Databricks co-founder shares his secrets for winning big enterprise customers

Turns out selling to big companies isn’t about having the shiniest tech: It’s about hitching a ride on a giant’s sales team. Startups have never been under more pressure to grow quickly. To do that, many of them must land large enterprises, the deep pockets of the IT world, as customers. But as any company that sells to enterprises will tell you, it’s not easy to win such contracts. One critical mistake most younger startups make is believing that their tech will practically sell itself, says Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, co-founder and senior vice president of field engineering at Databricks, which helps businesses store and analyze huge amounts of data.

Yes. The tech must work well. But that’s not enough, he warns. Databricks today is an AI and big data storage giant, valued at $190 billion, with more than 70% of the Fortune 500 as customers. But it was once a tiny startup, and Tavakoli-Shiraji was responsible for helping bring in its first big deals. “Everybody when they’re selling to enterprises at startups … we think it’s all about the tech and having the best tech,” Tavakoli-Shiraji told attendees at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. But he learned the hard way that “people and processes matter the most.” He remembers securing a meeting with a prospect in the early days, only to discover