One thing that helped me in the past is differentiating on how fast I could move the deployment / customization of our solution vs. a larger competitor. The service we offered was pretty complex in terms of business requirements (periodic, enterprise-wide, hierarchical data collection of say 10-15 schedules with workflows, status reporting, followups, etc) and it took our larger competitors ~2-3+ months to turn the deployment. One tactic I employed was to ask the prospect for an excel spreadsheets they used in the past and customize the system a bit before the presentation. This had a big wow factor since we already had something that looked familiar and was almost there, made my contacts look good in front of their bosses and eleviated most of the deployment risk (savvy clients really understood that most of the risk was in deployment). We were often able to commit to ~2 week deployment and that made a huge difference. We were winning really large accounts, too (Fortune 100s). Now, this may not scale, but that's a beauty of an early startup - you get to and should do things that may not ultimately scale and may win as a result of that.
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One thing that helped me in the past is differentiating on how fast I could move the deployment / customization of our solution vs. a larger competitor. The service we offered was pretty complex in terms of business requirements (periodic, enterprise-wide, hierarchical data collection of say 10-15 schedules with workflows, status reporting, followups, etc) and it took our larger competitors ~2-3+ months to turn the deployment. One tactic I employed was to ask the prospect for an excel spreadsheets they used in the past and customize the system a bit before the presentation. This had a big wow factor since we already had something that looked familiar and was almost there, made my contacts look good in front of their bosses and eleviated most of the deployment risk (savvy clients really understood that most of the risk was in deployment). We were often able to commit to ~2 week deployment and that made a huge difference. We were winning really large accounts, too (Fortune 100s). Now, this may not scale, but that's a beauty of an early startup - you get to and should do things that may not ultimately scale and may win as a result of that.