Enterprise Software Sales is Dead. Long Live Enterprise Sales.

Jerry Rackley

By Charles Gold, Demand Metric member

For a very long time, software companies have gone to market in the same way.  Using a combination of field reps, inside sales, and telemarketing they targeted decision makers and endured long sales cycles.  They traveled to customer sites and took people to dinner. They used Powerpoints and glossy sales collateral to communicate their message. They teamed up with marketing to generate and process leads. They invested months in building relationships and were (often) rewarded with six figure wins. And the system worked.  Billions of dollars of software have been sold this way.

But here's a secret:  This model is dead.  Over.  Done.  But it's dying slowly -- especially within large, established software companies. Startups are innovating, not just in technology, but in the way they go to market.

They're selling at lower levels in their target organizations, they're enabling bite-size purchases, they're letting prospects sell themselves via free trials that deliver real value.  In short, they're transforming the way software is purchased -- in a new customer-centric way.  Customers are buying the way they want to buy -- not the way the vendor wants to sell.

This new system is working -- incredibly well.  If you're selling software, you should pay attention -- the world has changed and it's time to get on board. Read the full post at https://bit.ly/Az3QVd

Demand Metric member Charles Gold is a career software marketer who believes passionately that as the software market matures, marketing is rapidly becoming the thing that sets winners apart from also-rans. For nearly 20 years, he has worked with start-ups and established public companies as a senior executive in both marketing and product management. He currently serves at the Chief Marketing Officer at Sonatype, an enterprise open source software vendor. Charles lives in Fairfax Virginia with his wife, three kids, and a rescue dog.  You can find him on Twitter at @chasgold and blogging on software marketing at cgoldmarketing.com.

 

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