Dan Somers: What I wish I'd known when I started

Selling to blue-chips
It would have been helpful earlier on if I’d understood customers as I do now. When trying to grow and sell more we found sales cycles of blue-chip companies extremely long. You need to prepare for the length of time they take to adapt to new products, services or suppliers and then develop a plan to shorten the sales cycle. Find out who’s in charge, who’s your champion, who’s your user. You need to demonstrate each aspect to the right person – make sure you’re working on the right decision-makers at the right time. Working with partners can be key – if you’re lucky you can work with a well-known name like Cisco or, as we have, Microsoft. If you’re not on the radar, a partner can let you piggyback their brand reputation. Then customers will think, ‘If it’s good enough for them then it’s good enough for us.’

Know what you don’t know
It’s important to realise how much you don’t know. We’ve recently taken on a very experienced chairman who’s helped to plug the holes where I don’t have the experience. At the start, I didn’t think I knew everything but I underestimated what I didn’t know. It’s important to get good people to fill your knowledge gaps. Try to draw on other entrepreneurs’ experiences. Everything in business has been done before by someone else – it took me a few years to work that out!

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