5 keys to selling to enterprise customers (part one)

The enterprise market is changing. IT is loosening its chokehold on software purchasing decisions, and consumer-like products and techniques are finding their way into enterprise software. People expect enterprise software to be beautifully designed and fun to use — a fundamental shift from how we’ve looked at this market for the last 20 years. These changes are happening faster than ever and generating unprecedented opportunities for software startups.

As a founder of multiple software startups, including my current company, GoInstant, I’ve learned a few lessons about selling into this singular market. While my companies have achieved success and were able to implement strategic alliances with large enterprise companies, such as IBM and Jive Software, it didn’t happen overnight. In my experience, if you’re looking to sell into the enterprise, there are two golden rules: know your customer and know yourself.

Knowing your market is critical. Knowing how customers want to buy, how they buy, and how you can package your solution with the appropriate support, training and value proposition is critical for gaining success in the enterprise space. Enterprise companies are slow — and loathe — to switch out existing systems. Once you get into a company and it is using your product actively, this is an advantage. But as the underdog trying to break in, it’s a huge disadvantage.

In this blog post, the first of a two-part series, we’ll examine five key questions that need to be addressed to fully understand the enterprise customer in order to gain a foothold. In part two, we’ll look at the important questions you need to answer about your own business, as well as the overall market.

Understanding your customer

1. How much should you genuinely innovate versus the status quo?

The status quo or “good enough” is an extremely powerful force. Entrepreneurs clamoring to innovate don’t always realize that companies may actually like something we don’t consider valuable. But just because you would never use it in your startup, don’t assume something isn’t good for your customer. You need to carefully consider the purpose it fills for the enterprise organization. Because large organizations have different concerns and requirements, something that looks broken to you may still be serving an important purpose internally.

Additionally, too many enterprise startups identify top-level problems without appreciating the layers of complexity underneath them. They see a big “obvious” problem (for example: “recruiting top talent is hard”) and assume there is a technological solution that they can build. But look underneath one problem and you’ll find three others. There may be issues with how internal departments communicate, or who owns the budget for specific things, the sophistication of the staff, or something else that’s going to roadblock your great solution.

2. Who are you selling to?

Every company has a hierarchy. There will be gatekeepers (lower-level folks that are tasked with doing research on your market), mid-level managers with some budget but restricted on spending without higher up approval (probably around $ 5,000 per year), and then C-level executives. You have to be strategic in how you sell to enterprises and how you move up (or down) the food chain, and how the value proposition changes along the way.

One of the best ways to do this is to get engaged within the organization and be accessible. Today’s enterprise buyers have taken a proactive approach in seeking out great software. Your job is to be sure that you are easily available and can clearly and effectively communicate and tailor the value of your solution as needed to people of all levels you’re selling to throughout the organization.

When talking with C-level execs, you need to be able to communicate how your solution can contribute to their overall business goals at a higher level, including projected ROI. Connecting them with C-level execs in other organizations who have already adopted your product might also help. At a mid-level, your approach should focus more on solving a specific business problem within their organization and streamlining existing processes.

3. How are you training customers?

Even with relatively simple software, companies ask about training. Most enterprise startups can’t afford to do on-site training, so look for other ways to provide the necessary handholding and comfort level customers need. One option is to create a video tutorial library. Video tutorials are easy to do and very effective for training. They’re also helpful when your customers on-board new employees or want to introduce your product into other areas of the organization.

4. What level of customer support do you offer?

Most legacy software companies offer poor support (and it’s generally quite expensive), so this presents an opportunity for enterprise startups. However, because startup founders focus heavily on innovation and product development, they often believe that these attributes are also the most important for customers as well. This ignores the premium that enterprise customers place on support — a value that frequently supersedes the fact that your software may be free and offers tons of cool new features.

The value you deliver is in the overall solutions package that you can offer to enterprise customers. And key to that package is a quality experience that contributes to the customer’s own success. While your features may, in fact, be groundbreaking, if they don’t facilitate better work processes for the customer, if they cannot be easily implemented and adopted throughout the organization, and if they cannot offer guaranteed performance, they don’t provide the value that’s required.

5. What are companies’ buying habits?

Enterprises are accustomed to long sales cycles, approvals, demos, trials, more demos and so forth. Changing those habits is not always easy, and in some cases you’ll have to play by the rules to get a foot in the door. At the same time, customers can stretch things out forever, and you will lose momentum quickly.

As with all the aforementioned, this is a delicate balancing act. You need to push your agenda and your sales strategy as much as possible. But you also need to weigh everything with an acute understanding of how your customers like to buy things and the processes they have to go through internally.

As I mentioned earlier, gaining a foothold in the enterprise market doesn’t happen overnight. But without a consistent and laser-like focus on your customers’ needs, it won’t happen at all. In my next post, I’ll take a look at the questions that you need to ask yourself to make sure you’re on the right track.

With more than a decade of experience managing and building software startups, Jevon MacDonald is currently the CEO and co-founder of GoInstant. The startup delivers a co-browsing experience for enterprise customers and consumers. Its patent-pending technology aims to help enterprise customers improve sales, customer support and problem solving processes.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Rojer.

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