[fishtoaster]

> Selling to businesses is very easy. You go to a business and you say "hey, you like making money?" And the business will say "why yes, I do like making money" and you will say "great, I can help you make more money.

This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.

I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.

Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.

Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.

Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.

[jiggawatts]

I've been watching this process with a keen eye as a technical consultant, and one thing I've learnt is that naive models of large organisations as Profit=Revenue-Costs is totally inadequate for enterprise sales. Yes, it is true that saving money anywhere will improve profits, but you can only sell that to an individual who's personal KPI needles move because of this! If the cost is in dept X but the profit is recorded in dept Y, then don't bother. You won't get a sale, even if it's tens of millions of dollars of saved costs or increased revenue. At best, you can find their common manager and try to sell it to that person, but even that has pits of failure you can all too easily fall into.

[zahlman]

... Couldn't companies gain a competitive edge by fixing their internal structures and aligning the KPI needles?

[fishtoaster]

Yes. But that's like saying "a racecar would gain a competitive advantage by being faster."

Getting your internal structures right and aligning your incentives is one of the main challenges of building and running a large company! If it were easy, you wouldn't see nearly so many massively-inefficient corporate giants. :)

[burch45]

A big part of that is “I will save you X” is a non-starter. That is not making the business more money. If you have something that will actually make the business more money then they will go “Great if I pay you twice as much will it make me 2X?” and if the answer is yes, that will be a sale every time.

[dkersten]

Given how much some companies spend on their cloud services bills without batting an eye, I definitely believe this. They care about making more money, not so much about spending less, even though both are ways to increase profits.

[hujun]

yes, and I think one big reason enterprise might not buy your product even if it is guaranteed to make/save $X is $ is often NOT most important thing to the people make buying decision, specially when it is not your own money to save or gain

[mindwok]

This is very true. Look no farther than the perennial problem of department heads spending all their budget to keep their budget. Decision makers rarely care about saving money in isolation.

[rikthevik]

I might be overstating it, but here's what I see at my company. "Sell" is very different in all of these situations.

- Sell to the champion. - Sell to the rest of the org. - Sell to procurement. - Sell to the implementation project team. - Sell to the users and get adoption up.

Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.

Easy!

[sevensor]

This is what I’ve seen; it’s hard work, and if you fail to make any one of those sales, it can all fall apart. And you didn’t even mention getting your foot in the door in the first place. I used to chat with our business development guy in the lunchroom. He spent hours on the phone every day getting told no. It took a ton of work just to get from “no” to “maybe later,” and that’s when they didn’t just hang up in him. I think he understood what made our company tick better than anybody else, better than the CEO.

[johnnyanmac]

> going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.

I mean, it still sounds like snake oil salesmen. It's just that that's what it takes these days to even get noticed (let alone make a pitch). rubbing hands trumps a quality product 99% of the time.

[temp0826]

Can confirm. At one point in my career (after reflection on the situation) I realized I had been made a champion by a subsidiary of IBM for one of their products. I found myself in some really bizarre meetings with our execs and their executive sales people that left me feeling like a puppet that was made to tell our CEO that we needed this. They really took us apart, It was all very slimy.