- Talk to your tech and customer service people about onboarding and supporting another 5000+ users. Does the server load of your SaaS really scale linearly with user count? Does your product need more customer support when the users are less bright? (For this purpose, large-company employees typically are.) You can kill yourself trying to swallow a whale.
- Next, give a very cold, hard business look to this potential customer. Large enterprises too-often treat their smaller vendors quite poorly. Will they expect you to jump through hoops of fire every time they snap their fingers, then pay you on "Net Eventually" terms? Maybe learn about their industry's norms in treating smaller vendors, too. (At $Job, we got burned badly once by an automotive supplier. "Normal" norms of honesty did to apply, and we'd delivered product on verbal assurances, without full legal paperwork in done advance.)
- Next, talk to some experienced business people about whether an "Enterprise Edition" could add serious value to your product, or not. As an old manager once told me, "There's no EE of Post-it Notes, only a volume discount."
- If that EE-value answer is "no", then your "Enterprise" product may be something like "Same price per seat, but at 250+ users you're allowed up to 5% overage until your next annual renewal. And we're currently working on a few more user-management and reporting features for large customers."
- If that EE-value answer is "yes"...then life gets interesting. Large customers can be happy to spend $20M to save themselves $50M. OTOH, $20M is real money. How wide & deep is your moat?
- Next, give a very cold, hard business look to this potential customer. Large enterprises too-often treat their smaller vendors quite poorly. Will they expect you to jump through hoops of fire every time they snap their fingers, then pay you on "Net Eventually" terms? Maybe learn about their industry's norms in treating smaller vendors, too. (At $Job, we got burned badly once by an automotive supplier. "Normal" norms of honesty did to apply, and we'd delivered product on verbal assurances, without full legal paperwork in done advance.)
- Next, talk to some experienced business people about whether an "Enterprise Edition" could add serious value to your product, or not. As an old manager once told me, "There's no EE of Post-it Notes, only a volume discount."
- If that EE-value answer is "no", then your "Enterprise" product may be something like "Same price per seat, but at 250+ users you're allowed up to 5% overage until your next annual renewal. And we're currently working on a few more user-management and reporting features for large customers."
- If that EE-value answer is "yes"...then life gets interesting. Large customers can be happy to spend $20M to save themselves $50M. OTOH, $20M is real money. How wide & deep is your moat?