

The Forgotten Secrets Of The Enterprise Giants - fishtoaster
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/02/the-secret-history-they-dont-teach-in-the-enterprise-old-school/

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jeremymims
There's certainly innovation taking place in enterprise sales, but don't
discard the "old school" just because it isn't new. Many of the largest
companies you can think of are "old school". Traditional enterprise sales is
high touch relationship building with millions of dollars at stake. And it
isn't the cold call BS boiler room stuff that people think of when they think
of enterprise sales.

The best enterprise salespeople become great friends with their potential
clients. They know what schools their clients' kids are going to, where they
went on vacation, and who they need to introduce them to. They know when a
client's birthday is and which restaurant she's eating at to call and pick up
the tab. They know how a client takes their coffee and what their favorite
drink is. They show up with hard to get theater or game tickets. They're
sincerely invested in the success of the client. The client isn't a "mark" to
them. Clients are friends and you'd never do anything to hurt your friend. In
many ways, a great enterprise salesperson becomes the advocate for your
customers inside your company, pushing you to create a better product because
they never want to let their friends down. Great enterprise salespeople know
how to ask for money because they understand the value they're delivering and
also when to comp something. They know how to say sorry and they know how to
keep a valuable customer.

The fact is that this kind of selling is hard to scale. However, it's worth it
at less scale because the account sizes are usually quite large. Your best
enterprise salesperson is like a Zappos account rep on steroids. Clients feel
great and they give you the chance to build a product that they love and
recommend to other large account holders.

This isn't for everyone. You should probably be in a market where you can make
$100,000 per year from a client (you'll probably be making the client $500k+
per year and you'll need a product that lots of clients need) to employ an
"old school" strategy. And it should be said that there are bad enterprise
sales people. They'll abuse your clients, make you develop the wrong features,
and some won't sell a damn thing because they're better at selling themselves
than they are at serving clients.

Great old school enterprise salespeople combined with a top-notch product is a
killer combo. If you find a few techniques that help you sell more, that's
great. Just don't be in a hurry to avoid building a real relationship with
valuable enterprise clients. If you're easy to switch to, you're easy to
switch from.

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Spooky23
The only disruption that I see in Enterprise sales is that consolidation of
functions and growth in the big enterprise software suites is wiping out whole
categories of product.

Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this. How can you justify buying Altiris
when you own SCCM via the Core CAL? Ditto for AV, although the MS solution is
not that great. How do you justify some enterprise monitoring suite for some
wacky prcice when you license system center for $2k per VM host?

People who think they are disrupting spending in the enterprise on on crack.
You're in an era of belt-tightening, and the belt gets tighter every time
there's a "fiscal cliff" or some other looming nightmare. My director circa
2003 could drop $500k with a few days notice. Now, the procurement people
watch any purchase like a hawk -- some places want ROI calculations on toner!

Salesforce is a another great example. I met them last week, they very much
looked and sounded like enterprise sales folk. The only thing "radical" about
them is that they are competing against other software vendors AND your
incumbent hardware and data center / network providers. If you buy Siebel, you
need to deal with Oracle's bullshit for the software and the services to make
it work, AND you need to land infrastructure to run it at full capacity on day
1.

These changes are radical in that they make procuring and getting value
easier, and lower the probability of seven figure shelf ware. But they don't
change the sales process... You still have a salesperson and supporting team.

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apapli
I think the author of this article is mistaken between what pivoting is and
what sales is.

Pivoting is what owners and senior stakeholders do to a company, to change
it's future direction. The Concur example is a good example of this. Sure it
may have happened after being enlightened by a sales call and competitive
situation, but it was primarily a one-off change. You can't enable your sales
reps to "pivot" during each sales opportunity, it impacts too many systems.

In enterprise, the role of ISV reps has been created to try to do this within
a defined scope - ie get ISV partners to add new capabilities that help you
reach a different vertical.

Enterprise sales is pretty close to what Roman Stanek's article the author
linked to. It's not fun or sexy, it's about finding real problems in
companies, convincing their stakeholders you're the lowest risk and highest
return option, then working hard to identify and hold them to a compelling
event to move the discussion along from concept to signature to
implementation.

Just my 2c.

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AndrewKemendo
>Enterprise sales is undergoing the most radical shakeup since the turn of the
century, and today’s experiments will be tomorrow’s best practices

Ok, so what are some examples of this radical shaking?

The author gives plenty of examples of the old guys "new ways" - back when
they were new - but I am not seeing the new radical-ness described the article
or the one linked.

