“If you’ve been on the internet at all, you’ve probably seen one of our ads,” says Bill Lapcevic, New Relic’s VP of Customer Success.
“It’s not the brand marketing that has to change” when shifting from a SaaS marketing strategy geared toward small and medium-sized businesses to a SaaS sales strategy targeting enterprise companies. Bill knows that it’s necessary to bring the complete story, because, “from an enterprise perspective, they need other information other than, ‘This is what I do. This is why you care. Try the product.’ They also want to know, ‘Who else is using the product? Who else like me is using the product?’ So, you might find suddenly you have to do a lot more in-depth case studies. They often like to look at white papers. They like to look at things like Gartner Analyst reports to help them make decisions, so if you’re not working with those analysts in the right way and helping shape their vision, and listening to what they have to help you shape your vision, then you’re going to miss the boat there as well.”
Dan Scholnick, board member at New Relic since 2008 and General Partner at Trinity Ventures, is convinced that the quality of the product carries the day, no matter the size of the business consumer. Potential enterprise clients will try the product, “then they’d talk to our sales folks and say, “we need x,y and z enterprise feature.’ And we’d say, ‘Sorry, we can’t do that.’ And they’d walk away and say, ‘we can’t buy your stuff; we’re going elsewhere.’ And then two weeks later we’d look at our server log, and, ‘there’s that guy “Bob” from xyz company who said he couldn’t use us, and they just swiped a credit card and they’re paying us $5000 a month.”
Bill and Dan joined The New Stack founder Alex Williams over a cup of San Francisco-roasted Ritual coffee in the New Relic studios to record this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast.
Dan recalls their days before cloud infrastructure, when potential clients would tell them how much they liked what New Relic offered, but they wanted it on-premises, ostensibly due to security and privacy concerns.
How does a company counter such a customer stance?
Primarily, says Bill, New Relic endeavored to seek out attainable security compliance and to develop stringent and audit-able policies regarding data privacy. These initiatives integrated into a solid security story that differentiates New Relic in the market. Moreover, “Lew [Cirne, New Relic Founder] had a vision,” Bill recollects, “that SaaS was going to overtake on-premise as the way to build and deploy modern web application software. And what we’re seeing now is that vision is actually accurate, that the market is coming to us…”
Often, developers are already holding the door open. “We targeted, and still target to a certain extent, developers as the primary user of our product,” notes Bill. Even within big enterprises, developers “have a lot more flexibility and they’ve got credit cards.” Developers may have already installed and already begun to use product before any official sales are proposed. When enterprises say “no,” Bill’s counter-stance might be, “you’re already using it and there aren't any problems.”
Both Dan and Bill allow that sales team growth is a fact of business, but that being product-driven leads to greater sales success and marketing efficiency. A superior product lays the foundation for the go-to-market logistics. Dan and Bill speak of “The $2000 Minute,” during which the customer experience of the product seals the deal. Dan believes that this crucial experience remains the key sales lever, regardless of the size of the prospect enterprise.
