
At times not losing is as important as winning - pier0
http://steveblank.com/2012/08/17/at-times-not-losing-is-as-important-as-winning/
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paulsutter
Primary lesson: the old school enterprise sales process is as painful as hell.

Dropbox does tons of sales into the enterprise by doesn't need to resort to
political gambits, because their product is chosen by individuals and spreads
virally.

Ping Li of Accel has an excellent paper on this alternative way to sell into
the enterprise. It requires a careful approach to choosing and designing your
product, but it makes your business more scalable and less painful:

[http://www.accel.com/assets/resources/files/17/original_rena...](http://www.accel.com/assets/resources/files/17/original_renaissance_of_business_software.pdf)

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hammock
> Primary lesson: the old school enterprise sales process is as painful as
> hell.

Still, if you are going for $1MM accounts, that is probably what you'll be
dealing with.

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paulsutter
If you expect accounts to go from $0 to $1MM in a single deal, yes you need to
send in the field sales cowboys. Your revenue will be chunky and hard to
predict, and your business will grow slowly based on long sales cycles.

Dropbox will have million dollar enterprise accounts. They'll get to that size
gradually, with a nice smooth revenue ramp, and without a financial model
based on sales heads. The negotiation will be easy, because the customer will
call them after too many people are expensing the product

Quantcast gets million dollar customers over the phone by starting with a $20k
test buy. Less elegant than Dropbox, but not too shabby.

Nerds should be all over this stuff. These decisions get made in the earliest
days by the founders. That's us, here. Investors love companies like Dropbox,
and get a sick feeling in their stomache when they see a company based on
field sales doing big deals.

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lifeisstillgood
And therein lies the black hole at the heart of the HN dream.

Sales, really good, professional, stab-you-in-the-back sales is still what
counts. A winning, superior technology, was not the deciding factor here.

Anyone got the number of a good Oracle Headhunter.

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chris_wot
Whoa there! It appears that they indeed had this in the bag, but the IT
department wanted ultimate control. I've seen this sort of thing before. In
this case, all they could really do is indeed pull out. While it was a smart
play, in actual fact if AutoDesk had run with it and let them go, then they
would still not have been any worse off.

Given that the CIO did the keynote for their conference, I'd say that it was
outplaying the dreadful politics at the company. I can't see any real
backstabbing from anyone but the CIO on this one!

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wangarific
It was a matter of understanding how politics plays a big role in these
decisions, more so than which product is best. I agree with you, it didn't
have to do with "cut throat sales" or anything like that... just understanding
your customer, even their internal struggles.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I see there being two kinds of sales - the one where you just need to build a
better mousetrap, and market honestly and clearly, and the kind where you
force your sales people to get the names and phone numbers of the board of
directors, and take them all out for lunch

One is Instagram style sales, one is Oracle sales.

Oracle Sales might not be best categorised as cut throat or stab in the back,
but the game Steve Blank played was not fluffy - it was hardnosed and fully
engaged with the politics of the world.

Just saying.

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jbm
Anyone who has ever played Japanese Reach Mahjong can tell you with some
certainty as to the astuteness of the point made.

Ignoring any aspect of the other player's discards (or, more to the point,
telling signs emanating from any of the players in a company with the power to
reject your product) is a certain path to failure.

When you have 3 other skilled players (or X number of competitors) - all of
whom can deal triple damage to you if you aren't careful - you learn to avoid
losing.

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ActVen
"But what if we added a third choice? What if we formally, publicly and
noisily withdrew from the account? The worst case was that we could tell our
engineering team that we should have won but the game was rigged."

No, the worst case would be actually going through with "publicly and noisily"
withdrawing. If you want to scare away future large company prospects I can
think of few better ways than letting everyone know you will raise hell if
your product isn't chosen in a competitive procurement. I respect Steve...but
this portion of the advice seems a little shortsighted. Go ahead and withdraw
and explain it to your team and the customer. But, there is not a good enough
reason to publicly shame the customer.

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shalmanese
"publicly" with all relevant stakeholders. Not "publicly", we're going to post
this on our Sales Tumblr.

~~~
sblank
correct

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ActVen
Thanks for the clarification.

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balancethought
I find that understanding 'big company' politics is one of the most
challenging ideas for developers to understand. One of the thing that Joe, the
E.piphany sales guy could have done to head this off, would have been to
immediately suggest an audience with the CIO the minute the VP of sales stated
that her problems were ones that IT was working on but could was taking a long
time to solve.

The politics of big companies can get really crazy and just like Steve,
internal IT believes that 'not losing is as important as winning'. To IT,
having a new company come in and solve a problem that they were spending
months to solve would be the same is losing. The end result is that they are
now perceived as not being a true partner to the business. They are just the
people who plug in cables and who make sure the lights are on. For the
AutoDesk IT department, this would be the same as losing.

Kudos to everyone for making this work if it solved AutoDesk's problems.

To everyone else, make sure to discover and get in front of all key
stakeholders. Some of those stakeholders can be the person vacuuming the floor
as you walk into the building.

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lrs
Great post - really brilliant tactical thinking, and it's always a delight to
see smart moves pay off.

I feel like it should be noted that it's quite dangerous to threaten a move
like this unless you're actually prepared to follow through with it if the
gambit fails. If this move hadn't worked and the prospect had responded with
something like "please reconsider, we believe there is still a good chance
things can work out," I think it would have been disastrous for this company's
credibility going forward if they had actually continued working on this
prospect. Part of the reason this was a great move for them in this situation
is that they were legitimately ready to cut their losses with this prospect
and move on. When that's the case, even the smallest chance of jamming a sale
through is pure value over their best alternative.

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specialist
Not losing also explains much of legislation politics and campaign debates.

Survive this round of the contest, you get another bite at the apple. Maybe,
just maybe, you'll work up enough courage to grab for the brass ring. Such as
reach for higher office. Or pass some important legislation.

In politics, any position you take will offend someone. So you become
cautious. "Keep your powder dry" for the imagined future contest. Only jump on
board the bandwagon when it's crystal clear, so then when it goes bad you can
use the safety of the herd to avoid repercussions.

Watch political "debates" sometime, you'll see that frontrunners play to not
lose, because the person left standing wins.

