise outbound, from a CIO who says roughly 80 percent of the startups he evaluates were found through outbound research, peers or LinkedIn. He also times each phase of his buying process, which tells you exactly how long your deal will take.

How Startups Can Sell to Big Companies ft. Karthik Chakkarapani, Zuora

On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Karthik Chakkarapani 62 min listen

Watch on YouTube neon.fund
🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checked India Free Intermediate

Why we picked it Kapil built one of India's few listed SaaS companies, so when he takes apart the myths (Indians will not pay for software, they demand endless customisation, they want enterprise support at SMB prices) he is arguing from a P&L. Essential if you are deciding whether India is a real market for you.

7 Myths About Selling B2B SaaS In India ft Unicommerce Founder Kapil Makhija

On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Kapil Makhija 80 min listen

Watch on YouTube neon.fund
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it 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.

The Confounding Logic of Discounting

From SaaStr by Jason Lemkin short read

Open saastr.com

The same ground, at another level

How running a sales process and closing reads from a different seat.

People also ask

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Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Money, pricing & model, our Starting Up track.

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Money, pricing & unit economics, our D2C track.

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