> As my father always counselled me with regards to dating advice: "Don't come up with reasons for them being out of your league. Make them come up with them. Someday, someone -- perhaps someone surprising -- will say Yes."
More to the point, we're not afraid of BFEs because they may be "out of our league" and say no; if they said no right away we'd be fine.
We're afraid of BFEs because we fear they will absorb all of our time in endless email conversations, nitpicking, forms-filling, PDF-generating, phone calls, meetings, and eventually say no -- or even if this results in a sale it may not be worth it.
I'm not saying this is true -- I'm just trying to describe the fear. The OP clearly addresses most of those points by the way.
In my experience working with clients of various sizes, it is generally not the largest that are particularly painful but the smallest. The largest have staff trained and dedicated to their positions. The sole/small operators are juggling everything and most struggle to do many things well (often I'm one of those struggling).
These are the clients who, when you ask them for written content for their website, give you a scan of their competitor's brochure with the name crossed out and replaced with that of their own business. (This actually happened to an officemate of mine today.)
FWIW, I think the fear of selling to large companies is of embarrassing ourselves in comparison to larger and more experienced operations who have an SLA template, dedicated tender writers, etc.
The funny thing is, the larger the company is, the less likely anyone there will remember anything you (as "some supplier") does or says--unless you're the one who wins the sale.
With the super-Enterprisey corps, you can even fail horribly to sell one branch/office/department, then turn around and strike a huge deal with some other branch/office/department of the same company.
The biggest fear of selling to BFEs (too many multiple use acronyms here)... is actually just getting our foot in the door.
We hired a dedicated sales person recently and his ability to close far surpasses ours... really it's just a matter of him digging in and getting to the right person (basically what this article says).
Isn't this a line from "Shit My Dad Says"? https://twitter.com/shitmydadsays/status/4811790555
Maybe all fathers say the same thing.
More to the point, we're not afraid of BFEs because they may be "out of our league" and say no; if they said no right away we'd be fine.
We're afraid of BFEs because we fear they will absorb all of our time in endless email conversations, nitpicking, forms-filling, PDF-generating, phone calls, meetings, and eventually say no -- or even if this results in a sale it may not be worth it.
I'm not saying this is true -- I'm just trying to describe the fear. The OP clearly addresses most of those points by the way.