3 ms·

My employer is a 20+ person startup selling to the enterprise market. We don't feel that they 'hate' dealing with us, although, our only competition is other st

My employer is a 20+ person startup selling to the enterprise market. We don't feel that they 'hate' dealing with us, although, our only competition is other startups. Even so, we get rave reviews about the level of service we bring to each contract. They are not used to seeing that from their large company vendors. It's true that selling is hard, but that is why we have an experienced sales staff. And yes, sales can take 6-12 months in the worst case, but I think you underestimate the number you can have in the pipeline at once and overestimate the cost to support each sale. One more note in defense of enterprise oriented startups: as a hacker, I don't find creating enterprise software to be less palatable than consumer software. The selling is compartmentalized in a sales dept, so it's not as if I'm the one jumping through the enterprise sales hoops. Obviously, if you're hoping to keep your company so small that you don't have a dedicated sales department, it's a much different story.

gamble 18y ago
My feelings on this subject were less jaundiced before I'd been working with large customers for a few years. The first year or so was much easier - you're hitting all the easy sales, the ones that are geographically close, and the technically-sophisticated early adopters. After a while you've plucked the low-hanging fruit and each sale becomes progressively more difficult and expensive. Meanwhile, the support costs for existing customers accumulate and competitors proliferate. As a startup, it's easy to differentiate yourself from competitors by offering better-quality service. The difficulty lies in scaling up to a large number of customers.