How to Win Enterprise Deals without a Sales&Marketing Budget?

4 min readJan 24, 2018

We started Divante as an eCommerce Software House 9 years ago and since then we have achieved double-digit growth every year. But we always wanted to build our very own products. We succeeded. These days, every week we close a deal with an enterprise client. Let me share some ideas we gathered on the way.

The Idea

While working on eCommerce, we saw that retailers are struggling with Omnichannel. They pay high rents to attract many clients every week. Then they pay again to attract these same clients online. This is insane. Selling to an existing client is several times cheaper than winning a new one.

So retailers should attract clients off-line and then move them on-line. The easiest way of doing so is by building a loyalty program. Why don’t retailers use them?

The Problem(s)

Retailers tried loyalty programs in the past and it turned out that:

implementation is very expensive, and ROI is hard to estimate
integrations with outdated systems are Pain in the ass

The Solution

So how to fix that?

We built OpenLoyalty — a product that can be used out of the box (just like a typical SaaS solution) but the code is open so you can build your custom features on top of our platform. And you own your data.

The Growth Hack!

This is how we hack the enterprise sales process: we published Open Loyalty on GitHub — there is an open and free license for developers. So they can download it, play with it, enjoy it, and then sell it internally to the business people.

As a result, every day we get 3 qualified leads asking about the enterprise license cost.

The best thing is that with internal IT support, integrations are suddenly much easier to do :)

https://github.com/DivanteLtd/open-loyalty

Growth Hack no 2 — how we help with ROI estimation

ROI of loyalty programs is hard to estimate so our idea is to not estimate it at all. We suggest use Proof of Concept Approach. You can start from one-day workshop where we present Open Loyalty as a base and then just check what needs to be done to go live.

Growth Hack no 3 — integrations are pain in the ass

Integration with POS or ERP could easily stop every implementation for months.

Instead of stopping the project, it’s better to try… the Proof of Concept approach :).

In this approach, you select, for example, 5 shops and just start the program. You can ask sales clerks to manually add points and skip all integrations at the beginning. After PoC you can easily estimate the ROI and get a budget for all the integrations you need.

Benchmark — Magento for Loyalty

In eCommerce the leading platform is Magento. Magento accounts for more than 25% of the market and is basically an industry standard for retailers. Why? This solution is open source and allows clients to build whatever they want on the top of a ready to go solution.

We built „Magento for Loyalty”. Our platform is open-source and free for developers. For business, there is an enterprise license with support and upgrades.

When Developers download our platform from github — they feel they can learn something new using Open Loyalty.

How to build a Product inside of Software House

It’s common knowledge that this is nearly impossible to build a serious product inside of service company. How we handle this?

We switched Divante from the typical Department/Silos Structure to Tribes. Tribes are like a small companies/startups inside of Divante. The idea came from Spotify and we adopted this in our business.

Each tribe is no bigger than 20 people and is focused around one technology or application. They have all resources needed to work on projects and products. They feel fully responsible for the business outcome, people and processes inside the tribe.

There is a Tribe Master who is sort of Mini-CEO. This helps us scale and eliminate all typical problems connected with growth.

Next step — Other industries

We started as a solution for retailers but we see huge interest in loyalty in B2B industry. Companies use OpenLoyalty as a gamification tool to motivate salespeople. You can even motivate sales managers outside of your company. You just create a gamification program that rewards sales activities across all your distribution channels.

Btw. You can find benchmarks for you industry in our “Top 40 Loyalty Programs” report.

Open Loyalty for Startups

We also decided to fund Open Loyalty for Startups because we believe that our product base, originally developed for commercial loyalty programs, can be a useful base for various applications where we interact with customers. We want to unleash the power behind Symfony3 and Elastic matched in Open Loyalty and empower great startup ideas.

If you have an idea for a startup and you’re looking for a powerful set of technologies which can power your idea — just let us know!