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Before I went into development full-time, I was in Enterprise Sales. There were times I sold a product that the users (Dev Team in the author's case) wanted de
by a4isms 1y ago
Before I went into development full-time, I was in Enterprise Sales.
There were times I sold a product that the users (Dev Team in the author's case) wanted desperately, but leadership (VPs of Product, CPOs, PMs in the author's case) didn't see the importance and/or urgency of. And yes, there were times when I sold a product that leadership wanted desperately, but users didn't see the importance and/or urgency of.
The second case can be wrangled over user objections, but in the long run, such products end up failing once past harvesting the Hawthorne Effect. The lasting successes were the ones where all the stakeholders (I know, I know, buzzword alert) bought in.
And that's why closing Enterprise Sales is a load-bearing role in an Enterprise Software business. It's hard to do, but through a combination of product design that creates discoverable value for every "buying influencer" (another term of art from sales) and needs discovery on the part of sales and product management, followed by tailoring pitches and demonstrations for each group, you can get them all in a room nodding together and close the deal.
It is NOT easy. And a lot of this is not the vendor's fault. Beneath the superficial appearance of a recalcitrant dev team, there may be scars from previous top-down dictated changes that did not, in fact, do anything for the users or the company, so closing a deal may involve a lot of listening and empathy and a very open mind.
People make fun of Enterprise Sales as a perfectly coiffed salesman golfing with the customer's CIO, but the hard truth is that Enterprise Sales is hard because Enterprises are full of people with complicated needs and relationships and perception and the entire thing is steeped in hidden historical legacy context.
I feel for the author, I really do. But I also reflexively feel for the customer's dev team. And for the customer's leadership. A change to communications tooling is a change to a load-bearing part of a company's processes and culture.
Selling this kind of thing is not easy.
- a4isms 1y agop.s. I said it wasn't easy, do I have any suggestions for selling to Enterprises where there may not be trust between the users of your product and their leadership? Yes I do, here's one that is very well-suited to startups who want to sell to the enterprise: Product-Led Growth ("PLG"). This is defined as building a product and customer acquisition strategy around people trying the product for themselves and then buying the product without interacting with a human. To make this work, you have to strategize which feature or features will close people using the product, as opposed to leaders looking at a PowerPoint with estimated ROI numbers. You have to make them discoverable, and you have to find a way to surface the value to users... In the product, not in a white paper or on a marketing web site. You also have to have someone own PLG and ruthlessly experiment with user experience design and product design to drive better and better PLG. Yes, you have to track it and prioritize it. PLG can't be your only strategy, you still need Enterprise Sales. For most enterprise products, PLG will never generate as much revenue as sales. It will be tempting to ditch it as wasteful compared to just building whatever the C-Suite demands from salespeople. BUT! If you have any traction at all with PLG, your product will also be an easier enterprise sale. The problem the author listed is greatly mitigated by a product that has even modest success getting individuals and/or small businesses to buy it based on their trial experience only. PLG can be the key to unlocking enterprise revenue, you just have to play the "long game" with PLG and treat it as a particularly honest way of obtaining user feedback, which must be coupled with a mechanism for improving the product based on that honest feedback: Someone must own PLG, must be held accountable for driving PLG, and they must have enough authority not to be swept aside by prioritizing top-down features.