> If customers tried to set that up with a web form they'd screw it up and hate our product.
I'm sure it's true for quite a number of products. But what I wonder: how many products are that way because of the sales channel?
Even in the best case, a product built for self-service and user-driven adoption is going to be designed very differently than something sold through a high-touch sales channel with an expectation of expensive training before use. And that's before you account for all the product distortion that many enterprise salespeople introduce. "Why of course we'll have feature X in the next release!"
I expect there are a lot of companies that started out with an enterprise approach that are now ripe for disruption with a user-friendly, self-service model. A classic Innovator's Dilemma situation: the competition would seem laughably weak until it's too late. E.g., Linux vs proprietary Unix solutions.
I think the decisions are driven by the market, honestly, not the sales channel.
The products targeted at enterprise simply have to be vastly different than products targeted at small to medium sized businesses. The 37Signals business model of "Minimal features, give the customer what we give them, and nothing more" just doesn't work for companies with over xx,000 people.
How many large enterprises are using Basecamp? Highrise?
It isn't because they aren't good products, and it certainly isn't because they don't sell well... It also has nothing to do with the sales channel and process. But, simply put, the bigger the customer, the higher-touch the integration process must be, which by nature, drives up the touch-requirements of the sales cycle.
The long-drawn out sales cycle is a feature, really. It helps the customer get a really good understand of product capabilities before a lot of money is spent, as well as a realistic timetable of how long it will take to be integrated with their existing services, tied in to their existing data, authenticating against their native ADs or LDAPs, and provisioned within their existing storage arrays.
It isn't for everybody, and it certainly isn't the silicon valley way, generally speaking, but it works when done well, despite how much people might hate it.
> The products targeted at enterprise simply have to be vastly different than products targeted at small to medium sized businesses.
Sometimes. Sometimes not, though.
A while back I heard a story about SurveyMonkey, a classic self-service tool. At the time, they are going along like gangbusters: shipping new features, gaining new customers, making users happy. Eventually, some finance person at a major enterprise notices all the corporate credit card charges to SurveyMonkey and contacts them wanting an enterprise deal. Consolidated billing, special discount, special features.
The SurveyMonkey people, I am told, consider it carefully and then tell them "no". They figure they're doing just fine as they are, and have actual user needs for their coders to work on. In a huff, the large-company CFO cuts a deal with some more enterprise-friendly search company and sends out a memo: no more SurveyMonkey.
The memo is widely ignored. The other product isn't as good, and people have actual work to do, so they just keep charging SurveyMonkey to their credit cards like they always have.
My conclusion: with self-service products, the user is the customer. With enterprise products, the customer is often somebody totally different. So I think the sales channel shapes the market, which in turn shapes the product.
That's a fair point indeed, and if I seemed to represent the entirety of enterprise sales, I misspoke.
There are utility applications that work for enterprise, though I think we could both agree that SurveyMonkey wasn't specifically written at that audience. In fact, it seems that they turned their nose up at it, which is and isn't shocking. Like you said, sometimes the sales funnel does shape the product, and it takes a certain kind of person to go after enterprise sales, as it certainly isn't for everyone.
Winzip is another one. It's certainly valuable in the enterprise, and perhaps even necessary but, to my knowledge, the last time I saw it licensed (many moons ago) they didn't have any sort of enterprise agreement. You just paid for the number of seats.
That makes perfect sense. I agree with you that some things will always be enterprise products, sold the traditional way. The interesting thing to me is wondering which products people think are enterprise-only, but are actually ripe for disruption like survey tools were. Only time will tell, I guess.
It's a fair point. It also leads to the enterprisation of otherwise commodity software. Jive, for example, takes software that everybody has easy access to, adds enterprise features and enterprise class support, and sells them to the enterprise.
Need a blog? You could use Wordpress, for free, or you could pay Jive a large bundle of money, have them come in and install it, have active directory and oracle support, and somebody to blame when it doesn't work.
I know for a fact that if somebody would clone Evernote and allow it to operate within the Enterprise (instead of storing data in public cloud), there are at least three government agencies that would buy it for $10,000 or more.
Your point is definitely solid though, but the process that the enterprises are used to following are the ones that will win. If you hired a seasoned enterprise sales team, you could probably make a killing selling Wordpress, or something similar, to prevent people from overpaying for the existing enterprise solutions. You'd just have to know how to get in, and how to follow the sale.
I'm sure it's true for quite a number of products. But what I wonder: how many products are that way because of the sales channel?
Even in the best case, a product built for self-service and user-driven adoption is going to be designed very differently than something sold through a high-touch sales channel with an expectation of expensive training before use. And that's before you account for all the product distortion that many enterprise salespeople introduce. "Why of course we'll have feature X in the next release!"
I expect there are a lot of companies that started out with an enterprise approach that are now ripe for disruption with a user-friendly, self-service model. A classic Innovator's Dilemma situation: the competition would seem laughably weak until it's too late. E.g., Linux vs proprietary Unix solutions.