The sales process in crypto sales has been largely “crypto-native” until now. If you were selling a crypto-based product, protocol, or software-as-a-service, the prospects and customers you were targeting generally had some familiarity with relevant terminology, specific technological primitives, and the benefits to them. This crypto-native approach simplified the go-to-market motion — which spans everything from business development and product marketing to sales and customer success — for most crypto companies.
But over the last year, customers interested in crypto industry products have broadened significantly. Consider these data points, which go beyond stablecoin adoption:
- Bitcoin ETFs collectively manage $150.2B (as of September 2025) — making them the fastest growing ETFs in history.
- Circle’s (CRCL) stock increased over 300% a month after its IPO (May-June 2025) — making it one of the top performing IPOs of this year.
- Robinhood’s revenue from crypto was more than 2.5X its equities trading business (as of Q2 2025) — reflecting more widespread consumer interest.
- Fidelity, and soon Charles Schwab, are offering direct crypto spot trading — showing large institutional adoption and interest in sharing crypto gains with their millions of retail brokerage customers. Early next year, Morgan Stanley will also offer cryptocurrency trading on its E*Trade platform.
These developments signal that we have entered the enterprise adoption era of crypto. The market has not only awakened and taken notice of crypto more seriously, but several traditional finance and other large enterprises have also begun embracing “crypto inside” for their offerings.
But wait, why do we need sales?
“The best products sell themselves” has been a long-lived fallacy in tech. Here’s how the (flawed) logic goes:
- First, you build an incredible product.
- Then, customers will buy your product and love it.
- Those customers will tell their friends and colleagues, referring new customers to your product.
- This bottom-up, word-of-mouth, viral cycle keeps going, your product keeps selling itself, and life is great!
But this is not how things play out in reality. This logic chain skips key steps: discovery/ distribution (how and where do people find your products when it’s no longer Crypto Twitter and Farcaster?); persuading people on the fence (some organizations need more tech context and convincing); comparing against competitors (there may be more offerings, can you position yourself more strongly and even deposition competitors); and much more.
Even the most viral products can only get so far on their own before they need an additional boost to expand further. Large enterprises in particular are prone to roadblocks like internal organizational politics, existing tech to replace or integrate with, or trouble spreading beyond a few early adopter-types. Many of the most successful tech products today took a while to expand to more departments after landing with an initial batch of internal early champions and adopters. There’s a reason the most successful technology companies today — including the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook/ Meta, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Salesforce, and so on — have gigantic sales teams.
Having a robust sales function and process is the only way to break through organizational roadblocks and sell to a large enterprise.
While some founders might miss the insiders-only dynamic, this shift signals a potentially huge size increase in the overall opportunity. The vast majority of SaaS spend, cloud spend, and assets under management (AUM) comes from the Global 2000. As these giants wake up to and understand the opportunity in crypto, the crypto industry could expand by multiple orders of magnitude along many of the metrics that matter most — number of transactions, total value locked (TVL), protocol revenue, contracted spend, and so on.
But this industry shift also means that crypto founders must embrace enterprise sales.
What crypto founders need to know about enterprise sales
Selling to an enterprise requires different mindsets than what’s worked in crypto until now for many founders, so let me outline a few of them here.
#1 Enterprises have different priorities and decision-making criteria
Crypto-native companies often prioritize the best technology or the most ecosystem-aligned projects or pre-existing community relationships when deciding who to partner with.
But for most large enterprises, the most important criterion is going to be ROI (return on investment): Does this partnership or product deliver measurable value by improving an existing line of business, starting a new line of business for the company, or reducing risk around an existential threat to the company?
Other buying criteria for large enterprises include:
- Risk & compliance. Is the technology safe and audit-ready? Will deploying it cause the company to run afoul of any existing regulations, or otherwise increase scrutiny and overhead for us?
- Security & resilience. How can the company prepare and protect itself from known and unknown attack vectors related to the new technology?
