

A Product Person’s Perspective on Enterprise Selling - tangled
http://a16z.com/2015/05/20/enterprise-sales-for-product-people/

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mattzito
As a product person in the enterprise space, I think there's a lot of good
things in this article. BUT, there's a couple of things that I think reflect
Steven's background at Microsoft and are common assumptions in the Enterprise
space that no longer hold universally true.

\- There's a lot of talk about "IT" as a group that you sell to, which by and
large only still exists at the highest end of the market, and even then
largely as a group whose buy-in you have to get past in order to complete the
deal. Many technologies these days are sold directly to the LoB, and IT's only
involvement is a security audit, data recovery strategy, and integrating the
new app into SSO.

\- The downside of this is that many, certainly not all, organizations are a
lot less mature than they used to be when it comes to rolling out technology.
After all, if all you have to do is log into a web portal and start doing
things, what prep do you need? Consequently, your implementations will be a
lot more successful if you can show up and _tell_ prospects how to roll out
your software, or migrate away from a competitor

\- I find that a lot of these organizations are less mature when it comes to
understanding "roadmap vision" \- they're a lot more aligned to, "What can I
do now?" and "What will I be able to do in six months?". There's nothing wrong
with that, but selling vision that might represent an aspirational dream for
three years out can conflict with the short-term vision of the stakeholder

In general, I think the disconnect comes from the fact that IT in a lot of
organizations grew to a sufficient size that the justification for (some of)
their existence was implementing and managing the implementation of enterprise
software. To do this they built processes and procedures that mitigated risk,
helped them plan, migrate effectively, train people, etc.

Those same processes also created jobs where the sole purpose was to justify
their existence and increased overall complexity.

~~~
petercooper
Do you write anywhere about this stuff? If not, I would love to read it if you
did :-) In my minor experience with selling to enterprises, the three points
you raise hit home.

~~~
mattzito
I have a terrible, unmaintained blog at [http://mzi.to](http://mzi.to) that I
keep promising to myself I will do something with. My bio isn't even accurate
there at the moment.

So if I do start writing about it, it'll be there.

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stevesi
Great discussion. I totally agree with @mattzito about the opportunity to sell
at the business unit level. At the same time the points about getting IT buy-
in remain critical. I've watched too many SaaS uses shut down or "banned"
under the guise of security/compliance/etc for failing to engage IT.

The reality is that IT has always pushed to be more than the control point or
network. Different organizations have different ways to execute on the use of
ITs skills in business units. The complexities of large organizations
(budgets, accountability) make this dynamic very localized to a company and
why the role of the account manager is so critical.

My own experience at Microsoft was going from a consumer company to a business
unit focused sales effort to a top down IT/C-suite sale. Office was a classic
bottom up sale at the time which morphed into a strategic sale over the course
of a decade. Many people forget that in the early 1990's Microsoft was always
a big question mark in the world of the enterprise.

Regarding pricing, here's a post I did a while back on SaaS pricing.
[http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/16/the-price-is-right-for-
earl...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/16/the-price-is-right-for-early-stage-
saas-companies-it-needs-to-be/)

\--Steven

~~~
snowwrestler
Steven, might want to update your HN bio.

~~~
sinofsky
Oops, two hn usernames. Browser cache issue.

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akanet
As a technical founder / product person in this exact position, I think one of
the biggest takeaways from this excellent article and the many others like it
is the distinction between a _customer_ and a _partner_. At enterprise-scale,
all deals become partnerships, essentially, and getting used to thinking "how
can I help these people?" instead of "how can I sell to these people?" was big
eye-opener.

~~~
swalsh
My experience at a startup working with some big companies, is that you really
need to become another employee for those you're selling to.

For our key customers, everyone on the team knew as much about their product
road map as our own.

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koddi
This is a great article and from experience the model is solid. It made me
think it would be pretty easy to put together some sort of enterprise SaaS
selling "Masters" course like we see come up so often for data science and the
like.

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wslh
I like the article BUT it doesn't articulate one important and pragmatic
variable: price and how to move from your product price perspective to the
enterprise price one. The same product you sell by unit for $ X can be sold
for more than $ 20 * X (including support and etceteras) in the enterprise.

That is not so obvious for a product oriented person unexperienced in
enterprise selling. For example, you should now that your one-click
installation and easy configuration demands a lot of resources on a company.

Another variable not articulated is your cost of selling to these enterprises:
salesman + pre-sales engineer + engineers working on the PoC, etc.

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beat
Glad to see articles like this here. Trying to build a startup in the
enterprise space is really difficult, because the customer/sales cycle is so
difficult. I'm coming at it from the perspective of an enterprise engineer
turned founder, someone who used enterprise products but neither sold them nor
made the final decision. I have a lot to learn!

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Toenex
Interesting article. In an Enterprise setting is it better to think of
'product' as 'capability'?

~~~
HenryTheHorse
That is correct. A product IS a capability to the user-buyer. What's more,
certain types of products (CRM, sales, marketing, supply chain) are usually
bought and implemented during certain business events. For e.g.: a company
hires 100 new sales reps and now needs the capability to manage this new sales
pipeline. Time for a vendor to pitch a CRM subscription!

