4 ms·

Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Any

Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Anything that needs to be hands on costs you almost as much in labor costs as big company ... without the high-price point to justify it. And especially in medium business range they often actually need _more_ support, since they are complex enough to have integration problems, but not big enough to have specialized personal to internally manage and deliver a project. It works for some products and services but not others. One model you'll see though in this market segment and VARs and other channel providers. They'll have set of enterprise vendors they work with, but take on the sales and service aspect themselves. So while it might not make sense to have dedicated sales and customer success for a $5k piece of software - if you are effectively bundling 10 of these from different vendors + profserv, a $100k/deal starts making sense of the VARs, and offloads the costs from the vendors who are then just giving bulk pricing to the channel.

a4isms 4y ago
Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Anything that needs to be hands on costs you almost as much in labor costs as big company ... without the high-price point to justify it. My very first personal ISV "hustle" was a classified ad product for desktop publishing. I priced it at $750, and discovered that my cost of sales and support made this untenable. Now I know why small desktop publishers were doing classified ads by hand, and the really big companies had mainframe- and minicomputer-based systems costing five or six figures in the 80s and 90s. Same dynamic, and all it took was my car being repossessed to make me realize there was something wrong with my business model.
ghaff 4y ago
Yeah, SMB has to be partner-led. They're often specialists (geography, vertical, etc.) That don't have the BigCo overhead that enabled BigCo to build the product in the first place. Partners are a huge part of selling for most B2B hardware and software companies. 50% or more of sales is not uncommon.

a4isms 4y ago

Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Anything that needs to be hands on costs you almost as much in labor costs as big company ... without the high-price point to justify it. My very first personal ISV "hustle" was a classified ad product for desktop publishing. I priced it at $750, and discovered that my cost of sales and support made this untenable. Now I know why small desktop publishers were doing classified ads by hand, and the really big companies had mainframe- and minicomputer-based systems costing five or six figures in the 80s and 90s. Same dynamic, and all it took was my car being repossessed to make me realize there was something wrong with my business model.

ghaff 4y ago

Yeah, SMB has to be partner-led. They're often specialists (geography, vertical, etc.) That don't have the BigCo overhead that enabled BigCo to build the product in the first place. Partners are a huge part of selling for most B2B hardware and software companies. 50% or more of sales is not uncommon.