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How Not To Sell Software in 2012

al3x.net

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Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#71

Post by suresk »

Enterprise software purchasing is pretty broken from both sides, but the vendors make tons of money because of it and the managers who do the purchasing often don't care.

Part of the problem Alex is seeing (and I've seen) is that the startup/small business segment just isn't that big, and vendors are usually fine with ignoring it and losing out on revenue. I do a lot of stuff on the side and have tried to buy licenses for some enterprise products, and even mid-sized vendors aren't really interested in talking to me. Large vendors like Oracle and IBM are heavily optimized toward selling to big businesses who need a purchasing process to take months and aren't as sensitive to price. The App Store model is 99%+ consumer-oriented.

Unfortunately, a lot of startups and small Enterprise vendors end up recruiting sales and marketing people who have been successful at larger vendors, so the same practices get implemented.

I blame this mostly on purchasing practices that are largely centered around managers mitigating risk. The risk they are most interested in mitigating is the risk that they'll get fired for making (or approving) a bad purchasing decision. Vendors are happy to play along, since it usually means they can make more money out of the deal.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#73

Post by CamperBob »

patio11 wrote: post #46
pavel_lishin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "1 month email course on X" What's the advantage of being spammed for a month vs. having the entire month's course on an HTML page that I can peruse at my leisure and at my own pace? Or am I misunderstanding what an e-mail course is?

If you ask me for email, by definition sending you the email you asked for is not spam. The advantages to the software purchaser: 1) You're a busy guy. If we critically hit you with a wall of text right now, you'll bookmark it and never get back to it. If you're honest with yourself, you know this, because you've got a backlog of things to read four miles long already. What's your RSS reader look like? Instapaper? I…

You sure seem to know a lot about how busy I am and where my priorities lie.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#74

Post by lhnn »

caublestone wrote: post #54
unreal37 wrote: post #9

There is this space between "personal" and "enterprise" where this model works. Call it "startup" or "small business". I want something, I have a credit card, I buy, I move on. The less hassle the better. But in real enterprises, I don't have a credit card. I don't even have authority to purchase. (There is a whole department named "procurement" for that.) But I need to see "sales decks", do webinars, talk to salesme…

I work in Procurement and run RFP's all the time. you are right that enterprises go through this whole process and that they ask a lot of questions about software capabilities. But honestly, at the end of the day, the process is so long and drawn out mostly because of compliance. Start-ups are fun companies that don't really have to worry about the threat of being regulated or audited by the government. But a publicl…

As long as you hate being a part of that shitty machine, it's ok... I guess.

EDIT: I love my job.. mostly because I got to install an app for my team that increases productivity WITHOUT:

-Requesting a dev server build

-Requesting a test server build

-Getting permission to use an open source tool

-Getting persmission to run said tool on "non-standard language" (PHP)

-Explaining why I'm installing a tool for which one already exists for our usecase (the enterprise solution sucks)

-Getting a prod server build

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#75

Post by robocat »

raganwald wrote: post #17

There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the…

"There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000."

Although there are annual licences sold within this range (nearly all of our contracts are). Companies grok SaaS, whereas they probably wouldn'y have in 2004.

We do all of his wrongs, but we don't sell to small companies.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#76

Post by davmar »

aantix wrote: post #70
davmar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gladly. i think the single biggest contributor to our success has been the fact that we are in close contact with our customers. if we lose a sale, we have the opportunity to learn why we lost. during a webinar, we hear the reactions of customers. with RFP's we get a list of the features they want. when we win, we stay close to them during implementation. we learn what works/what doesn't work with our products. based…

Just curious, how did you find your sales guy and how did decide on the revenue split?

we're a type s corp, so it's a flow-through entity. at the end of the year we distributed remaining profits based upon equal ownership (things have changed as we've grown). he worked off commission only to begin with and i drew a small salary once we had revenue.

but...i was in college and my salary requirements were low. the sales guy? my dad who had another job at the time (sales at: apple, sun microsystems, hitachi datasystems, etc).

