Sexy Software, The Enterprise and You

I original skipped over Robert Scoble’s post, Why Enterprise Software Isn’t Sexy, it just seemed too obvious to be worth reading in much detail. I’ve been working on software that sells to enterprise customers for the past 6 years or so and no one cares about it, but release a poor version of that software for the consumer space and everyone goes ga-ga over it. EditLive! and eWebEdit Pro have been bringing WYSIWYG editing to the browser for years and no one cared because they were sold to the enterprise, but when Google put out Google Docs everyone went crazy about it, even though it has half the functionality and twice the bugs.

There’s a ton of people going into the obvious reasons why people don’t care about enterprise software, mostly because the vast majority of people don’t ever have to make decisions about which enterprise software to use. Bob Warfield has a pretty good response to most of that commentary.

I tend to think that the difference between consumer and enterprise software isn’t in the actual technology – it’s in the sales processes. Consumer software is sold on the basis of high volume, low prices whereas enterprise software has very little volume and very high prices. It’s amazing how much comes out of that very simple difference.

With huge numbers of direct customers, consumer software providers are outright scared of support costs. They have to make the install seamless because they don’t have the resources to help people install it. They have to make the product high quality because they don’t have the hands on contact to find out about half the problems and they don’t have the support resources to handle the feedback they’d get anyway. There’s almost certainly a free download that you can get started with straight away so everyone can get their hands on the product to try it out and talk about it – right then when they hear about it.

Enterprise software however, often close fewer than 100 deals a year (I know many enterprise companies who close less than 10 a year and are still doing ok). The price points are huge and the sales cycle is much, much longer – at least months, if not years. Ephox has had potential clients that took over 2 years to close and we tend to have relatively short sales cycles. That means that a client of enterprise software is going to hear from at least one sales person directly, usually multiple sales people, pre-sales engineers, professional services etc etc etc. Enterprise sales require building relationships with clients, not just an online store. That relationship and the cost of the sale means that you are selling your support services as much or more than the product itself. Quality doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as long as you can show you have guaranteed response times and the support team to get things working again. Installation is a nightmare because you’re going to be working with a professional services team or a technical partner anyway. The cost of all those people doesn’t seem that much because the software itself is so expensive – if spending another $50 000 makes your $300 000 CMS roll out successful you’d be a fool not to pay it. Try asking a consumer to pay an extra 15% of the purchase price to get help to install the product and it’s not going to end well but that’s expected in the enterprise sales model.

Don’t forget as well, that consumer software generally sells directly to the end users, whereas enterprise software sells to CIOs, CEOs and CTOs who force it on their employees. A bad UI generally kills a consumer application but it’s par for the course with enterprise software because enterprise software isn’t sold to the people who actually use it. Listen in on a sales call for enterprise software and you’ll hear all about scalability, integration, security, interoperability, support, customisation, more support and corporate compliance. The UI only gets a passing mention and then it’s usually about how everything will be in one place so employees will be more productive or how they’ll have all this information at their fingertips rather than on how much user training is required or how many clicks it will take to do anything. We can deal with usability problems through our support team – we mentioned how reliable our support is right?

The bottom line is that most enterprise software sucks big time. It may provide huge business benefits over manual efforts or it may make new business models and processes possible, but the vast majority of people are the ones that have to use it and the UI sucks. Just look at the problems enterprise roll-outs have with user adoption and you’ll see that but it just isn’t affecting the sales cycle enough to cause change. The good news is that it’s starting to change – all this buzz about consumer software is starting to get the more adventurous knowledge workers into technology and make them aware of how things should work and that’s starting to put pressure back up the business chain and affecting the enterprise software process. Expect to see consumer technologies and styles making the jump over to the enterprise more and more as businesses realize that it all those extra clicks add up to serious costs. Just don’t expect it to change fast – nothing in the enterprise ever does.