10 ms·

If SaaS Products Sell Themselves, Why Do We Need Sales?

176 points by boynamedsue 12y ago

applecore 12y ago
This is a decent article on enterprise/SaaS sales, but no knowledgeable person has ever claimed that a SaaS product can reach its customers without sales.
- jseip 12y ago
  and yet I find that is a commonly held misconception, and that there are many founders who think of sales as a four letter word.
  - hawkice 12y ago
    Just more evidence that says they aren't knowledgeable: they cannot correctly identify the number of letters in "sales".
- AVTizzle 12y ago
  Definitely sounds like a straw man. What on earth would the business model (SaaS vs anything else) have to do with the product selling itself?
dspillett 12y ago
Because the products only sell themselves once they are in front of the right decision makers at the right time. Sometimes arranging that takes much foresight, skill & determination (and not a small measure of bull too, if I may be more cynical for a moment!). Also, SaaS offerings are not new and therefore rare & exciting any more so you are unlikely to be alone in the market - you need your sales+marketing people to compete with everyone else's.
- shostack 12y ago
  What's interesting is when sales people think they can get a leg up on closing the deal by going over your head because they don't think you are a key decision maker or influential enough in the process to worry about. A couple years ago I had a sales guy at a large ad tech company that shall go unnamed try to go over my head to executive team members. Of course the first thing that happened after that initial contact was that executive coming over and saying "so and so reached out to me...what do you think about them?" At that point I explained that not only did I not think they offered a great solution, but that it spoke volumes of how they do business if they go behind people's backs like that. The icing on the cake was when that executive sent an email back to the sales rep, CCed me, and said that he would defer to my expert knowledge of our needs. Note to any sales reps reading this...just because someone doesn't have an executive-level title, don't for one second think that you might be able to close the deal without their buy-off.
burgreblast 12y ago
This cannot be over emphasized: >Your biggest competition isn’t just other startups, perpetually licensed on-premise packages, homegrown solutions, or incumbent vendors. It’s inertia...the target company’s urge to do nothing. So how do you make enterprises care enough to act? I've found that as "obvious" as saving money should be as a change agent, in many organizations that doesn't move the needle. Products that increase revenue usually gets far more attention than money saving products. Competitive leapfrogging / strategic value even more, but that goes to Mark's about understanding and identifying their initiatives. Would also add: identify their incentives. Make heroes the organization rewards.
- exelius 12y ago
  Totally agree. If you look at your company, where are your "rockstars"? I don't mean rockstar developers; I mean the most ambitious, most well-connected (and highest compensated) people in your company. It's a trick question: they're almost always in sales, marketing or product because these are the parts of the organization that drive profit. This is true of almost every company. It's not a secret why Salesforce was the first real SaaS success story: companies are a lot more inclined to spend money to make money than to spend money to save money. Growth is the name of the game; cost cutting is usually only a focus once growth is no longer an option. That's why I groan whenever I see something like yet another IT operations management platform. Would the company be better off buying a software package to manage their IT, or firing all their IT staff and hiring a managed services provider to fill the gap? Operational cost cutting has a lot of different modalities that are often mutually exclusive, while you can more easily chase down multiple paths for revenue generation.
  - rubensmead 12y ago
    Does ServiceNow count as "yet another IT operations management platform"? Do they make you groan because their IT applications business is doing so well? Or because you think they're overhyped and will crash and sputter?
    - exelius 12y ago
il 12y ago
A corollary is that your SaaS product needs to be priced in a way that enables sales (typically >$5K ACV).
- kareemm 12y ago
  This is a non-obvious point that took me a long time to grok: the way you sell your product is a function of its price, not the other way around. The more you charge, the more high-touch you can get when selling (i.e. with an outside sales force).
- jfabre 12y ago
  Could you be more explicit please? I have no idea what's ACV.
  - chiph 12y ago
    Annual Contract Value. The lower your price, the more your product and sales process needs to be self-service, because you can't afford to send a salesperson out for a $1000/yr contract (airfare + hotel + rental car + their time, annnd you're over any possible return, even before including R&D and support costs)
  - jxm262 12y ago
    I believe he means annual contract value. http://saasaddict.walkme.com/getting-your-saas-acv-annual-contract-value-right/ http://saasaddict.walkme.com/getting-your-saas-acv-annual-co... http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/ http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/
- efriese 12y ago
  Not only to enable sales, but to also show the business problem you are fixing is important. I've been in enterprise deals where if the price tag is too low, the executive doesn't think it's important enough for him/her to fix. It can sound crazy, but once you've tried to fix big problems at that level it makes some sense.
- orky56 12y ago
beartime 12y ago
If people can vote on issues, why do we need politicians? Similar reasons imo...
dangrossman 12y ago
