Any suggestions on how to deal with an answer of a prospect like this? ” Have you currently performed any work with a top performing US electric utility?” - which we haven’t (being a startup…)

I usually start like this - we have been doing business with such and such large companies , unfortunately none in the electric utility. However we would love to.. blah blah. Usually large companies have two concerns - what if you would go belly up (go bankrupt ) and second they don't want to be first in the vertical , as they would have teething trouble. If company has concern #1, then sharing other large company name should alleviate that and you should be good. If they have concern #2, then they are not right fit at this stage. I recently was working with Thompson Reuters and after the CTO was sold on value proposition , they said that the central purchase team may give hard time in buying from startup. I told them that let's first evaluate (POC) and then if you like the solution , then we can work with one of their existing partners who can be reseller of our product (as they had concern #1)...