“Will you still be here in a year?”

The review you are not in the room for

Past a certain size, buying from you is not one decision by one person. Your champion — the one who likes the product — has to carry it to procurement, legal, security, sometimes finance. Each of those is measured on avoided failures rather than on the upside your product delivers.

Nothing you said on the call is present at that meeting. Your champion is, holding whatever you gave them. If the strongest thing in the folder is enthusiasm, the cautious answer wins, and you never hear why.

What they are actually assessing

Not whether your company is impressive. Whether replacing you mid-contract is likely, and how expensive that would be. Three questions sit underneath most vendor-risk processes:

Continuity. Does this supplier survive the length of the agreement. Concentration. Are there other customers, or are we funding the company. Exit. If they do stop, what happens to our data and how long does migration take.

Revenue questions are almost always a proxy for the first two. They do not want to value your business. They want to know whether other people have been paying you, and for how long.

Why the usual answers land badly

Logos show that someone bought once, possibly years ago, possibly for a pilot that ended. Every vendor has them, including the ones that folded.

Funding is an argument about who believed in you, not about who pays you, and for a bootstrapped business it is absent entirely — which a reviewer may read as a negative rather than as a choice.

Statutory accounts are old by the time they are filed, need an accountant to interpret, and disclose a great deal that the question did not require.

Assurance in prose — “we are profitable and growing steadily” — is the weakest of all, because it is exactly what a company in trouble would also write.

What answers it

Duration, measured by something other than you. A record of recurring revenue read directly from your payment processor, running back as far as your billing does, with the launches and pricing changes sitting on the dates they happened.

It answers continuity, because it is a history rather than a claim about the future. It answers concentration, because it shows an account base rather than a single figure. And it is a link, so it survives the trip into the meeting you are not attending — which is the property that actually matters here.

If the number itself is the worry — and against a large buyer with procurement leverage it reasonably might be — figures can be turned off. The reader still sees several years of continuity and the direction of travel, without an amount to anchor a negotiation against.

Arm your champion before they ask

The tactical point, and the one most founders miss: send it early, unprompted, while the deal is still warm. A stability answer supplied before anyone requested it reads as confidence. The same answer produced after a formal request reads as a company scrambling to satisfy a requirement.

Put the link in the proposal, on your about page, and in the follow-up email after the demo — the one your champion forwards. Embedding it on your own site · showing revenue without exposing customer data · what makes a figure checkable

Questions founders ask

What do big companies check before buying from a small vendor?

Beyond security review, the recurring themes are continuity and concentration: will you exist for the length of the contract, is there a customer base beyond this deal, and what happens to their data if you stop trading. Financial questions are usually a proxy for the first of those. They are rarely trying to value your business — they are trying to size the chance of having to replace you mid-year.

They asked for financials. Do I have to send accounts?

Often you can offer something better targeted. Statutory accounts are historical, take an accountant to interpret, and reveal far more than the question needed. A verified, current recurring-revenue record with a multi-year history answers continuity more directly and more recently, and it is reasonable to offer that first and ask whether it satisfies the requirement.

Isn't it risky to show revenue to a customer who might use it in negotiation?

It is a real consideration, and it is why absolute figures can be turned off. The timeline still publishes the decisions, their dates, and what revenue did afterwards as a percentage — so a buyer sees several years of continuity and growth without seeing a number to anchor a discount against.

We're small. Won't proving it make things worse?

Being small is already visible — headcount, office, support hours. What is not visible is duration, and that is the thing actually being assessed. A four-year record of customers paying every month reads very differently from a company that is simply small, and the reviewer has no way to distinguish the two unless you show them.

Who actually reads this?

Usually not the person you have been talking to. Your champion assembles an internal case for procurement, legal or a risk function, and defends it in a meeting you are not in. That is why an artifact that survives forwarding matters more than a persuasive call — the material has to work without you there to explain it.

What if they need a formal supplier questionnaire completed?

Complete it — this does not replace that. What it replaces is the vague part, where the form asks about financial stability and you attach a paragraph of assurance. A link to a continuously measured record is a stronger answer to that field than any sentence you can write in it.