Unlike dealing with individual consumers or small businesses, enterprise clients come with a set of complex billing requirements that can include customized pricing agreements, compliance needs, and integration with existing corporate systems. Obviously, bigger, more sophisticated clients will likely demand and expect similarly sophisticated billing systems to match -- hence the need for a whole niche of specialized services (enterprise billing solutions).

Here are some considerations:

Customization and Flexibility
Having enterprise customers often means being able to accommodate unique pricing structures, discounts, and bundling per their specific agreements.This is pretty much self-explanatory: whatever billing system you use as the vendor has to be able to handle all sorts of billing cycles, such as monthly, quarterly, or annual billing from specific dates, and adapting to volume-based pricing or tiered service fees, and tackle whatever other specifics your contracts laid out.

Integration with Other Corporate Systems
For an enterprise billing system, seamless integration with your customers' other systems such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is non-negotiable. Your clients will likely rely on these systems to manage their business processes, so any effective billing solution must integrate smoothly to ensure data consistency and streamline operations. If you don't support these integrations, that's where the conversation stops.

Defining Enterprise ACV and Aligning Sales Strategies
When transitioning to or enhancing enterprise sales, SaaS startups must first define what constitutes an "enterprise" customer for their specific market and product. This classification is typically based on the Annual Contract Value (ACV) which directly influences the sales approach, resource allocation, and pricing strategy.

Establishing ACV Thresholds
The ACV for enterprise customers varies widely among SaaS companies depending on several factors including market demands, product complexity, and customer support needs. For early-stage startups, an enterprise customer might be defined with an ACV starting from $6,000 to $10,000. This range is suitable for companies that are scaling and refining their enterprise sales processes without extensive sales teams. More established companies, however, often set higher thresholds, such as $15,000 to $25,000 or more.

Sales Motion and Pricing Page Optimizations:
Tier Realignment: Adjust your pricing tiers on public pricing pages to funnel larger customers towards a high-touch sales process. This might involve setting clear thresholds for when a customer should contact sales to discuss custom solutions.

Clear Messaging: Ensure that your pricing page communicates effectively to different segments. While you want to attract large enterprises, it's crucial to maintain messaging that reassures smaller businesses that your solutions are still accessible to them.

See also: Why your pricing page needs a 'Contact Sales' button

Enterprise-Specific Pages: Develop dedicated pages on your website for enterprise customers. These pages should detail custom features, support options, and case studies relevant to large organizations, helping to convey that you understand and can meet their unique needs

Creating Base Packages
Develop two to three base packages tailored to different enterprise customer profiles you have identified. These packages should include the core features most commonly requested by these segments and allow for some customization through add-ons or volume-based pricing components. This strategy not only makes it easier for customers to understand what you offer but also simplifies the quoting process.

Contract Flexibility and Pricing
Offering flexible contract terms, such as annual or multi-year agreements, can be advantageous for both you and your clients - giving you both some peace of mind and predictability. You may also want to have some tailored add-on options on hand that you can add in to contracts that require significant setup, customization, and ongoing support.

It's important to make sure whatever you're including in your contracts are appropriately priced to cover your own costs over the contract duration, where you don't want to be footing an operational bill for months on end without any payment in sight to help cover it. While the main contract might be annual, you can also ask to invoice your clients quarterly or monthly in addition, especially if there are usage-based components that will get billed regularly.

For SaaS startups aiming to target enterprise customers, integrating a Product-Led Growth (PLG) approach with a sales-led approach presents a strategic opportunity to cater to diverse customer needs effectively. This may sound counter-intuitive, as you'd assume that high touch sales would be the best bet.

Targeted Customer Engagement
By combining PLG and sales-led strategies, startups can engage with enterprise customers at various levels. PLG allows enterprises to explore the product independently, appealing to tech-savvy teams within larger organizations. Meanwhile, the sales-led approach addresses the needs of key decision-makers who expect personalized interaction and detailed discussions regarding contracts and customizations.

Accelerated Adoption and Expansion
PLG can serve as a catalyst for initial product adoption within an enterprise, often starting with individual departments or teams. As these users experience the product’s value firsthand, the sales team can leverage these internal endorsements to negotiate broader adoption across the enterprise, enhancing overall contract value.

Balanced Customer Acquisition
This dual approach helps balance the cost-efficiency of acquiring new users through PLG with the high-touch, resource-intensive process of engaging large enterprise clients through direct sales. It allows startups to optimize resource allocation across different segments of their market.

Caution: Not all Billing Systems Support Hybrid Sales Models!
However, this hybrid sales model, while potentially lucrative, introduces significant complexities into the  billing process: namely, it's hard to execute on both at once, and especially if your infrastructure isn't doing you any favors, you might introduce heaps of data chaos or manual labor trying to keep everything organized across both sales motions. You need to be sure your tools can accommodate both sales motions at once, otherwise your billing process can suffer dramatically.

Go deeper: Merging PLG and High-touch sales motions

For SaaS startups targeting enterprise clients while integrating Product-Led Growth (PLG) with traditional sales-led strategies, they'll need a robust and adaptive solution to manage the complexities of enterprise billing. Here are some of the reasons B2B SaaS startups choose vendors like Wingback as their enterprise billing solution:

Navigating enterprise billing as a SaaS startup involves understanding the complex requirements of enterprise clients and choosing a billing solution that meets these demands. Any decent billing vendor should be adept at enabling you to create fully customizable plans and contracts tailored to your client, while also supporting and integrating with their other processes. Otherwise, you'll never get the deals you're after.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, you may want to leverage your pricing page and lean into your PLG strategy as you go about targeting enterprise customers, just be sure you're using an effective billing vendor like Wingback that's not going to make your billing system a chaotic mess.