Be Enterprise Ready!

As an SME, patience and tenacity are the two most important qualities required to secure a deal with an international corporate. Oh, and your application needs to be enterprise-ready from the onset.

Our latest breaking news: we have just secured ourselves an international corporate deal; so here's a heads up about disrupting the market from one SME to other SMEs and startups...

If you think your solution will only be adopted by other SMEs, then think again!

We, at Rison, set our sights to target all businesses from SMEs to global corporate giants by implementing a scalable, affordable SaaS model...

And guess what?

We just secured a multi-country deal with Nissan Motor Corporation, you may read about it here.

Here's my advice:

Think affordable scalability and build your solution to be enterprise-ready from the very onset of your design; trying to change from a small scale solution to enterprise-ready is very challenging but to build your solution from the onset with enterprise-ready in mind requires surprisingly little extra effort by way of design consideration (read cost) and will put you in good stead for the future.

Also, be prepared for 'corporate-deal-slip', I'm not sure if that's a real term but an American colleague of mine gave me a heads up on this some time back, basically make sure you have enough runway within your busienss to deal with the corporate bureaucracy that will certainly steal time from you, lots of time, moving your hopeful start date down the line, not once, but many, many times.

Always remember that there will be many aspects to consider when attempting to secure deals with big corporate companies - they are generally very cautious when it comes to taking on new suppliers, no matter how big or small the supplier may be, so make sure you have everything ready from being able to provide a proof of concept to ensuring you are able to deliver a multi-country solution, and let's not even get me started on the price-sensitivity issue and having to negotiate the pricing model with the procurement department...

But, let me tell you, it is worth all the effort! Securing a global player as an SME, having beaten all the big players vying for that business, is very satisfying not to mention the wonders it does to your solutions' credo.

So get cracking and aim global from the onset!

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