How to overcome the "you guys are too small" buyer objection

Size doesn't matter if you change the perspective

I’ve spent most of my career working with early-stage startups that are competing with BigCos — incumbents that are better known, better resourced and all round bigger — and I often run into buyers who say they aren’t ready to buy from us because they think we are too small. This week’s issue is about handling that objection.

From the startup’s point of view it’s a classic chicken and egg problem. On one hand you can’t get bigger without adding customers, on the other you can’t add customers without getting bigger.

Founders often try to overcome this objection by over-promising — they’ll build one-off features even though they destroy the roadmap and create maintenance debt, they’ll throw in crazy discounts even though they make the deal unprofitable, or they’ll claim to be more responsive even though they aren’t staffed to be so.

Over-promising seldom overcomes the “you’re too small” objection because it doesn’t get to the root of the problem, which is that buyers are afraid of doing business with an early-stage startup in case something goes wrong and they get blamed for it.

Even when you genuinely have a better product than your BigCo competitor, at the end of the day if something goes wrong with a BigCo product, your buyer can blame BigCo. Nobody ever gets fired for buying BigCo but they do get scrutinized for buying an unknown startup.

The key to overcoming this objection is to reframe the buyer-seller dynamic, so that buyer goes from being afraid of doing business with you to being afraid of missing out on the opportunity of doing business with you.

There are 4 steps to executing this reframing and none of them involves discounting, custom development or fake deadlines. It’s all about changing the perspective: