What I am saying is, the essential problem of sales to enterprise is still making something someone wants, and finding that someone and persuading them to sign.

Edit: not disagreeing with anything patio11 says - in fact I think I am supporting the main point - government and enterprise sales ain't so different and they are gettin more similar each day.

And the whole limit that this article is talking about exploiting, of sticking under a specific amount... That is called frequently called "DOA" - Delegation of Authority. And the trick stated, to keep your price under a specific DOA level, is questionable. People who aren't trusted to spend more than $500 also likely do not have a large budget, so your $500 a month would kill their yearly budget, and you would lose the sale anyway, or at best become a target for cost reductions in the future.

Sure, using tricks like that might quicken a sales cycle and avoid annoying bureaucracy. But in the long run, you will still lose. You are a pain point in the budget of a 1st line manager, instead of a prized vendor in the large budget of a higher manager. When the day comes that the corporation challenges all its managers to shave 15% of their yearly budget, guess what list you end up on? Trust me, you do NOT want your monthly bill to be falling in the budget of a low-level manager.

Instead, Deal with the pain. Put up with the bureaucracy. Do the PO process. Get in as a line item on a budget higher in the hierarchy. You then are really considered a cost-effective solution, and higher-level leaders don't like admitting mistakes, so they will put their political clout behind keeping you in that organization.

While I've certainly heard justifications for this relationship ("they provide good support"; "we don't need an inhouse ops team this way"; etc.) there are more than enough examples of these being pragmatically false to convince me that there's a whole lot of lag between a service not providing a compelling net value add and being cleared out of institutional process and culture.

And there are usually feature/function levers to pull to select out government clients for different price points.

I don't remember government RFP processes being a whole lot different from those of banks and tech companies.

I do remember that the fedgov team I worked with had a whole bunch of skeezy government-specific sales tactics it tried to leverage.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the myriad defense and intelligence agencies have always been easier for startups to work with than the civilian government. It is virtually impossible as a startup to have a profitable relationship with the civilian U.S. federal government due to the mind boggling overhead and an extremely slow, paperwork driven, and politicized process that makes enterprise sales seem easy.

Mind you, defense and intelligence is the same but with one important exception: if you can address a critical operational need, they have the ability to make the absurd overhead go away and pay real money. It is why startups have always had much better luck there than the government at large; you are not automatically subject to a Byzantine multi-year process that will probably never pay off. But even then, it is a challenge to get to the right people. Nonetheless, they are constantly inventing vehicles like In-Q-Tel that have no civilian equivalent to funnel money to startups.

Enterprise is definitely easier than government in most regards from the perspective of a startup. The mechanics are more transparent and businesses understand ROI.

I understand one of the current best tricks is to sell your company to a Native American, while retaining control. A portion of your profits go to your new owner, but it allows you to check the "Native American owned business" box.

My nightmare scenario is when of the K Street wonders (or I street) gets their software required for a grant program. It is always awful which leads to a nice side business in training classes. I've had to deal with too many of these wonders.

To give a nice example, one piece of software needed an "update". This update came in the form of a PL/SQL file that needs to be applied. This file was 762 megabytes. No install program just a list of steps to run the sql file that took over 4 hours to complete.

  UPDATE    12,904
  SELECT    22,810
  INSERT    91,170
  IF        71,792
  ALTER      1,148
  CREATE     5,338

The problem I've had with the RFPs I've responded to in this regard is that training may or may not be accounted for in the original RFP and if you try to increase your bid to accommodate the knowledge transfer sessions and especially the three to four that you have to schedule eventually because the people you need to train are all on PTO for three weeks at a time all for critical stakeholders.

  Actually, that seems like it was generated by some
  half-ass SQL generator written by a summer intern.
  Wait, are you running my code from 12 years ago?

I would prefer the software to require little to no training. Given what is gathered then typed in, it seems like they took the forms that are required and ran them through a blender then an input wizard. This is par for the course. They are already getting training on data gathering so having the program match the damn forms might be a bonus.

I am in awe of what can be shipped these days.

Most (all?) are required to the take the lowest bid that satisfies their requirements, but they are free to craft their requirements so that only one vendor can possibly meet them.

I raise my rate when working with government entities (to account for the significant administrative overhead and lead time on payment), as compared to private companies, and still have no trouble getting POs for my asking price.

I've been the recipient of a government (in this case, large municipal essential services department) RFP that was crafted for me.

Things like software usually go though a multi-state "miscellaneous software" contract. You provide a parts list, provide it to resellers on contract, and the resellers compete over the fulfillment pennies.

Each state is a little different, but I would be careful about telling the world about potentially bad bids.

In the end, my government clients all received great total value (i.e. relatively high unit cost, but a much lower overall cost than they'd experienced with "cheaper" vendors in the past) and consistently successful outcomes. So, I don't feel bad at all about the process we had to go through in order to secure that for them, as suspect as it may superficially seem.