There are billions of individuals and millions of small businesses that can be reached without a sales team. If you don't want to do sales, then don't target enterprise customers. I make my living with SaaS products, and have never made a cold call or sent an unsolicited mail about it.
- theallan 12y ago
  Out of interest then, how do people hear about your SaaS? Word of mouth and Google searches only?
  - dangrossman 12y ago
    I run a low-budget (<$1000/mo) PPC and retargeting ad campaign which is where most of the first customers came from. Today, at least 80% of new signups are either referrals (word-of-mouth, or articles/blogs/tweets written by current and past customers) or from organic search. The #1 keyword in my paid PPC campaign is just the brand name.
    - brandnewlow 12y ago
      It helps that the product is really great, too.
      - jimiwen 12y ago
        the pre, during and after service enhances the product and amplifies the experience
    - AznHisoka 12y ago
      Good stuff. Assume Improvely is your Saas. You do realize that marketers/agencies are very active in social media, blogging, etc. I can think of over 100 blogs that would write about you: conversionxl.com, okdork.com, quicksprout.com, kissmetrics.com, etc, etc. I'm sure if you created a SaaS for X, where X = farmers, or or home funeral owners, or home contractors, you would not have that luxury. So it definitely depends on the space, and for most people, your strategy simply would not suffice... not even close.
dtournemille 12y ago
Who said SaaS products sell themselves? Who said anything sells itself?
- patio11 12y ago
  There exists a continuum of SaaS sales strategies. One end of the spectrum is high-touch sales, which is Oracle's "We send you a sales guy, a supporting engineer, a bunch of Powerpoints, and enough steak and wine to feed a European wedding reception, and afterwards you pay us several million dollars" model. The other end of the spectrum is low-touch sales, where the website/email/product/onboarding tour does the heavy lifting and contact between the customer and the company is, to a greater or lesser degree, seen as a bug to be fixed in a later version. An entire constellation of decisions about one's company/customers/product/pricing/business model/etc gets determined instantly when you pick your point on this continuum. (Or, equivalently, you get placed on the continuum basically instantly when you make most consequential decisions about a SaaS company/product/etc.) The reason this article is on this blog is that there is a playbook for high-touch SaaS businesses which is amenable to venture funding and that is not exactly true for low-touch businesses. (There exist a handful of exceptions, but people consider B2B high-touch sales to be a solved problem.) Additionally, and more directly responsive to your question, there exists at least one popular and widely listened to corporate voice who quite literally wrote a bestselling book which might as well be subtitled Low-Touch Sales Mean You Don't Have To Take Dirty VC Money. (Cards on table: My business is mostly on the low-touch end of the spectrum but I work with people all over it. There exists a shedload of money to be made in software and a variety of ways to make it effectively at the traditional points on the spectrum and at emerging points besides.)
  - isb 12y ago
    and which book would that be? :)
    - loumf 12y ago
      I'm going to go with 37Signals.
dmourati 12y ago
One thing I've learned is that the sales process is a continuum. Things that work well in multi-million dollar deals are totally inappropriate in sub 5k deals. The trick is getting the right amount of "touch" for the right types of deals. One way to do this is to segment the salesforce. From there, you can attack different sized opportunities with different levels of engagement and investigation. Freemium represents this process taken to one logical extreme where you have zero-touch and rely on marketing from the web site and pure virality. Next up might be limited email marketing/sales. Then phone, then phone and outside sales. At the very high end, you are talking about regional field sales as well as face-to-face visits with your companies leadership up to an including the CEO.
cperciva 12y ago
Why do I get the feeling that there's a joke here with a punchline of "Tarsnap"?
- lanstein 12y ago
  Do you still sell in picodollars? :)
  - cperciva 12y ago
    Yes! And I take in many quadrillions of them!
wirefloss 12y ago
"...Because selling an enterprise-wide deal is a lot like getting a bill passed in Congress." On how the above is done see Netflix original: http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70178217 http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70178217
rokhayakebe 12y ago
When you wear your sales hat, you almost don't care if what you are selling is useful so long as the prospect satisfies your single condition: 1) has enough money. Sometimes I wished we eliminated salespeople entirely. I would prefer to have "honest" marketing, and strong customer service. What I mean by honest marketing is to continually share content with the prospective client, and try to win them over without playing gimmicky mind games and tricks. To do this, you must understand that your client may need to time to understand your product, move away from current solution, etc.. A strong customer service agent would help answer all of customers' concerns once the marketing has gotten them interested.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
  A strong customer service agent would help answer all of customers' concerns once the marketing has gotten them interested Often that "strong customer service agent" is a salesperson.
reubenswartz 12y ago
