There’s no single recipe for enterprise growth, but there are 3 common ingredients.
There’s no single recipe for enterprise growth, but there are 3 common ingredients.
You refined the problem interacting with the potential audience, and arrived at a minimum viable product. MVP is not a crappy product with all the features, it should test the core idea. Congratulations on coming this far.
Do you have Hardware involved in your MVP?
Simulate the hardware, if possible, and strip features to validate the core problem
Start with software and expand into hardware. Get the traction first
How do you decide to sell? Let’s take a look at different ways to grow revenues.
Sales led growth
Before the 2000s, most of the companies sell through dedicated account managers. Depending on who is buying (CIO, IT manager, Head of Engineering), there are playbooks around value. IBM sales reps selling the mainframes to the enterprise after enterprise. Most companies employ this approach for all the major accounts.
Marketing led growth
Salesforce came in the early 2000s with an interest form in their portal. Salesforce employed inbound marketing techniques and an army of sales development representatives to demo the product. This approach is very much relevant in today’s internet economy.
Product led growth
Fast forward to 2020 coupled with COVID, most B2B software businesses start with freemium models akin to consumer companies to drive growth. There is no need to book demo meetings or registering interest. The product speaks for itself.
Now that we have different sales approaches, how should we grow? It’s a careful combination of the above three depending on how your product will evolve and grow.
Start with basic MVP
Find your users who have the same pain through Google, LinkedIn ads
Crank up your marketing to acquire targeted users, build the user base and a community to support
Start inbound marketing to convert growth into $$
Build the dedicated sales engine to achieve predicatable revenues
For example, Coursera’s mission started with educating individual learners like you and me. Then they expanded to enterprises to develop the skills of their employees by providing career paths. Github, Headspace, Calendly, Notion, Slack, Airtable, and Zapier have a very similar approach.