This depends on the organization. At my university, my boss can spend $1,000 at a time on his company credit card on an whim. If I make a convincing case for something that's $900, he tosses me his card and it's here in two days with Amazon Prime. He controls a budget closer to $10,000 but large purchases require the approval of his own supervisor and the invocation of the University purchasing/accounts payable system.

If I ask for something that's $1,100 then he needs to schedule a meeting with his bosses to start a long and arduous process involving a sales guy, quote, purchase order, etc. My last purchase was held up for a week because the designated sales guy was on medical leave. It was also $200 more expensive from the preferred vendor, which did not offer free shipping over the phone (despite having it on its own website). Delivery is going to happen approx. 10 weeks after I asked my boss for it. Contrast with two days. The University purchasing department may not care about price, but most of my boss's budget already needs to go somewhere and $200 is not insubstantial in terms of the extras/upgrades I can propose.

This is what I think the article is referring to. Sneak in just underneath the (completely arbitrary) limits that make the difference between an impulse buy and something involving fax machines.

That's quite a different beast.

Any variance requrires a manager to complete an "exception to protocol" form which is routed to about 6 people to approve.

For cases like this, it's probably going to be easier to just have a yearly price which you invoice yearly (cron job + email would do) than to go through the bureaucratic overhead of getting an automatic monthly charge approved.

If you're not just doing one time deals, find a lobbyist in the branch of government that you're interested in. It will cost $40-100k, but will get you in front of the people who matter. Usually these people can hook you up with the right partners as well.

Customer/vendor is a very different relationship than employer/employee, even for consultants to say nothing of SaaS vendors. You don't have to run your vacation plans past them, you can moonlight at 10 jobs simultaneously without of running out of hours or having any of the jobs think this is odd, you can hire people to do the delivery in a way an employee cannot, you can sell your relationship, etc etc.

No lie: occasionally more stressful than working for W-2, and you largely don't get the option to just focus on delivery, but it's a very different beast.

[1] Never been in that position; have been in the "Oh, good, you're finally here. THE SKY IS FALLING!!!11!" position, though.

[2] Actually the clocks don't work that way. But I don't understand them anyway.

This is a pretty important point. The financial scale that a company operates at can be hard to reason about if you aren't involved in that part of its operations. Buying $500 licenses for an IDE in my department seems prohibitively expensive from my perspective, but for the company it probably costs less than the furniture in the office.

I assure that most office furniture is absurdly over-priced and indeed would dwarf a $500 license. Just a desk chair with modest comfort and ergonomic features will be priced in that ballpark, with anything that you'd consider "nice" being higher than that.

I'm thinking of SaaS at launch. My lowest monthly plan is probably $250 to 490. (In addition to a free "personal" edition for people playing with projects.) My average price point I think will be in the 2k to 5k a month. I have a verbal commit from a medium sized customer at $10k.

How much do I publish online? Do I run the risk of alienating one segment by simply being available to another?

As an anecdote, we had "small business pricing" published on our site and organizations like The World Bank, Koch, and a few others were paying $279/month which was insane. We made a few thousand a year on those plans, and a few hundred thousand on "enterprise" clients.

We don't have small business plans anymore.

Bigger customers will need more user logins and more processing capacity. So they segment alright that way, although I'm not sure how many axes to include (users, TB/month, peak messages/sec, feature set, etc.). But a <$500 plan won't include more than a TB a month, and even medium users will need that much.

Can engineers not play golf? I'd like to read a post on how to get in on this sales process -- ultimately, that's always where the money is!

It is inexplicable.

I am basically a solo founder (have a tech partner, but he's 25% in vs. me 500% in) whose work grabs the attention of the biggest companies in the world. I publish my work on the iNet and or demo it and in doing so VP and higher ups of Fortune 50 to 500 companies reach out wanting to do business and or it could be just flirt and or figure out how my partner and I achieved what we have accomplished.

Examples... 1. Two months after announcing our work we were invited out to the valley to demo our tech to an entity out there. They were total jerks to us and baited us to tell them how we accomplished X. That was a low day .. felt like we flew out to the valley to get kick in the stomach by a giant.

2. Fast forward 16 months later and just about every massive tech company has reached out to us showing some level of interest. Not sure how they find out about us (a east coast start-up), but they do and we get excited but then demoralized as nothing happens.

3. Most recently I demoed our tech at a hackathon. After my demo a VP of Fortune 500 company was super excited and said i want to use this at my end of the year board meeting. Ok, awesome let's make this happen I thought. Though first big wig you will need to sign a document and half licensing agreement. Oops that small document that protected us killed the deal and well NOW I AM CRAZY TIRED OF DEALING WITH THESE UPS AND DOWNS.