"The true purpose of sales is to create new value for customers." Yes. If you're just parroting talking points, you can be replaced by a website. Plus, it's more fun to really help people. "your biggest competition isn’t just other startups, perpetually licensed on-premise packages, homegrown solutions, or incumbent vendors. It’s inertia. Enterprise/SaaS salespeople find themselves in a constant battle against the target company’s urge to do nothing." Yes, again. This isn't just a sales problem-- this is a human nature problem. It's just that selling to big companies involves lots of humans, almost all of whom are deeply resistant to change.
- jusben1369 12y ago
  "Do nothing" understates the challenge here. Every change introduces risk and costs. The process today might be less than optimal but changing it will require hard and soft investment costs and take time and comes at an opportunity cost of doing something else. 1 in 4 projects runs terribly over budget/time etc. So the urge to do nothing is actually "The barrier to implementing change is much higher than simply "hey once implemented this will save you x per year or generate Y per year" How tangible and achievable and risky are those goals. A good rule of thumb is that as a sales person you want to feel like there is a 4x minimum change vs the cost of your solution. So if your solution is $250,000 a year as a SaaS offering you want the company to believe it will save or generate $1 million a year. Anything under 3x and they'll probably punt because of the risks and opportunity cost of all things change.
  - reubenswartz 12y ago
    These are good points. The game theory in enterprise sales is pretty perverse. Buyers want to guard against risk (including lying sales people), so they create more hoops for the vendors to jump through, which increases the cost of sales and makes the project more expensive, which drives the creation of more hoops... I've seen RFP processes from both sides where buyers asked hundreds of questions, vendors responded "optimistically", because that was the only way to get into the next round, and most of the energy on both sides was spent dealing with the buying process instead of the actual problem.
evv 12y ago
Good products don't sell themselves? Somebody should tell Atlassian!
- aspir 12y ago
  Perhaps Atlassian's VP of sales and marketing (now president)? https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysimons https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysimons
  - jsimons 12y ago
    Flattered by the shoutout. Atlassian's model is most definitely focused on empowering customer self-service (and probably a strong counterpoint to the a16z piece). We do believe software can sell itself, and I think there are dozens of examples of other companies that do as well, from Basecamp to Expensify. But we also enter and expand via teams. If we were dependent on selling initially to the whole enterprise, our model probably wouldn't work. Talk I gave on our model here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1AWD_fue8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1AWD_fue8
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dkrich 12y ago
In my experience the reality of enterprise purchasing is far more depressing. If you are a new company with a new product, hoping to sell into the large enterprise market, you're competing with large, well-funded sales teams who's most compelling pitch is that "we're the safe choice." It may not be (and usually isn't) the best or most cost-effective choice. Yet at the end of the day, divisions or agencies making 7+ figure purchases want to feel confident in their purchase. "SAP is a good purchase because Ford/AT&T/Apple (I'm making these up) purchased them and they must know what they're doing." Enterprise sales is a very tough business. If I were launching a product, I'd probably target small teams first with a lower price-point to bypass the politics and get almost instant purchase approval. There the stakes are lower. Sure, you won't close a $500,000 sale in one fell swoop, but once you establish yourself across a number of teams, you can always change your product lineup and create an enterprise package that has a much higher cost. Obviously a large number of SaaS companies already do this and I have to believe it's the most effective route.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
This reads really interestingly to me. Things like: Then I’d show the sales reps a long list of initiatives they needed to look for in companies Once the sales and marketing teams have uncovered these initiatives (as well as the critical capabilities that need to be in place for the initiative to be successful), they can begin to define the unique value proposition. This data is almost never public, so it couldn't be found by just doing your standard research on a company from the outside. The only way you get this kind of stuff is with an access agent. What this article basically says, without saying it, is that your sales team needs to be Human Intelligence officers out there recruiting individuals from large organizations to be champions for your product. Nothing new here[1][2]certainly as this is a fantastically useful way to do business, but you had better know how to do it right or you look like an idiot. It also means you really need to hire top notch sales people. [1]http://www.amazon.com/Work-Like-Spy-Business-Officer/dp/1591843537 http://www.amazon.com/Work-Like-Spy-Business-Officer/dp/1591... [2}http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:W6r6dsvp8TQJ:https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140626110221-20747703-sell-like-a-spy-using-an-access-agent+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:W6r6dsv...
taksintik 12y ago
Whoever thinks that is mistaken. Without an active sales strategy your business is a hobby.
notastartup 12y ago
man I just read the article...I'm perplexed as to how I can take this to sell my SaaS product to enterprise customers. It looks very complex and intimidating. Even landing an enterprise customer alone is tough enough.
bulte-rs 12y ago
Now, who will do Sales as a Service?

