Asymetrical Sales Acceleration & Strategic Marketing

Sales Automation & Strategic Marketing. Take a look at this image contrasting convetional and irregular warfare strategies.

If you swap 'Users' for Population and 'Management' for Military, it's a pretty good analogy of the way companies sell.

Traditionally, companies have sold into management structures who have then pushed downstream into their users. Installed software companies are a great example of this. If you buy installed software you're making a big investment and taking some risk. The sales focus is on getting the management to buy or adopt. End users usually have no say in what they end up with.

Increasingly, and espectially with SaaS models, the emphasis has changed from selling to management, to selling (through adoption) to end users. The parallels to asymetirical or irregular warfare are striking.

Comments

[Allan]

I swear you keep stealing my ideas except you develop and explain them 100x better!

This is good stuff. SaaS software like Basecamp have a grassroots adoption strategy that management is almost powerless to stop once it gets going. But the key is that pricing is so low that it doesn't show up on radar until it's already deeply embedded in the enterprise. If you are asking for any significant chunk of change, you still have to close the check writer.