January 7: @MarkBirch on Enterprise
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For January 6, we’re profiling enterprise startups. Today's guest expert is Mark Birch, CRO at Enhatch and founder of the NYC Enterprise Sales Meetup.
Enterprise sales at its core has seen enormous change over the past five years. When I look at the way we sell B2B deals going into 2015, the biggest difference from even a couple of years ago is the amount of information available to both buyers as well as sellers. Buyers have had the advantage for some time given the amount of product and vendor information freely available on the Internet, highlighted in the study by the CEB that 57% of the sale happens before a vendor is even engaged. However, vendors are starting to win back some ground, leveraging tools that give them better intelligence about prospects like Datanyze or Relationship Science, make sales teams more productive like Enhatch or Toutapp, and remove friction from the sales process like Quoteroller or CallidusCloud.
Ultimately, it is about making the enterprise sales more predictable by making sales people and managers more effective. Despite comments about the "death" of enterprise sales, the need for informed, data-driven sales people will be even more critical as the solutions they sell become more complex and the prospects they sell to become more complex organizations. Therefore we should expect most companies to start employing various sales technologies beyond mere backend CRM systems in the near future. The difference in this generation of sales technologies will be the simpler cloud and mobile deployments, ease of use with improved adoption, and the ability to more easily plug into existing corporate IT systems.
Bio:
Mark Birch is an enterprise software tech entrepreneur, sales executive, and early stage startup investor based in NYC. Currently he heads revenue and marketing for Enhatch, a company in the mobile enterprise software industry providing sales & marketing productivity tools. He also started the NYC Enterprise Sales Meetup. In his spare time, he can be found trawling the narrow streets of Chinatown scouring the best dumplings and Chinese snack foods around New York.
About Enhatch:
Enhatch provides an enterprise mobile platform that allows business people to build and deploy visually compelling apps that bridge the engagement gap between sales, marketing and customers involved in complex B2B selling environments.