176 points by boynamedsue 12y ago

This is a decent article on enterprise/SaaS sales, but no knowledgeable person has ever claimed that a SaaS product can reach its customers without sales.

jseip 12y ago
and yet I find that is a commonly held misconception, and that there are many founders who think of sales as a four letter word.
- hawkice 12y ago
  Just more evidence that says they aren't knowledgeable: they cannot correctly identify the number of letters in "sales".
AVTizzle 12y ago
Definitely sounds like a straw man. What on earth would the business model (SaaS vs anything else) have to do with the product selling itself?

dspillett 12y ago

Because the products only sell themselves once they are in front of the right decision makers at the right time. Sometimes arranging that takes much foresight, skill & determination (and not a small measure of bull too, if I may be more cynical for a moment!). Also, SaaS offerings are not new and therefore rare & exciting any more so you are unlikely to be alone in the market - you need your sales+marketing people to compete with everyone else's.

shostack 12y ago
What's interesting is when sales people think they can get a leg up on closing the deal by going over your head because they don't think you are a key decision maker or influential enough in the process to worry about. A couple years ago I had a sales guy at a large ad tech company that shall go unnamed try to go over my head to executive team members. Of course the first thing that happened after that initial contact was that executive coming over and saying "so and so reached out to me...what do you think about them?" At that point I explained that not only did I not think they offered a great solution, but that it spoke volumes of how they do business if they go behind people's backs like that. The icing on the cake was when that executive sent an email back to the sales rep, CCed me, and said that he would defer to my expert knowledge of our needs. Note to any sales reps reading this...just because someone doesn't have an executive-level title, don't for one second think that you might be able to close the deal without their buy-off.

