I’ve been on vacation this week and spending more time on the beach than on the internet. That said I did come across a couple of neat posts this week. Enjoy!
William Mougayar of engagio had a great post over on StartupNorth this week about his lessons learned over the past 3 years. I agree with a lot of what he has to say here about relationships, the danger of believing your own story if nobody else does and how helping people is important. I don’t agree with him that selling to enterprises is a dead end – but I do agree that it’s very, very different from selling to individuals. (full disclosure, I am an advisor to engagio)
Mark MacLeod at startupCFO had a nead post called Vision can Come Later talking about startups that start as services businesses that later transition to product businesses and the resulting domain expertise that comes with that. His thinking is very much in line with mine on that topic – there is no substitution for hands-on market experience.
The Content Marketing Institute has a summary of the results of the Brandpoint 2012 Digital Content Marketing Survey with some interesting data around social content, outsourcing and storytelling.
Earlier this week I posted about what startup folks are looking for in a marketing hire. MarketingProfs has a related post this week called 7 Traits of an Ideal Marketer. I agree with all of this in particular the desire to have marketers that have had some sort of sales training and also the need for great writing skills.
That’s it for this week. I’ll be in China next week working and eating as much food as I can in 6 days. I’ll be posting here but if it takes me a while to respond to comments, I will blame that on my spotty internet access. Have a great weekend.
Thanks April for the ping back on Engagio’s story. I didn’t say that selling to the enterprise is a dead-end. It is more difficult and different than a consumer app,-that’s for sure.
For a start-up, my point was that the best way to penetrate an enterprise is via a SaaS-based product that can infiltrate easily and where the user and usage have consumer-like characteristics. That’s a disrupting factor itself. Of course, the exception is very well funded startups that can afford a direct selling model.
So, to come full circle on this, I think it’s the enterprise direct selling that “could” kill a start-up from the point of view of reaching a sustainable, repeatable, growing business. It’s expensive to build a sales force (even via inside sales).
Hi William,
I don’t think that Saas means you don’t need a sales force. Almost all have inside sales and my team just bought a Saas based HR system from a startup with both inside and outside teams. Consumerization of enterprise IT is real and that in itself means there is a lot of opportunity there. I think where startups fail in enterprise is they fail to understand the purchase and budgeting process. Because we are all consumers, folks don’t have that problem in B2C. Plus we have the Instagram style companies where we don’t have to worry about revenue at all which certainly seems easier than selling at least in the early stages 😉
April
It’s not that they don’t understand the purchase and budgeting process, but the question is – can they withstand it?
Oh for sure. And B2C companies have to withstand a ramp too (or withstand no revenue at all).
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