[Duff]

The premise of the article is wrong -- "Creating amazing products, not amazing RFP responses"

Innovation and "amazing" are concepts completely alien to enterprises, particularly government. Corporate people have certain motivations, government people have other motivations. Maybe they need to comply with "strategic sourcing" procedures. Or funnel all procurement through a procurement group incentivized to get large % discounts from "list" or "state contract" or "GSA" pricing. Or maybe they need to run all of the business through some BS minority/woman/veteran owned company to hit some quota.

RFP responses matter, maybe more than the product.

At the end of the day, if you want to sell to enterprises, you need to know your way around the market.

[martincmartin]

At the end of the day, if you want to sell to enterprises, you need to know your way around the market.

This is absolutely true, however, it's also true that you need to create amazing products. Enterprises are very conservative. There's a lot of "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" style decision making. An established product has a huge CYA advantage over entrants. To be more attractive, you need to be not just a little better, but a lot better.

I work at Endeca, and for our e-commerce search engine, increasing conversion rates is a huge selling point. Note that I'm in Engineering, so I don't have a strong handle on the day-to-day operations of the sales team, but there is a lot of communication between sales, PM and engineering, so I feel I know enough to comment.

[Duff]

Usually smaller or companies entering a new market influence a VAR or enterprise vendor who have a gap in their portfolio.

If you're a services company, it's essential -- you basically subcontract through the "mother" vendor's contract.

Cisco is doing this with their blade servers. They partner with EMC and NetApp, especially at entrenched IBM/HP customers where vertically integrated vendors like EMC are at a disadvantage.