burgreblast 12y ago

This cannot be over emphasized: >Your biggest competition isn’t just other startups, perpetually licensed on-premise packages, homegrown solutions, or incumbent vendors. It’s inertia...the target company’s urge to do nothing. So how do you make enterprises care enough to act? I've found that as "obvious" as saving money should be as a change agent, in many organizations that doesn't move the needle. Products that increase revenue usually gets far more attention than money saving products. Competitive leapfrogging / strategic value even more, but that goes to Mark's about understanding and identifying their initiatives. Would also add: identify their incentives. Make heroes the organization rewards.

exelius 12y ago
Totally agree. If you look at your company, where are your "rockstars"? I don't mean rockstar developers; I mean the most ambitious, most well-connected (and highest compensated) people in your company. It's a trick question: they're almost always in sales, marketing or product because these are the parts of the organization that drive profit. This is true of almost every company. It's not a secret why Salesforce was the first real SaaS success story: companies are a lot more inclined to spend money to make money than to spend money to save money. Growth is the name of the game; cost cutting is usually only a focus once growth is no longer an option. That's why I groan whenever I see something like yet another IT operations management platform. Would the company be better off buying a software package to manage their IT, or firing all their IT staff and hiring a managed services provider to fill the gap? Operational cost cutting has a lot of different modalities that are often mutually exclusive, while you can more easily chase down multiple paths for revenue generation.
- rubensmead 12y ago
  Does ServiceNow count as "yet another IT operations management platform"? Do they make you groan because their IT applications business is doing so well? Or because you think they're overhyped and will crash and sputter?
  - exelius 12y ago

il 12y ago

A corollary is that your SaaS product needs to be priced in a way that enables sales (typically >$5K ACV).

kareemm 12y ago
This is a non-obvious point that took me a long time to grok: the way you sell your product is a function of its price, not the other way around. The more you charge, the more high-touch you can get when selling (i.e. with an outside sales force).
jfabre 12y ago
Could you be more explicit please? I have no idea what's ACV.
- chiph 12y ago
  Annual Contract Value. The lower your price, the more your product and sales process needs to be self-service, because you can't afford to send a salesperson out for a $1000/yr contract (airfare + hotel + rental car + their time, annnd you're over any possible return, even before including R&D and support costs)
- jxm262 12y ago
  I believe he means annual contract value. http://saasaddict.walkme.com/getting-your-saas-acv-annual-contract-value-right/ http://saasaddict.walkme.com/getting-your-saas-acv-annual-co... http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/ http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/
efriese 12y ago
Not only to enable sales, but to also show the business problem you are fixing is important. I've been in enterprise deals where if the price tag is too low, the executive doesn't think it's important enough for him/her to fix. It can sound crazy, but once you've tried to fix big problems at that level it makes some sense.
orky56 12y ago

beartime 12y ago

If people can vote on issues, why do we need politicians? Similar reasons imo...

dangrossman 12y ago

There are billions of individuals and millions of small businesses that can be reached without a sales team. If you don't want to do sales, then don't target enterprise customers. I make my living with SaaS products, and have never made a cold call or sent an unsolicited mail about it.

theallan 12y ago
Out of interest then, how do people hear about your SaaS? Word of mouth and Google searches only?
- dangrossman 12y ago
  I run a low-budget (<$1000/mo) PPC and retargeting ad campaign which is where most of the first customers came from. Today, at least 80% of new signups are either referrals (word-of-mouth, or articles/blogs/tweets written by current and past customers) or from organic search. The #1 keyword in my paid PPC campaign is just the brand name.
  - brandnewlow 12y ago
    It helps that the product is really great, too.
    - jimiwen 12y ago
      the pre, during and after service enhances the product and amplifies the experience
  - AznHisoka 12y ago
    Good stuff. Assume Improvely is your Saas. You do realize that marketers/agencies are very active in social media, blogging, etc. I can think of over 100 blogs that would write about you: conversionxl.com, okdork.com, quicksprout.com, kissmetrics.com, etc, etc. I'm sure if you created a SaaS for X, where X = farmers, or or home funeral owners, or home contractors, you would not have that luxury. So it definitely depends on the space, and for most people, your strategy simply would not suffice... not even close.

