> 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.