- Structured buying or procurement process. Has the company run a proper, thorough buying or procurement process? Did they look at all of the potential suppliers/partners, evaluated and compared features, run diligence checks, and only then chosen the best option? (Note too that sometimes an organization’s buying process, while clear to the company internally, can be opaque to sellers approaching them.)
This isn’t a comprehensive list of buying criteria. There are other considerations as well, such as the egos of key players involved and career impact for the product-evaluation team. Will advocating for a specific partner make me look smart and help me get promoted, or will our selecting them make me look stupid and even get me fired?
#2 What worked for early crypto sales won’t work in an enterprise sale cycle
The value proposition and selling process that worked well selling in a crypto-native market will likely fail in the enterprise. In early technology markets, breakthrough tech and transformative product capabilities go a long way towards winning deals. When selling to enterprises, however, these attributeswill help but only get you ~30% of the way. Success in the remaining 70% towards winning the deal requires:
…A value proposition that resonates. How does your solution solve the specific problems that are top of mind for a given customer? How does your product drive measurable business outcomes? Mastering this messaging and translation — of how your product features and benefits map specifically to the company’s needs or desires — is a skill that can become second nature with repetition. This skill can be learned, just like many other aspects of company building. However, assuming that your existing pitch decks and product descriptions will work as-is in a new market will lead to lost deals.
…Understanding the procurement process. The four most dangerous words in enterprise sales are “We got the verbal!” — the customer telling you that your solution is the one they prefer. This can be exciting and is an important accomplishment. But a verbal commitment is far from the finish line, so don’t update your Board or cash-burn analysis yet.
What comes next is a lengthy, arduous process with the customer’s procurement team in which you’ll have to negotiate, and come to agreement on, several critical items such as —
- Pricing: What’s the overall pricing model and approach to volume discounts? Be cautious of agreeing to special pricing for early customers that you’re not prepared to carry forward as the business grows.
- Contract duration: A longer contract gives you more time to validate the effectiveness of your solution, but it may also cost you in needing to offer the customer a higher discount.
- Termination rights: Under what conditions can you or the customer terminate the contract? The words “Termination for Convenience” can become a club with which enterprises choose to beat their suppliers.
- Support SLAs (service-level agreements): Do you have a customer success and support organization that can respond in the timeframe the customer requires? If not, can you build one?
- Indemnification and Limitation of Liability: How much financial liability are you willing to assume if things don’t go as planned? Indemnification is where so many contracts stall out with big-company legal teams given their surface area of exposure.
- Governing law: In the case of a dispute, in what state or country will the issues be arbitrated?
It’s essential to have a plan and a strategy to successfully answer these questions as you enter the contracting phase of the sales process. Knowing where you can push back on the customer’s asks, where you have to hold your breath, and where you can go for it are important to closing the constract. Otherwise, you’re likely to lose control of the process and that verbal win you worked so hard to achieve can slip through your fingers, ending up in the hands of your arch competitor.
Sales process and deal hygiene also matter here. Enterprise sales campaigns are games of inches, just like football: Every inch you gain is hard fought and brings you closer to the end zone. Teams that approach the process with a clear strategy and process — as opposed to relying on charm, persuasive skills, or product benefits alone — are more likely to out-execute their rivals. This means asking and answering questions such as “who are our champions and who are our detractors?”, because it can yield important insights into your chances of winning and help you adapt messaging accordingly as well.
As a founder, you’ll want to regularly inspect what you expect. At every phase of the process, it’s essential to assess how you’re performing, identify your blind spots, and understand how you can improve your position.
#3 Every enterprise customer is different; knowing the differences will help you sell
There are multiple segments of enterprise customers at various points on the crypto-adoption spectrum. Depending on where they are and what they want, the way to approach these customers will vary. If you understand what drives them before the initial meeting, it can greatly increase your odds of success:
Are you pitching an enterprise-scale centralized exchange or fintech (e.g. Coinbase, Revolut, Robinhood, etc.)? In the not too distant past, each of these companies likely looked a lot like your company in that they were small and scrappy. They may still beconfident that anything worth building, they can build themselves. So these companies are more likely to do a build vs. buy analysis in assessing your product. In these situations, it’s essential to communicate why working with a partner like you can help the company achieve their objectives better, faster, and more cost effectively than if they did it themselves (overcoming the “Not Invented Here” syndrome).
