

One of the Biggest Mistakes Enterprise Startups Make - swampthing
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/19/bigmistakeenterprisestartupsmake/

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tptacek
From extensive, sometimes bitter experience: I think there's a lot of truth to
this.

Startuplandia has a sales playbook that works well for selling to early
adopters and the SMB market. That playbook does not work well selling into the
F500. In particular, BigCo's don't respond productively to passive sales
processes. A lot of the things you do to optimize passive sales, like free
trials or tiered account models, don't really help F500 procurers. It is
sometimes just as hard for those people to spend $5000 on something as it is
to spend $100,000. Sometimes, it's actually better for those people to spend
$100,000 on something even if $5000 would buy them a reliable call option on
the value of the product.

There's a reason the enterprise sales playbook leans so heavily on inside
dial-for-dollars sales and direct account managers: that process works.

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danielweber
You can sell stuff for around $1000 to Fortune 500 easily, since they can just
expense it.

If your software is something that a Fortune 5000 needs only once, though, you
shouldn't be selling it to them for $1000.

Like Joel Spolsky said: free, cheap, or dear. There's little room for stuff in
the middle. I've watched companies thrash themselves to death in that middle
zone right up close.

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techtalsky
I think 1 and 4 are the best points. It's a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone
proposition. You get to give your first clients the care and feeding they need
to become great initial success stories as you make some of the initial cash a
startup needs so badly in its infancy. I think this is solid advice.

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Swannie
I don't know if I can think of any major software company, that is not purely
consumer focused, that doesn't have some sort of professional services group
(Amazon AWS may be an exception - but they did have some talented "advocates"
or "champions" early on that must have supported early customers).

Enterprise software lives and dies by the quality of the professional services
teams working on it. They will typically custom implement v1 and v2 of any new
features that should go into the product, as there will usually be customer
willing to pay for those features ahead of the product road map. This is where
you can get solid gold. Product managers/owners who ignore this will end up
writing useless features that don't work the way the customers need them to.

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mwcampbell
It seems to me that it's a good idea to have an automated sales process and as
much self-service as makes sense, anyway, for the customers who want to work
that way.

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comrade_ogilvy
If it is really true that your software is mind-boggling useful and novel,
that is a nice thing to shoot for.

The article in question is talking about enterprise software. And even if your
software is clean and beautiful, if it is actually doing something important,
it probably must accomplish that task in a complex environment, e.g. does it
have to play nice with legacy systems?

For software companies who have a merely great idea, 98% of your potential
customers are going to ignore you if they lack confidence that the
implementation will succeed. Self-serve is a useful idea, but you may be
setting a very high bar for yourself. Maybe that is the right move; maybe that
is setting yourself up for failure.

