
Selling to the Fortune 500, Government, and Other Lovecraftian Horrors (2013) - putnam
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales
======
gsylvie
Reminds me of how many Atlassian Platinum Partners offer "licensing support".

e.g.
[http://valiantys.com/en/software/licensing/](http://valiantys.com/en/software/licensing/)

> Each company decides how to conduct their purchases. We let you choose your
> preferred currency (USD, GBP, EUR, CHF or CAD) and payment method (bank
> transfer or credit card).

This is just arbitrage! e.g., "If Atlassian doesn't accept your company's
standard payment style, we'll bridge the gap for a fee!"

In other words Selling to Fortune 500 is hard enough. For a real challenge
"Try Selling to Fortune 500 When You Yourself Are Also Fortune 500." :-)

------
jayonsoftware
I have worked for bunch F100 organization and many times I have ended up
writing my own library or tool because the effort that need to buy a $99 tool
is so huge, its cheaper to write my own logging frame work, ORM or deployment
script. It cost same effort to buy a $99 or $250K product.

~~~
devonkim
Similarly, the open source review process for so many companies I've seen has
been so onerous that it was easier to write your own proprietary clone with
absolutely none of the community and review possible with OSS. Enterprise
processes in general are historically oriented around avoiding downside risks
at the expense of agility and growth because it's simply easier to lose money
than to gain it when you're an incumbent in a market vertical.

------
tyingq
Google is particularly funny to watch trying to sell to F500 companies. Their
sales pitch is roughly: "Buy Our Cloud Services because We're Smarter Than
You". While mostly true, that approach tends not to convert well.

I've seen Amazon eat their lunch over and over. And Amazon's not even as good
at it as, say, Oracle.

~~~
andrewflnr
How does Amazon pitch their services in that context?

~~~
tyingq
Better idea of how to stroke egos. Like allowing AWS to take on the
infrastructure frees the client up to do their "innovative work". More empathy
about compliance issues, internal politics,etc. Pre written whitepapers the
client can use to calm their internal IT security people, etc.

Basically just putting in the work to understand how to sell to that crowd.

------
probdist
I've help sell software-as-a-service to large businesses for a few years and
this is a good read. An interesting additional nugget is that when the stakes
get big enough customers often are being guided by a consultant (Accenture
etc) in crafting things beyond an internal purchasing/procurement/IT mashup.
You need to make sure you help the customer and the consultant to get the
sale.

~~~
putnam
So Accenture does due diligence on the expected ROI from the product?

What if you're offering a SaaS product that no one there (but everyone on HN)
gets - Is it possible to be both Accenture (review and craft a deal and
explain the benefit to the business really well) and also be the software-as-
a-service if the client has never bought anything like this before?

Context: I am trying to sell DL consulting/productized models but enterprises
either say 'we don't really do that' or 'we do that but we don't work with
consultants'.

~~~
abraae
> What if you're offering a SaaS product that no one there (but everyone on
> HN) gets

When you feel you're in this position, you should possible reevaluate your
offering or the way you think about it.

Although all of the things in TFA ring true, its also true that very often,
your internal champion at the customer is actually pretty savvy, and has a
strong understanding of their own needs. Not always - but often.

I interepret the feedback you are getting from them as "I don't understand".

If so, thats your problem, not anyone else's.

In the early days we used to market our product as super flexible, way beyond
what anyone else had, you could "bend it to do anything". We had a smartypants
view of the world, our offer was meta-data driven, yada yada.

After a while it became clear that potential customers did not understand.
They (curse them) wanted to see our product in action, solving their business
problems. They didn't want to embark on some big configuration journey.

If you can I'd suggest you think about ways to offer "out of the box"
implementations of your product, where no consulting activity is required -
then seek out early adopters/champions inside the organization who will bring
you inside.

~~~
putnam
Thank you

------
mherrmann
I liked the point "GitHub probably makes more money from their largest
Enterprise customer than from all personal accounts combined". I think the
same is true for desktop apps. For instance, Sublime Text's price point of $70
is precisely for Enterprises. Nevertheless, I believe ST could easily make an
extra $ x0,000 by having a one day sale for personal customers. I blogged
about this [1].

[1]: [https://fman.io/blog/finally-understanding-sublime-texts-
pri...](https://fman.io/blog/finally-understanding-sublime-texts-
pricing/?s=hn)

~~~
paulddraper
Huh? For software I use 5 hours a day, $70 is definitely personal pricing.

Compare, say, Intellij IDEA (does some things better, some things worse),
which sells for several hundred dollars per year.

~~~
mherrmann
It's seriously great you see it that way. I wish there were more people like
you.

As a bootstrapper, I compare it to my other (eg. living) expenses. $70 feeds
me for several days.

You mention IntelliJ. I use another JetBrains IDE: PyCharm. A two year
subscription cost me $66. Sure, I will have to pay again in two years time.
But I would argue PyCharm is much more powerful than ST.

That's no criticism of ST. It provides tremendous value and as I mention in
the post, I did buy a license. But I don't think that most people consider $70
"personal pricing". I wish it were that way because I'm selling a (ST-
inspired) desktop app myself [1]. But I don't think it is.

[1]: [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

~~~
paulddraper
Perhaps you have an educational or startup discount? Two years of PyCharm is
$358 for commercial, or $160 for personal use.

And that's just for Python. 3x that if you want Java, Ruby, PHP, etc.

~~~
mherrmann
Yes I have some kind of start up discount I think.

------
SOLAR_FIELDS
I think this is a good article. It works well for internal "sales" too, where
the main budget is developer time instead of dollars (which translates to
dollars eventually of course). I've worked in these sort of teams for the
greater part of my career and I've learned that the word "permissions", as
referenced in the article, is an immediate trigger for asking for more capital
i.e. dev resources to complete the project.

As the classic xkcd comic[1] implies, there is a large difference in
difficulty for certain tasks that may be seen as roughly equal in effort to
the end user.

[1]:[https://xkcd.com/1425/](https://xkcd.com/1425/)

~~~
SwellJoe
It's interesting that the "virtually impossible" task of a few years ago is a
joke app of today ("Hot dog or not hot dog"). Machine learning is moving
_fast_ lately.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Indeed. The field is moving quickly. Part of the joke though was that the
problem is still hard enough that the app was only able to identify one food
item. We're getting closer, but it's still quite a hard problem.

------
kbenson
I kind of wished I had signed up for patio11's newsletter years ago. It hits
just the right spot of being informative and actionable to actually be
_enjoyable_ for me to read.

He's not still doing it since he went to Stripe, is he?

~~~
patio11
I plan on continuing writing in my own capacity; been a bit busy the last few
months though (a combination of work and us having our second child in
February).

~~~
kbenson
That's good to hear, and congratulations on the increasing responsibilities of
fatherhood. ;)

