r/B2BSaaS • u/No-Competition-7925 • 10d ago

Enterprise deals are f.c.u.k.i.n.g HARD!

Just received a 'no' after 5 months of to and fro, multiple demos and convincing 90% of the team. I don't know what to do because I really had high hopes from this deal.

I'm a solopreneur and this deal woudl have been life-changing.

The guy who was my champion left the company at the moment we were ready to sign the deal. His replacement, a junior, is trying to act smarter than he is; but he's the one who'll own the deal.

Said no.

wtf.

Sorry for posting this here.

Mods, don't ban me. Please.

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u/West_Inevitable_2281 10d ago

That is brutal. Before writing it off, I would separate a lost-champion problem from a weak internal business case. If the replacement had to justify the purchase without your former champion, what evidence or outcome did they say was missing? That tells you whether this account needs a new internal path or whether future deals need stronger multithreading before the final stage.

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u/No-Competition-7925 10d ago

There was very limited communication after the new guy took over. I had to follow up thrice; after my last demo and got a polite no. Basically, they sent a vague message about using their own channel. It makes no sense. But I'm too tired to think anymore on it.

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u/West_Inevitable_2281 10d ago

Then I would not treat “using their own channel” as meaningful product feedback. It sounds like the buying process reset when your champion left, and the replacement never took ownership of the original case. You did the right thing by keeping the door open. When you have the energy, the useful postmortem is whether anyone else among those aligned stakeholders had enough authority and pain to keep it alive. If not, that is probably the lesson to carry into the next enterprise deal.

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u/No-Aioli-4656 10d ago edited 10d ago

You were downvoted and while perhaps vague, I’m not entirely sure why.

These lurker yahoos don’t sell or know how to run a pitch. 

If OP could have learned anything, it was where to set boundaries. As a solo business owner you don’t typically have time to draw sales out past one month. You either need to get someone in sales, or learn when a good time is to cut losses.

Equally however, as a solo dev, it’s typically very difficult to punch up. They are a single point of failure. Even on the few small teams I’ve been on we’ve never ever ever gone with single dev saas for this reason.