The B2B Backdoor Strategy
My first startup was a B2B Enterprise software vendor. In those days enterprise software companies went to market by building a really expensive direct sales force with sales reps and sales engineers out in the field in key cities. We had little visibility into which deals would close when. And we routinely had to replace sales reps and start over again in a sales territory.
One of the reasons why we took such an expensive approach was that it was the only way to sell to major enterprise accounts. You had to be where your customers were. And you needed relationship building reps on the ground to continually work an account and work through all the hoops needed to get to a purchase order.
Things have changed. Yes, enterprise software is alive and well. Just ask Larry Ellison from Oracle. But increasingly, enterprise software is deployed over the web (either public web or internal) and this opens up more entry points to an account. You could target departments or subsidiaries vs. going to corporate IT. Yammer has done an amazing job of this getting into some major accounts by letting anyone with a company email address create an account.
In Toronto last week, I met with a few founders who were going to market by targeting the Canadian subsidiaries of some major Fortune 1000 companies. In many cases, success in the Canadian sub has quickly led to intros to the key decision makers in the U.S. Intros that would have been hard to get directly without that expensive sales force on the ground.
There is no better referral for a head office decision maker than that of an internal executive or employee that has had success with your product. So, I say rather than trying to get into head office, go after an office that is closer to home. It will be easier to get introduced to them and you’ll be closer to them in order to help them deploy and be successful with your product.
Mark,
I agree that B2B software is changing rapidly and the approach of targeting the smaller, localized segment of an org is the best approach. This is the approach that we are taking with my start-up (a marketing SaaS, we get one user within an org, then empower then to become our internal evangelist to sell for you.
I also think that there is another big shift afoot in B2B software, the rapid adoption of viral SaaS'
A perfect example of this is how Dropbox can goes from consumer to corporate. 1 person begins to use it, then they want to share information with a colleague. Within a matter of time, Dropbox has organically gone viral within the organization and now becomes a enterprise solution. My whole org uses Dropbox and it started with 1 person using it.
A couple of other SaaS products that use a similar viral approach are Right Signature (e-signing software) It all begins once someone sends you a document to sign, then when you use it, you spread it organically. This spread through my small org in less than 2 months. Another example of a SaaS product that can go Enterprise is Planbox, a project management software.
Michael, for sure, consumerization of the enterprise is on. And viral definitely works. I am looking at a potential investment now where this is core to their strategy.
Another great example is Yammer. And they have seen huge success.