Business Size, ARR Goal, and Ambition

Most founders think enterprise sales takes 6-12 months. Bassem Hamdy closes deals in 9 days. After scaling Procore from $10M to $100M, Bassem built Briq - an AI workforce platform now doing 8 figures in revenue. His enterprise sales strategy is counterintuitive: never demo the product early, never do free POCs, and always charge from day one.

Bassem reveals why selling to enterprise starts with vision and value before showing a single screen ("I could demo a blank screen - they don't know what you're demoing anyway"), how targeting CFOs instead of innovation teams compresses B2B sales cycles, and the land-and-expand playbook that grew a $15K first deal into 8-figure enterprise sales revenue.

Briq is an AI orchestration platform for construction and manufacturing that automates back-office work for enterprise deal cycles across Fortune 100 companies. Bassem spent 15 years in construction tech before selling to enterprise in this market.

This episode is brought to you by:

💖 Gearheart → Book a free consult and get the first 20 hours free

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🏢 Enterprise sales starts with vision, not demos: Bassem says "I could demo a blank screen" - customers don't know what they're looking at anyway. Align on vision and value first, and enterprise deal cycles shrink from months to days.
• 💰 Never do free POCs in enterprise sales - even $1 creates commitment: Free pilots attract time-wasters. The moment money changes hands in B2B sales, prospects become invested in making the product work.
• 🎯 Target CFOs, not innovation teams: Innovation teams chase shiny objects but can't write checks. CFOs control the checkbook, love price certainty, and close enterprise sales quickly once they see ROI.
• 📈 Land small and expand to grow revenue: Briq's first deal was $15K. Through disciplined land-and-expand with consumption pricing, they grew to 8 figures selling to enterprise.
• 🔄 Don't pivot away from product-market fit: Briq had PMF with their automation product but pivoted to forecasting under investor pressure - and had to "refound" the company to recover.

Chapters

• Why SaaS founders should ignore feature requests
• Introduction and welcome
• What Briq does: AI workforce for physical industries
• The failed "construction data cloud" idea
• The investor-forced pivot to forecasting
• How to close enterprise sales deals in 9 days
• Selling on vision and value vs. features
• Why you should never do free enterprise POCs
• SaaS pricing: moving to consumption-based tokenization
• Selling to CFOs: overcoming risk aversion
• Firing bad enterprise clients
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/465
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email