We can and have a history of making cool things, but totally lack the social skills and business acumen. It time to hang things up and possibly open source our work. Many companies bottom lines will hurt once we and if we open source it. Though of course we will remain living our meager lives.

Done starting up after 10 years, broke, in debt, 4o years old and family-less (she is tired of waiting for it to happen too.. back to the corporate world so i can have that family ive always wanted).

Or, something about your pitch or follow up is turning people off. Have you sought out some advisors? Just getting meetings with all these companies is a good accomplishment. So perhaps you need s neutral third party to review what you're doing and try to find out where it's going wrong.

You absolutely will find jerk VPs and bait-and-switch. Patrick's article glosses over that, only briefly mentioning all the times he shot for enterprise and "missed."

If you want to talk more (I know nothing about what you did but it sounds interesting and I could possibly get you hired at a bigco), please shoot me an email: large.companies()gmail.com

The primary reason you didn't hear anything back is because these people, if they had any signing authority at all, are used to sales people pushing the deal along, and being the passive partners of the deal, no matter how enthused they were at the beginning. It is normal to see lots of initial excitement, followed by silence to repeated daily/weekly calls/voicemails/emails/letters/gimmicks for weeks/months/year, then a mad rush to purchase in just a week or two. I would go into details of why it generally works this way, but it would make an already too-long reply execrable.

Your description of what you were pitching was too vague for me to tell for sure, but the general rule of dealing with those licensing agreements is to get a company counsel to talk with you and express what their concern is that prompts such an agreement/clause, then in a friendly manner suggest alternate wording that protects that specific interest while not infringing upon your interests. Generally speaking, once you are exchanging legal/purchasing/contracts paper, F500 folks cop less "my way or the highway" attitude, and are more willing to meet you halfway if you are reasonable and negotiate friendly-like. Hire an attorney to teach you the wording you want to protect your specific interests if you are unsure of how to make the changes.

For some classes of software, you can separate out the R&D to a standalone company, designate yet another company as a retailer/distributor, and sell only licenses through the retailer/distributor. The R&D company will not sell direct, "as policy" (if pressed, just say the R&D team just doesn't want to get into the retail/wholesale side of the business, preferring someone with the appropriate skillset handle that for them). Anyone else who wants to be a retailer/distributor, has to have the appropriate skillset to support the product. It just so happens that only one company in the world so far can do that. As far as the F500 is concerned, you are now a third-party selling and supporting licenses, not the actual product itself. There is an exclusion of the "grab everything we can" clauses in every purchasing contract I've seen for third-party licenses. This is because the F500's realize Microsoft won't sell them Office (for example) if they made a grab for IP via purchasing of licenses.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Hacker effectiveness follows a power law, and business savvy does as well. You denigrate and ignore the high-effectiveness business people at your peril, as you have found out. Just because the majority of business people are mediocre like the majority of programmers, does not mean you can do without them.

This is not something you can get around easily. Some companies have strict rules such as "we can't be more than 30% of your revenue".

The reason behind that is that if a customer represents a very large amount of your revenue, you can be considered as a de facto subsidiary.

The real way around it is to work with a larger intermediary company.

Patrick's story is interesting but it won't work against hard formal processes.

Also this seems easy to massage, you can just resell a commodity under cost to generate all the 'revenue' you want (at negative margin.)

Highly recommended reading.

Pros: * Sometimes they're not spending their own money. Especially if they're spending grant money, simply price your package for the amount of the grant. They may have no incentive to save money if it's use-it-or-lose-it. * Enterprises or gov't sometimes have plenty of money to throw around, especially in the above scenario. Come up with as many frivolous "add-on" features as you can, put ridiculous price tags on it, and watch clients inexplicably check all the boxes. SMS notifications for only $5000/year? Deal! * Big government contracts may be for 5 years of service paid upfront. Think about what that does to your cashflow.

Cons: * Your soul withers away.

"they will ... send a check to an address picked randomly from the set of them printed on the invoice. (Make sure you give them one easy, obvious option for where to send the checks, and that that mailbox is monitored for discrete envelopes containing paper worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars. You can get a check reissued but it will be extra pain and take another several weeks.)"

For example, I've been "sold" as a consultant via a government subcontractor(1) that took care of bidding, billing, contracts and renewals, etc and simply paid me the rate I asked for. Similarly, I've had products that a distributor took on and did all the legwork to get on the GSA lists so all we had to do was fulfillment and support. They would even structure the financials such that it met whatever DOA requirement the end customer needed, but paid us up front.

(1) FWIW, the entity that subcontracted me was another small biz that was taking advantage of the "8A" category of small business set asides. If you fit in one of the categories, it might be an option as well. This is obviously a US-centric option.

https://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/8a-busines...