One of the first things I noticed when I looked at Ed Robinson’s company was a collection of logos from top clients. If you look at this page, you will see that there are others as well.

He was invited to teach us how he did it. Ed did not want to just wing it. Before he came to Mixergy, he sent me a list of detailed notes on what he wanted to teach and he backed his points with specific examples from his company. You will be able to use more of it after you hear what he has to say.

About Ed Robinson

Ed Robinson is the founder and CEO of Aptimize, a web performance company with a simple message: double your website speed. He designs and brings to market software that builds business value for developers and IT professionals.

He worked for major technology companies such as Microsoft, where he designed and helped market their products, and also for smaller companies through the start up phase. Ed wrote two books, UpgradingVisual Basic 6 toVisual Basic.NET and Security forVisual Basic.NET, with 50,000 copies in print.

5 tips for selling to the big guys

What is your product? You want to make it easy for people to understand that you bring value to the organization. Apitmize says to double your website speed, no code changes, no extra hardware.

Is it possible to quickly communicate what the company does? Ed says it took about 6 months for them to get to this simple statement.

Define what the value is. Too many companies put too much emphasis on the value they bring to customers. Ed suggests that you take the test to see how clear your message is. Ask your friends or colleagues to describe your business, then tell them what you value.

You aren’t focused enough if they can’t repeat it back to you clearly.

#3 Use an old-school sales model. It becomes harder for larger companies to know what they are paying if they have a complicated pricing structure. It is easier for your customers to understand what they are paying by keeping your pricing simple.

It’s great to offer great support. One of the advantages of being a young company is that your customers can speak to the people in charge. You are big enough that you can use that advantage. Customers can reach Ed directly at Aptimize. A viewer sent him an email after the interview. He received a reply right away.

Kevin Hale told us that everyone in his company, including the co-founders, do customer support and write thank you letters.

Discuss your background. You can see how a background story can help sell a product by reading how Aptimize was founded. Here is an excerpt from that part of the program.

Our background story isn’t just about making money. We had a problem and invented our product. We started a software-as-a-business service two years ago. There are so many of them. We had another one. It was an online product.

We hosted it in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s the last bus stop before you go to the Antarctica, right? It is a long way away. The website was fast for us in Wellington, New Zealand, but slow for people in Australia. Slower from Seattle. It was even slower in New York. It was very slow in London England.

I told a bunch of my friends that my website was slow. They only noticed that.

We were able to get our load times from New York to our website from 30 seconds to 4 seconds. The invention that ended up being the Aptimize Website Accelerator was called that.