The rise of enterprise marketing

http://cdixon.org/2012/09/24/the-rise-of-enterprise-marketing/

by yan • 14 years ago

43 8 14 years ago

drumdance• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

krrrh• 14 years ago

"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• 14 years ago

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.

gpoort• 14 years ago

These forms can actually help segment your customers and reduce sales cycle times when used appropriately.

nrmehta• 14 years ago

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.

eitally• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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. :)

The rise of enterprise marketing

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