As we conclude this series, we now will look at the art of selling into the mid-market.
- Effective selling - Admittedly, it's a massive challenge to align a Go-to-Market organization with the target customers and ecosystem of partners. Many large enterprise companies are very strong at having direct sales forces aligned on a one-to-one basis where they have a deep understanding of the account, a deep understanding of the industry and the core business processes. Hence, their solutions are clearly aligned with the customer's business processes. Their organizations however are NOT aligned when they are in the one-to-many business model where the enterprise company doesn't get to directly touch the customer - their ecosystem of partners evaluate customer needs, etc. However, this type of organizational transformation does not happen overnight. Software companies need to migrate from an organization designed to sell directly to large enterprises to a mix of direct and indirect sales, key account management and key partner management. Yet, there are very different organizational capabilities required to be in the business of direct selling vs. the business of partner management. This requires thought planning and balance to maintain the existing revenue stream from enterprise customers while nurturing the one-to-many partner relationships to effectively sell to the mid-market. (For more information on designing an effcient channel strategy, see The New Solution-Selling Paradigm).
When I finished my conversation with the enterprise software executive, we concluded that centralized, enterprise marketing organizations and consulting firms do indeed have a very difficult time understanding the complexities of marketing enterprise software to small- and mid-sized markets. Clearly categorizing those markets, effectively segmenting the mid-market customer, developing a clear "marketecture" of the partner ecosystem, creating clear business propositions to partners and effective value propositions to customers and, finally, wrapping these together with an effective mid-market selling machine, can go a long way to solve these challenges.
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