Landing your first few clients in any type of b2B startup whether it’s a service or product company can be a challenge. In this video I want to talk to you about the power of landing logos and how it can totally give you the rocket fuel to find product market fit and scale your company. And when I say logos I don’t necessarily mean Telsa, Amazon, or companies like that. I’m talking about the influential companies that in your space where if you had them as a client it would be very easy to get the attention of their competitors.

So for my company Order Solutions we landed Denny’s and Famous Daves as our first couple of large clients. And the way we did that was by #1 focusing on a niche which for us was the top 500 largest restaurant chains in the country. And the reason why we focused on that niche was because we figured out we would get the highest ROI on our time by going after large clients instead of a small clients. For context we streamlined and centralized all of the call in orders for over 500 Denny’s locations and all of the Famous Dave's locations at the time and charged per order. So we would generate way more revenue going after corporate accounts versus going after the small business owners that were one off franchisees.

And this is what all came down to in the beginning. After we knew there was demand for our services we realized that there were a couple of competitors that were more established than us. So there was know logical reason for them to choose us than our competitors. And this is something to write down its a huge difference from selling to small local business owners to high ticket enterprise accounts. Enterprise sales is logical instead of emotional. I’m not going to land $1-$3M per year account because i sold to their emotions. It has to make business sense and have a clear ROI for them to pay me that right?

So this is when I came up with a crazy idea or what I thought was a crazy idea. I decided to offer a free 60 day pilot to my clients for 10 of their locations. I believed so much in the service we were offering and that i would massively increase their revenue that I was willing to make that bet. It was going to cost me $10K or $20K do a pilot but I figured that if the pilot worked like I thought it would it would roll out nationally and generate at least $2M per year for one client minimum. And if they lasted 3 years that would be $6M over that time for one client. Thats what we call life time value. So if would cost me $20K to make $6M over three years its a no brainer right? And thats exactly what we did.

Because here another pro-tip to understand when you sell into bigger companies or executives. They are more concerned with getting fired than actually growing their company. I hate to say it but its true. Executives want to get promoted and avoid getting fired. So if I can make them look good by giving them a free pilot that could be worth tens of millions of dollars per year in increasing their revenue that might them look great in front of their boss or CEO and might lead to getting them promoted. Does that make sense? So thats exactly what a free pilot did for us. It eliminated the risk for them and it gave them a reason to choose us over a more established competitor.

And you can use this same strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a services company, agency, or saas company. This is a great way to build credibility and land a big logo. Then you can leverage that logo to get other clients.

There was a lot more that we did to land our first few clients but hopefully this gives you some ideas that you can use right away in your own business.

Also if you want a cheat sheet click on the link in my bio or below this page and I’ll shoot over a cheat sheet that breaks this whole process down step by step. And If you found this helpful please like it and share it so I’ll share other tips on how to get traction and scale your business.