I asked some of the entrepreneurs I work with about the biggest thing that took them by surprise, or something they underestimated, in starting their first ventures. @Marco Giberti, Founder and CEO of Vesuvio Ventures, has deep experience launching several startups and as a seasoned early-stage investor and business-builder. His response around working in the B2B environment is particularly poignant:

“My first startup was b2b related and I minimizde the long, painful and slow sales process around selling b2b and corporations in general and this is exacerbated with startups in particular because the additional challenges and risks that startups represents for corporate customers.”

We hear a lot about the difficulty to scale in the consumer environment. In B2B, it is no cakewalk! Several of my clients have found the above experience to be very real. While selling B2B has less customer acquisition fragmentation, your revenue targets are concentrated into bigger, fewer customer tranches.

Selling your great product to big businesses is often about pilots, aggressive pricing for “marquis” customers, long sales cycles.

Overcoming the hurdle of “we don’t integrate with startups”, “come back when you have traction” is hard enough when articulated by your potential customers – but often it is not. Businesses have their priorities and are often not geared to incorporate outside innovation (let alone inside innovation). Startups in the selling B2B must battle the prioritization triage that occurs daily in business.

Understand your customers well, and assure that your value can be articulated in an overwhelmingly compelling way so as to overcome these B2B hurdles.