[freehunter]

I work for a huge enterprise software vendor and even internally I’ve heard the rise of the cloud as “don’t have to talk to a sales guy as a service”. I was sitting in the room when one of our clients got fed up with our sales process (we’ll have a quote to you in two weeks) and called a competitor, who had a solution spun up in AWS in under 5 minutes.

Unfortunately enterprise sales are a self perpetuating cycle. Vendors do it because customers want it, and customers do it because that’s how the vendors are set up to work, because customers have been demanding it for so long.

What those customers actually want is long term stability and someone to blame when things go wrong. The drawn out sales cycle is just one manifestation of that, but doesn’t have to be the only one.

[mjwhansen]

> “don’t have to talk to a sales guy as a service”

I haven't heard this before, and it's great. I always get a chuckle when customers are dumbfounded that they don't have to have a call with us before using Geocodio. They're so used to the self-perpetuating sales pattern you mentioned that they're confused it could be so straight forward.