BC Startup Sales Podcast – Taking a SaaS Account Enterprise-Wide with Steve Bachert (Uptake)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Steve Bachert, VP of Sales at Uptake, to discuss “Taking a SaaS Account Enterprise-Wide.” Steve Bachert is the VP of Sales at Uptake, and the perfect guest to enlighten us on the subject at hand. Steve has over 12 years of executive sales experience, and over the course of his career has been directly responsible for over $130MM in revenue. Some of his previous roles include: Senior Director of Sales at Cloudera, VP of Sales at Hewlett-Packard, EVP of Sales & Field Operations at Digital Fuel Technologies, and VP of Sales at Parametric. Steve earned his BS from Northern Illinois University and received his MBA from Loyola University. Uptake is a predictive analytics software company that captures new value for Fortune 1000 companies by connecting and analyzing massive amounts of untapped data. Experienced SaaS salespeople will be familiar with a common scenario: you’ve landed into a SaaS account somehow, whether through a division, line-of-business employees, or perhaps even just through a beta program. Now you’re faced with the challenge of expanding that SaaS account to cover the entire organization (e.g. an enterprise-wide deal). In this episode, we’ll discuss the what to expect and how to prep your org to guide those whale SaaS accounts to close.

Things get complicated and burdensome fast when pursuing a company-wide enterprise deal. Especially when that SaaS account is a 500+ person organization, publicly traded and / or in a regulated vertical, you’ve got a whole new slew of potential considerations: security audits, F500-grade contract review, administrative requirements, regulatory & PCI compliance, DLP concerns, a new SLA / MSA scope, a new set of stakeholders getting involved from finance to IT, and much more. In our podcast, Steve and I started by defining the problem at hand, drawing on his deep enterprise sales experience at Uptake, Cloudera, HP and elsewhere: what does it mean to take a SaaS account enterprise-wide? We then broke down the how Steve has addressed this problem in the past, including amongst other things the common “tipping points” at which a SaaS account might be ready for that enterprise-wide pitch. In this week’s episode, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from Steve what to expect when selling big, what worked for him and what didn’t, and how to best ready your sales organization for the onslaught of organizational overhead courting a F500-level contract can often bring. We finished the session with Steve’s key takeaways for startup founders and early-stage sales leaders when first facing the challenge of bringing SaaS accounts enterprise-wide.

If you liked “Taking a SaaS Account Enterprise-Wide” 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!