dtournemille 12y ago

Who said SaaS products sell themselves? Who said anything sells itself?

patio11 12y ago
There exists a continuum of SaaS sales strategies. One end of the spectrum is high-touch sales, which is Oracle's "We send you a sales guy, a supporting engineer, a bunch of Powerpoints, and enough steak and wine to feed a European wedding reception, and afterwards you pay us several million dollars" model. The other end of the spectrum is low-touch sales, where the website/email/product/onboarding tour does the heavy lifting and contact between the customer and the company is, to a greater or lesser degree, seen as a bug to be fixed in a later version. An entire constellation of decisions about one's company/customers/product/pricing/business model/etc gets determined instantly when you pick your point on this continuum. (Or, equivalently, you get placed on the continuum basically instantly when you make most consequential decisions about a SaaS company/product/etc.) The reason this article is on this blog is that there is a playbook for high-touch SaaS businesses which is amenable to venture funding and that is not exactly true for low-touch businesses. (There exist a handful of exceptions, but people consider B2B high-touch sales to be a solved problem.) Additionally, and more directly responsive to your question, there exists at least one popular and widely listened to corporate voice who quite literally wrote a bestselling book which might as well be subtitled Low-Touch Sales Mean You Don't Have To Take Dirty VC Money. (Cards on table: My business is mostly on the low-touch end of the spectrum but I work with people all over it. There exists a shedload of money to be made in software and a variety of ways to make it effectively at the traditional points on the spectrum and at emerging points besides.)
- isb 12y ago
  and which book would that be? :)
  - loumf 12y ago
    I'm going to go with 37Signals.

dmourati 12y ago

One thing I've learned is that the sales process is a continuum. Things that work well in multi-million dollar deals are totally inappropriate in sub 5k deals. The trick is getting the right amount of "touch" for the right types of deals. One way to do this is to segment the salesforce. From there, you can attack different sized opportunities with different levels of engagement and investigation. Freemium represents this process taken to one logical extreme where you have zero-touch and rely on marketing from the web site and pure virality. Next up might be limited email marketing/sales. Then phone, then phone and outside sales. At the very high end, you are talking about regional field sales as well as face-to-face visits with your companies leadership up to an including the CEO.

cperciva 12y ago

Why do I get the feeling that there's a joke here with a punchline of "Tarsnap"?

lanstein 12y ago
Do you still sell in picodollars? :)
- cperciva 12y ago
  Yes! And I take in many quadrillions of them!

wirefloss 12y ago

"...Because selling an enterprise-wide deal is a lot like getting a bill passed in Congress." On how the above is done see Netflix original: http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70178217 http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70178217

rokhayakebe 12y ago

When you wear your sales hat, you almost don't care if what you are selling is useful so long as the prospect satisfies your single condition: 1) has enough money. Sometimes I wished we eliminated salespeople entirely. I would prefer to have "honest" marketing, and strong customer service. What I mean by honest marketing is to continually share content with the prospective client, and try to win them over without playing gimmicky mind games and tricks. To do this, you must understand that your client may need to time to understand your product, move away from current solution, etc.. A strong customer service agent would help answer all of customers' concerns once the marketing has gotten them interested.

HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
A strong customer service agent would help answer all of customers' concerns once the marketing has gotten them interested Often that "strong customer service agent" is a salesperson.

reubenswartz 12y ago

"The true purpose of sales is to create new value for customers." Yes. If you're just parroting talking points, you can be replaced by a website. Plus, it's more fun to really help people. "your biggest competition isn’t just other startups, perpetually licensed on-premise packages, homegrown solutions, or incumbent vendors. It’s inertia. Enterprise/SaaS salespeople find themselves in a constant battle against the target company’s urge to do nothing." Yes, again. This isn't just a sales problem-- this is a human nature problem. It's just that selling to big companies involves lots of humans, almost all of whom are deeply resistant to change.

