Breaking into the enterprise market will be a challenge for some vendors, Hilf says. “Google and Amazon really are going to struggle with understanding how enterprises buy,” he says. “As much as they want that to change and for everyone to swipe credit cards, that’s not realistic.”
Unlike Amazon, we don’t have to hire enterprise sales experts via NetworkWorld
There is this growing belief that sales people are not needed to sell tech, even for the more advanced, enterprise level technologies. This is because many founders of tech companies find the process of sales distasteful. They have to talk to people and convince them of value and results and plenty of other things that have little to do with the awesomeness of their technology. They simply want to build great products and let the world come to them. They look at companies like Atlassian and believe they too can simply do away with the “ugliness” of sales.
Of course, this is never true, especially when it comes to selling complex solutions to enterprises. Even major industry leaders like Amazon and Google think that because they have awesome technology that big companies will just buy if approached. What they struggle to understand however is that enterprise sales is something that everyone needs to fully buy into. It is a culture thing and great enterprise sales organizations like IBM, Oracle, EMC, and the like understand how to create and foster an effective and successful sales driven culture.
Can we reduce the need for large and expensive sales people? No, not now and not in the future. You might as well ask if you can have a tech company without programmers. Sales does not have to look the same as it does today and the profession does evolve, but you still need people that guide a prospect from initial interest to signed contract.
At some point I will get into this topic more, but the reliance on things like “freemium”, “marketing”, “bottoms up approach”, and the like are merely starting points. Eventually if you want to create a world-beating company, you need people that sell and a culture that embraces sales. As I tweeted out yesterday, the purpose of enterprise sales is not so much convincing prospects to buy as it is about helping a prospect figure out how to actually sell the solution internally.
(via marksbirch)



















