BC Startup Sales Podcast – Mastering the Complex Enterprise IT Sale with Assaf Resnick (BigPanda)

We were back in the studio this week with a new Bowery team member, Evan McElwain, co-hosting with Jess Bernido for our first-ever 2-on-1 BC Startup Sales Podcast. We were joined by Assaf Resnick, Founder & CEO of BigPanda, to discuss best practices for mastering the complex enterprise IT sale. We spoke about his journey from an investor at Sequoia Capital to starting and scaling BigPanda and the lessons learned along the way.

Assaf Resnick is the Founder & CEO of BigPanda. He enjoys uptime, freetime and cheesecake. Previous to founding BigPanda, Assaf was an investor with Sequoia Capital. He lives in California with his wife and two beautiful kids.

We start the podcast with the backstory behind why Assaf started BigPanda and the pain points he was aiming to solve. We go into the sales process in the early days as BigPanda was coming out of stealth mode, as well as the key early learnings that led to them locking in product market fit. After a year and a half with their initial inside sales strategy, BigPanda took a step back and reflected on which customers were getting the most value out of the platform and shifted their sales strategy towards enterprise. We then covered how to navigate enterprise sales while working on enterprise hardening the product. Assaf expanded on the various steps a company goes through when mastering the enterprise IT sale, and gave us insight into BigPanda’s approach to enterprise sales today and what that sales process looks like. Next, we dug deeper into qualification (i.e. not just asking if a buyer has budget, but digging into whether they have CapEx vs. OpEx and why it matters), followed by how to cultivate champions in a middle-up sales approach. We go into the various stages of an enterprise sale, where people can get stuck, and how to make sure your product is providing meaningful business value. We then get into the importance of scoping a POV to align it to business pain vs. focusing solely on impressive technical specifications. Assaf shared lessons learned as a CEO – touching on topics like identifying great leaders, experimenting with various types of sales backgrounds when building out a team, and also navigating SaaS sales in a world where buyers have lots of CapEx but a scarcity of OpEx (as companies are optimizing for EBTIDA).

If you liked “Mastering the Complex Enterprise IT Sale” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!