jusben1369 12y ago
"Do nothing" understates the challenge here. Every change introduces risk and costs. The process today might be less than optimal but changing it will require hard and soft investment costs and take time and comes at an opportunity cost of doing something else. 1 in 4 projects runs terribly over budget/time etc. So the urge to do nothing is actually "The barrier to implementing change is much higher than simply "hey once implemented this will save you x per year or generate Y per year" How tangible and achievable and risky are those goals. A good rule of thumb is that as a sales person you want to feel like there is a 4x minimum change vs the cost of your solution. So if your solution is $250,000 a year as a SaaS offering you want the company to believe it will save or generate $1 million a year. Anything under 3x and they'll probably punt because of the risks and opportunity cost of all things change.
- reubenswartz 12y ago
  These are good points. The game theory in enterprise sales is pretty perverse. Buyers want to guard against risk (including lying sales people), so they create more hoops for the vendors to jump through, which increases the cost of sales and makes the project more expensive, which drives the creation of more hoops... I've seen RFP processes from both sides where buyers asked hundreds of questions, vendors responded "optimistically", because that was the only way to get into the next round, and most of the energy on both sides was spent dealing with the buying process instead of the actual problem.

evv 12y ago

Good products don't sell themselves? Somebody should tell Atlassian!

aspir 12y ago
Perhaps Atlassian's VP of sales and marketing (now president)? https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysimons https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysimons
- jsimons 12y ago
  Flattered by the shoutout. Atlassian's model is most definitely focused on empowering customer self-service (and probably a strong counterpoint to the a16z piece). We do believe software can sell itself, and I think there are dozens of examples of other companies that do as well, from Basecamp to Expensify. But we also enter and expand via teams. If we were dependent on selling initially to the whole enterprise, our model probably wouldn't work. Talk I gave on our model here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1AWD_fue8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1AWD_fue8

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dkrich 12y ago

In my experience the reality of enterprise purchasing is far more depressing. If you are a new company with a new product, hoping to sell into the large enterprise market, you're competing with large, well-funded sales teams who's most compelling pitch is that "we're the safe choice." It may not be (and usually isn't) the best or most cost-effective choice. Yet at the end of the day, divisions or agencies making 7+ figure purchases want to feel confident in their purchase. "SAP is a good purchase because Ford/AT&T/Apple (I'm making these up) purchased them and they must know what they're doing." Enterprise sales is a very tough business. If I were launching a product, I'd probably target small teams first with a lower price-point to bypass the politics and get almost instant purchase approval. There the stakes are lower. Sure, you won't close a $500,000 sale in one fell swoop, but once you establish yourself across a number of teams, you can always change your product lineup and create an enterprise package that has a much higher cost. Obviously a large number of SaaS companies already do this and I have to believe it's the most effective route.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

This reads really interestingly to me. Things like: Then I’d show the sales reps a long list of initiatives they needed to look for in companies Once the sales and marketing teams have uncovered these initiatives (as well as the critical capabilities that need to be in place for the initiative to be successful), they can begin to define the unique value proposition. This data is almost never public, so it couldn't be found by just doing your standard research on a company from the outside. The only way you get this kind of stuff is with an access agent. What this article basically says, without saying it, is that your sales team needs to be Human Intelligence officers out there recruiting individuals from large organizations to be champions for your product. Nothing new here[1][2]certainly as this is a fantastically useful way to do business, but you had better know how to do it right or you look like an idiot. It also means you really need to hire top notch sales people. [1]http://www.amazon.com/Work-Like-Spy-Business-Officer/dp/1591843537 http://www.amazon.com/Work-Like-Spy-Business-Officer/dp/1591... [2}http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:W6r6dsvp8TQJ:https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140626110221-20747703-sell-like-a-spy-using-an-access-agent+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:W6r6dsv...

taksintik 12y ago

Whoever thinks that is mistaken. Without an active sales strategy your business is a hobby.

notastartup 12y ago

man I just read the article...I'm perplexed as to how I can take this to sell my SaaS product to enterprise customers. It looks very complex and intimidating. Even landing an enterprise customer alone is tough enough.

bulte-rs 12y ago

Now, who will do Sales as a Service?