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I saw this from Sam Altman a few months back: http://blog.samaltman.com/software-to-avoid-the-software-people http://blog.samaltman.com/software-to-avoid-the-so

I saw this from Sam Altman a few months back: http://blog.samaltman.com/software-to-avoid-the-software-people http://blog.samaltman.com/software-to-avoid-the-software-peo... To paraphrase "A few years ago, many of the Y Combinator B2B startups wrote tools for the developers in other companies" and how that has changed resulting in "so now the startups are trying to avoid the developers at the other company (so they don't get blocked) and sell to the person who is waiting in the internal development queue." I was selling enterprise SaaS in 2000 (yep, when we were called "ASP's") and back then we were writing and reading about how one of our greatest strengths was allowing business owners to avoid their own internal IT departments. One theory on the reason why Salesforce.com was/is the most successful SaaS company is because it targeted the VP of Sales (initially) This was the most "rebellious" leadership profile who often didn't connect well with a CIO and basically used their own budget to end around IT and get the tool into the hands of their end users. I think - based on this coming up to being a documented 15 year + theory - it probably needs some fresher thought around how the role of the IT department will morph vs not exist.

k3n 13y ago
That sales strategy is exactly what the sales team at my day job does; our software requires heavy buy-in from IT departments, and the payoff isn't in the IT realm but more for the foot soldiers on the ground (and of course, the bottom-line). At one point, it became obvious that it was much easier to wine & dine the non-technical executives than it was to win over the CTO. Also, it's a double-win since even if you had managed to win over the CTO, they'd (the CTO + our sales team) would still have to win over the other executives. However, if you flip that around, the CTO is really the only one you have to convince, and if you've made a good enough case upfront then the CTO will have a really hard time stopping it.

k3n 13y ago

That sales strategy is exactly what the sales team at my day job does; our software requires heavy buy-in from IT departments, and the payoff isn't in the IT realm but more for the foot soldiers on the ground (and of course, the bottom-line). At one point, it became obvious that it was much easier to wine & dine the non-technical executives than it was to win over the CTO. Also, it's a double-win since even if you had managed to win over the CTO, they'd (the CTO + our sales team) would still have to win over the other executives. However, if you flip that around, the CTO is really the only one you have to convince, and if you've made a good enough case upfront then the CTO will have a really hard time stopping it.