i think that's not a bad bootstrapping model though. if you're both employed, you can both take commission and built it part time until you can jump ship and do it full time.

but the question i hear you saying is - "where am i gonna find a sales guy?" you and i are techies at heart and probably have mostly techie (non sales type) friends.

like everything else, sales isn't a great mystery but it's good to find an experienced person. couple ways to find people, and i had a recruiter recently give me some advice that i'll pass on to you.

linkedin is the new recruitment tool. start looking for some sales guys that already work for companies that have the kind of sales guys you want, and get a hold of them (not sure if you need a premium linkedin for that or not). there's also professional networking events around, but i find that those tend to be about measure whose dick is bigger versus making meaningful relationships.

which city are you in? look up startup networking stuff. i hear all the time about people who want to find a technical co-founder. annoyingly large amounts. and on projects i usually wouldn't invest any time in.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#77

Post by davmar »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #58
davmar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gladly. i think the single biggest contributor to our success has been the fact that we are in close contact with our customers. if we lose a sale, we have the opportunity to learn why we lost. during a webinar, we hear the reactions of customers. with RFP's we get a list of the features they want. when we win, we stay close to them during implementation. we learn what works/what doesn't work with our products. based…

Would you mind to provide examples of B2B software that we rarely heard of? I have interest in B2B more than B2C occasionally but don't really have a lot of domain knowledge. Would you happen to know a few general tricks how or where to get such knowledge?

sure. first of all, if you're a cs major (like me) it's doubtful that you'll have the right domain knowledge.

in my case, my father and family friend approached me and asked if i could build something. our co-founder said "all the software in this (hr technology) industry sucked". can i build xyz? over a long period of time, i did.

so my general trick would be - find people who are in completely opposite industries as you are right now. doing totally different, non-technical work. often times they're consultants that are reselling other companies products. and they know - since they've been implementing products and speaking to customers on a daily basis - where the customer pain points are.

hope that helps. it only happened for me once, so it's hard to replicate, but i hope you get the chance.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#78

Post by davmar »

secret_target wrote: post #43
davmar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gladly. i think the single biggest contributor to our success has been the fact that we are in close contact with our customers. if we lose a sale, we have the opportunity to learn why we lost. during a webinar, we hear the reactions of customers. with RFP's we get a list of the features they want. when we win, we stay close to them during implementation. we learn what works/what doesn't work with our products. based…

Would love to get your take on what sorts of online advertising has worked and not worked for you in building your company.

obviously google adwords. remarketing pixels are good. adsense blew away a ton of cash with few results.

but check out other directory listings. www.capterra.com is HUGE for us. our conversion rates there are about 12% (!!!!). organic conversion rates are about 2.5%. which is much more reasonable. but we spend a lot of $$$$ with them.

edit: a conversion for us is a lead.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#79

Post by InclinedPlane »

wheels wrote: post #36

> Practically everyone who’s paying for software is doing so through an app store And how well's that working for them? • All of the revenue for the thousands of vendors in the Apple App Store together for 2011: $3.6 billion • Oracle's revenue alone for 2011: $36 billion Notice that decimal point there? There's a reason it's in a different place. I don't like the enterprise sales process – being on either side of it,…

"Shut up and take my money!" applies at both ends of the spectrum. If a hundred thousand people want to give you $10 through an app store, it might make sense to figure out how to make that possible. If one person wants to give you a million dollars using an ACH transfer or through gold doubloons, you should probably figure out how to make that possible too.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#80

Post by adamtmca »

notaddicted wrote: post #51
pnathan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I know of a number of products that are in the [1K, 75K] range. * Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate * vSphere datacenter edition * TestComplete from SmartBear * > 3 perforce licences

Joel's article was written in 2004 so, using gasoline as the benchmark, the 2012 dollars figure is $2180 [1]. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28average+price+of+gas...

Gasoline is a poor choice of benchmark. Energy prices aren't really a proxy for inflation.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=core+inflation+from+200...

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