The rise of enterprise marketing

I think one of the things a lot of developers and entrepreneurs fail to completely grasp is that there are a few very good reasons for the long sales cycles and the lack of pricing transparency. Primary among them is that when people label something as "enterprise software", the traditionally mean software that plays a critical part in a specific business process or sest of processes, or is an infrastructure compnent that's part of a large, complex distributed almagamation of crap that's accrued for generations.

nrmehta notes Box.net, Splunk, and Workday as enterprise software startups. I would argue that only Workday fits the classic enterprise software definition. Box.net is a straightforward productivity tool, Splunk is very simple analytics for orgs not inclined to roll their own, but HR Information Systems are incredibly complicated with a plethora of laws, rules, and regulations governing them spanning corporate, national, industry, and regulatory agencies. Being able to handle that is the enterprisey aspect, and learning the specifics of a given enterprise -- which quite likely mean the software sales agreement is accompanied by a professional services contract, too -- is why it's difficult to create a standard pricing model. If you look for counterpoints you might think of Salesforce.com, which publishes list prices for various levels of accounts for SalesCloud, as well as for several of their other services (e.g. Heroku). However, if you are a large enterprise and you are interested in engaging with Salesforce.com, it is exceptionally unlikely -- nay, impossible -- that these numbers prove meaningful. It's an advertising tool for Salesforce.com, but only that. In additional, an experienced and knowledgeable sales exec + sales engineer pair can be invaluable to an enterprise considering or evaluating a potential solution (hardware or software). I know that's common sense, but generally speaking I don't think startup culture educates adequately on enterprise as compared to the consumer world, and learning more about this would be useful for most of us.

"Submit your information and we'll respond with a quote" == "Our software costs twice as much as it should, because we need a fat margin to pay for the long sales cycle". I don't think I've willingly filled out one of those forms for over 5 years.

This was a good post by Chris and I think there are a number of companies who are shifting in this direction. Overall, I think Marketing is getting a bigger share of spend in enterprise IT vendors vs. sales from previous days. That being said, I also note that several of the most prominent enterprise startups of recent times (Box, Splunk, WorkDay, etc.) have made huge investments in traditional, direct sales. My 2c is a lot of this is driven by the ASP (average sales price). In a market where the ASP is low (< $10K/year), you need a marketing driven approach to grow cost-effectively. But for businesses with ASPs > $100K or > $1 MM, direct sales is often still very cost-effective. I'm not making any comments on the "goodness for the world" of sales here, just its efficiency as a growth engine.

I would love to see this come to pass. Salesforce and New Relic seem to be killing it, but I'm not aware of others. If anybody has more examples please share links.