alt Hacker NewsThis whole article smells a bit of someone being salty they couldn't sell their software.
Having worked in corporate with vaguely software-buying related stuff, I am confused at why so many small companies think an enterprise would be excited to go with them.
Even if I love your product, how do I pitch to the powers that be that we replace something we are already paying for with this new thing? The company might make billions but I've always had to fight for my budgets.
And tell me again why we should bet our core operations on a two man outfit with six months runway? What happens when you pivot? What happens when our competitor acquires you? What happens when you go on a transatlantic flight and a key expires?
Selling to enterprise early on is a poisoned chalice as well. They have much larger teams, so you'll be dealing with a horde of product owners, compliance specialists, data privacy experts, who might never touch your product but come with excel sheets with 300 rows of gnarly questions. Not to mention just getting the bills paid can be a huge fight.
It will drag you into their orbit, especially if 80% of your revenue is from a single customer. Soon your other customers will start going to someone who actually have time to care about them. And by then there's been a political shift in-house and the new VP of X gets a quote for an outsourcing bundle from his squash buddy at one of the big system integrators. Your line item gets bundled into this to motivate the cost even though it's not even relevant. And that the end of your company.
If you do want to sell, treat the enterprise like an ecosystem of SMEs, find a department or team who are more innovative and sell to them behind the backs of enterprise IT. Once you've entrenched yourself and the users love you, then you can expand to other teams and eventually enterprise IT will be forced to negotiate with you for a license and do the compliance dance. But even so this will take years of effort and luck.
> If you do want to sell, treat the enterprise like an ecosystem of SMEs, find a department or team who are more innovative and sell to them behind the backs of enterprise IT. Once you've entrenched yourself and the users love you, then you can expand to other teams and eventually enterprise IT will be forced to negotiate with you for a license and do the compliance dance. But even so this will take years of effort and luck.
This is the way.
There are back-doors as well. If you can get your software on a pre-approved vendor list in a big consultancy you can by-pass a lot of the song and dance with IT. Companies like Xerox have lists like this. They sign long-term contracts with enterprise customers whose business units can use their part of the budget to get any of the software on the list.
All you have to do from there is market to the right people running those business units.
Selling through the normal IT channels is much harder. It can take 6-9 months of back and forth and you'll still likely get denied more often than not. Enterprises would rather contract with a vendor like SAP, Xerox, Microsoft, etc which is all integrated with their systems already and has the advantage of the Lindy effect in place.