Coming back to blogging after a little holiday break, I ran across this great post by Matt Bell of Azaleos:
$0 to $20 Million: Ten Hand-to-Hand Sales Tactics

There’s a lot of good stuff here and I’d encourage anyone developing a sales and marketing strategy for an enterprise software start up to read this. There are a ton of articles on software sales, but most of them don’t get the enterprise dynamics quite right. This one gets closer.

The items that stand out for me are items 5 and 6: Once you make an initial sale to an enterprise client, you do have to “move in” with the client and become essential to the operation. And, yes, selling new software takes a lot of “swagger.” Every start up organization needs that swagger in its enterprise sales staff.

The only important thing that I think gets consistently left out in many discussions of enterprise sales is the “project sponsor” dynamic, which we’ve found to be incredibly important. Your entire experience with a particular client is likely to be dependent on the strength or weakness of that relationship, and the rising or falling status of that sponsor within the organization. Your understanding of the organization, and their understanding of yours, comes through the lens of that sponsor. Tough, important stuff that deserves a post of its own.

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Kraettli Lawrence Epperson

Managing Director at JumpPhase Ventures

This blog is dedicated to providing advice, tools and encouragement from one entrepreneur to another. I want to keep this practical and accessible for the new entrepreneur while also providing enough sophistication and depth to prove useful to the successful serial entrepreneur. My target rests somewhere between the garage and the board room, where the work gets done and the hockey stick emerges.

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