
The rise of enterprise marketing - yan
http://cdixon.org/2012/09/24/the-rise-of-enterprise-marketing/
======
eitally
I think one of the things a lot of developers and entrepreneurs fail to
completely grasp is that there are a few very good reasons for the long sales
cycles and the lack of pricing transparency. Primary among them is that when
people label something as "enterprise software", the traditionally mean
software that plays a critical part in a specific business process or sest of
processes, or is an infrastructure compnent that's part of a large, complex
distributed almagamation of crap that's accrued for generations.

nrmehta notes Box.net, Splunk, and Workday as enterprise software startups. I
would argue that only Workday fits the classic enterprise software definition.
Box.net is a straightforward productivity tool, Splunk is very simple
analytics for orgs not inclined to roll their own, but HR Information Systems
are incredibly complicated with a plethora of laws, rules, and regulations
governing them spanning corporate, national, industry, and regulatory
agencies. Being able to handle _that_ is the enterprisey aspect, and learning
the specifics of a given enterprise -- which quite likely mean the software
sales agreement is accompanied by a professional services contract, too -- is
why it's difficult to create a standard pricing model. If you look for
counterpoints you might think of Salesforce.com, which publishes list prices
for various levels of accounts for SalesCloud, as well as for several of their
other services (e.g. Heroku). However, if you are a large enterprise and you
are interested in engaging with Salesforce.com, it is exceptionally unlikely
-- nay, impossible -- that these numbers prove meaningful. It's an advertising
tool for Salesforce.com, but only that. In additional, an experienced and
knowledgeable sales exec + sales engineer pair can be invaluable to an
enterprise considering or evaluating a potential solution (hardware or
software). I know that's common sense, but generally speaking I don't think
startup culture educates adequately on enterprise as compared to the consumer
world, and learning more about this would be useful for most of us.

~~~
erichocean
_which quite likely mean the software sales agreement is accompanied by a
professional services contract, too_

I'm currently doing an enterprise SaaS startup, and we have a split-pricing
model for that reason. The actual SaaS part has standardized pricing, which we
don't change.

The professional services part is completely custom for each company. For the
most part, we'll do whatever kind of arrangement is needed, from nearly no
help at all, to white glove, onsite help, training, ongoing support, etc, with
costs to match.

It's just part of life when you're selling to the enterprise, for all of the
reasons the GP mentioned. The rewards are worth it though. :)

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krrrh
"Submit your information and we'll respond with a quote" == "Our software
costs twice as much as it should, because we need a fat margin to pay for the
long sales cycle". I don't think I've willingly filled out one of those forms
for over 5 years.

~~~
rgrieselhuber
You're probably not in their target market anyways. The people who will
willingly submit these forms are less technically inclined and have big
headaches that they will spend money on to solve. I hate this approach as much
as the next guy but I've come to respect that they still work very well. For
products that don't work well as self-service (and there are many), you almost
have to talk to a customer before you can close them.

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nrmehta
This was a good post by Chris and I think there are a number of companies who
are shifting in this direction. Overall, I think Marketing is getting a bigger
share of spend in enterprise IT vendors vs. sales from previous days. That
being said, I also note that several of the most prominent enterprise startups
of recent times (Box, Splunk, WorkDay, etc.) have made huge investments in
traditional, direct sales. My 2c is a lot of this is driven by the ASP
(average sales price). In a market where the ASP is low (< $10K/year), you
need a marketing driven approach to grow cost-effectively. But for businesses
with ASPs > $100K or > $1 MM, direct sales is often still very cost-effective.
I'm not making any comments on the "goodness for the world" of sales here,
just its efficiency as a growth engine.

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drumdance
I would love to see this come to pass. Salesforce and New Relic seem to be
killing it, but I'm not aware of others. If anybody has more examples please
share links.

~~~
aspir
This is how we do it at GitHub on a day-by-day basis.
<https://github.com/blog/1230-optimizing-sales-for-happiness>

Its still sales in name, but in nature and application, it's similar to what
cdixon spells out.