Are you pitching a traditional asset manager or brokerage? Institutions that manage large quantities of their customers’ money have tremendous responsibility and therefore lower risk tolerance. They will focus intensely on understanding and managing the potential downsides of any technology purchase decision, which may require inverting a crypto-native mindset that focuses more on upside. These institutions will also rely on a very formal, structured evaluation process in an attempt to fully assess the nature of the risk they are taking on.
Are you pitching a media, retail, or manufacturing company? Companies in these segments are often wrestling with razor-thin margins — and in many cases secular industry declines too — so a bullet-proof business case and clear articulation of ROI will be front and center in these sales situations.
#4 The CEO still needs to sell, but at the right point
Many CEOs believe, rightly so, that they are the most effective sales person given their intimate knowledge of the product, vision, and company. This is particularly true in the early stages when product capabilities and timelines are fluid. However, as the company grows and the market starts to increasingly embrace their product, the CEO is juggling a huge number of priorities, all existential to the company’s success: not just product and engineering, but also finance, talent, marketing, legal, and so on.
One mistake that crypto CEOs may make — especially given how hard it is to share and understand their products — is keeping themselves as the primary sales person, even after the market is telling them that the job is bigger than the amount of time they can commit to it. At this stage, sales needs to become a full-time job for someone else (or a team of people), and the best move that a CEO can make is to hire a strong sales leader to manage the sales function so it can scale.
To be clear, the CEO will still need to be involved in selling — getting on a plane to help sign big deals, coming in person to help close a deal, exchanging messages between company leader-to-leader for complex negotiations or integrations — but the CEO doesn’t have to drive sales alone anymore. At a certain point — when sales opportunity outpaces the amount of time individual leaders have — the CEO should show up only at the right time, to convert and close.
#5 Build an enterprise sales motion sooner than later
While the enterprise market in crypto is still in its early innings, enterprises are complex beasts — and the best go-to-market strategies get built over time through iteration. It’s unlikely that your first sales hires or initial value propositions and demos will be the ones that carry you to long-term success. Therefore, the sooner you build your enterprise sales motion, the more time you’ll have to learn and improve.
As for building the sales function — who does what — the key question to ask yourself when you’re starting from zero in sales is: Where do I need the most help?
- If you need help generating sales leads in the first place, consider building a Sales Development team This team’s job is to scour the market for qualified leads and pass them to the right account executive.
- If you’re getting lots of interest, but need help closing large deals, consider investing in Account Execs. These salespeople are the backbone of an enterprise sales force. Their job is to interface directly with a prospective customer, sell the vision, and close the deal.
- If you’re winning the technical aspects of sales already, consider building a Solutions Architecture function. Solution Architects are deep technical experts in the product, so they can help customers understand how your product can integrate well with their existing systems and operations.
- If you have growing numbers of customers and want to retain critical accounts, examine your approach to Customer Success. Unfortunately, most enterprise customers fail to plan how to successfully integrate and operationalize new tech, which leads to the majority of projects failing — but your product will be blamed (vs. the integration itself). Customer Success teams are the antidote to this issue since they can work with customers post-sale to help them get the most out of your product or service. Customer Success not only helps triage and manage support tickets and escalations, they also help upsell offerings as well to increase retention and revenue.
Of course, once you solve your biggest sales problem, you’ll likely find that the growth bottleneck moves to a different part of your sales funnel. However, this shift is a good indication that you’re increasing throughput and velocity of the overall sales process.
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Don’t assume your product will sell itself, especially to enterprises — you will need a different approach to enterprise sales. It may seem obvious, but the most important thing you can do is to plan before and throughout the sales process. As Benjamin Franklin aptly put it, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
