Crossing the Enterprise Chasm SaaS School August 14, 2019 @grinich

I’m @grinich Currently: Before: Before that: @grinich

Warning: 
 This talk is brand new It has a lot of text @grinich

Enterprise Software Success Formula Build Amazing Consumer-Grade Product Leverage Virality Across Individual Users To Grow Personal + Professional Adoption @ Low Cost Harvest Individual Users for Enterprise Go-to-Market With Dedicated Product + Inside / Outbound Sales Build Enterprise-Grade Platform + Ecosystem Net = Low Cost Product-Driven Customer Acquisition + Strong / Sticky Business Model - Ilya Fushman @ Kleiner Perkins Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2018

Enterprise Software Success Formula Build Amazing Consumer-Grade Product Leverage Virality Across Individual Users To Grow Personal + Professional Adoption @ Low Cost Harvest Individual Users for Enterprise Go-to-Market With Dedicated Product + Inside / Outbound Sales Build Enterprise-Grade Platform + Ecosystem Net = Low Cost Product-Driven Customer Acquisition + Strong / Sticky Business Model - Ilya Fushman @ Kleiner Perkins Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2018

@grinich

In b2b cloud SaaS apps, the Enterprise Chasm separates small early-adopter users from larger enterprise customers. Crossing this efficiently and quickly is key to winning your product category across the entire market. If you screw this up, your product will probably die. (Mine did.) @grinich

Why should you cross the Enterprise Chasm? What makes this so difficult? How can you make your app enterprise-ready? @grinich

Why should you cross the Enterprise Chasm? What makes this so difficult? How can you make your app enterprise-ready? @grinich

Early adopter growth Your app is growing organically (word-of-mouth, viral, etc.) You have product-market fit. Users love your app. You have a tiny (or zero) sales team but are still growing revenue quickly from self-serve conversions. Everything is awesome! … right?! @grinich

@grinich

Why cross the Enterprise Chasm? Increase product defensibility — a new moat! Decrease customer churn — Enterprise has significantly better net dollar retention and predictable sales motions Expand market size (TAM) — SMB will run out of customers. Moving to enterprise has more headroom. Accelerate revenue growth = control your own destiny! @grinich

Waiting is a big risk You work to innovate on product and educate the market… … but a competitor is able to capture the lucrative enterprise segment first. (Extremely hard to recover.) vs vs @grinich

Why should you cross the Enterprise Chasm? What makes this so difficult? How can you make your app enterprise-ready? @grinich

Why should you cross the Enterprise Chasm? What makes this so difficult? How can you make your app enterprise-ready? @grinich

Enterprise features are complicated Lots of small details with large surface area for bugs. This means they take a long time (i.e. cash). Be prepared to invest. Make sure you have the runway! 
 Slack PM: “I would guess we’ve spent $30M building enterprise features… and we’re probably only halfway done.” @grinich

Engineers don’t like building this Not fun to code. Usually dealing with legacy tech. Not visible to users, only visible to IT managers Not set up for glory/promotions (new feature vs. SAML auth) 
 Hard to motivate your eng team and keep focus.
 Requires ongoing work and improvement. Not a single sprint. @grinich

Feature prioritization is hard What is a "one-off" (bad) vs shared customer need (good) Requires doing deep customer research with enterprise IT to collect requirements. Different from most PM jobs. Need to prioritize based on future potential customers, 
 not only early-adopter enterprise customers. You are no longer the user. Your user is no longer the buyer. @grinich

Splitting focus is necessary If you don't build for enterprise, a competitor will swoop in and take that market. (Probably for good.) If you don’t keep building end-user features, a new startup can pull users away with shiny new features. So you need to do both. This sucks and is very frustrating. (Sorry.) @grinich

Why should you cross the Enterprise Chasm? What makes this so difficult? How can you make your app enterprise-ready? @grinich

Why should you cross the Enterprise Chasm? What makes this so difficult? How can you make your app enterprise-ready? @grinich

Go-to-Market Changes Product Positioning Pricing Packaging Sales collateral Security Compliance Adjacent stakeholders Partnerships … and much more. @grinich

Go-to-Market Changes Product Positioning Pricing Packaging Sales collateral Security Compliance Adjacent stakeholders Partnerships … and much more @grinich

Enterprise IT managers want: Visibility — See what is happening in your app Control — Choose what can & can't happen in your app Trust — Guaranees about your app @grinich

Visibility = Audit Logs Activity stream of what happened in your app Instrument events like “document.created” Match common schema (target, actor, action, meta) Searchable / filterable by IT admins Exportable to CSV, Splunk, S3 buckets @grinich

Control = SSO/SAML Enforce “Single Sign-On” via their Identity Provider (IdP) Required to enforce their IT security policy Example providers: Okta, G Suite, ADFS (Microsoft), OneLogin, Ping, Gluu, WS02, Shibboleth, KeyCloak Consider also building SCIM & Azure AD support for automatic user provisioning/de-provisionin @grinich

Trust = Security Policy Cloud Security Alliance
 Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) Center for Internet Security
 Critical Security Controls Shared Assessments Group 
 Standardized Information Gathering Questionnaire Vendor Security Alliance Questionnaire (VSAQ) @grinich

Where to start: Visibility — Audit Logs Control — SSO / SAML Trust — VSAQ & Security Policy @grinich

It doesn’t stop there… SCIM / directory / provisioning Org structure and team management Change management Data retention/deletion Geographic data residency Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Compliance (SOC-2, GDPR, ISO) Integrations (APIs) Encryption (EKM) Invoicing w/ payment via ACH SLAs w/ support Usage analytics and reporting @grinich

Why should you cross the Enterprise Chasm? What makes this so difficult? How can you make your app enterprise-ready? @grinich

Let’s connect WorkOS helps companies become enterprise-ready. Send me an email to learn more: [email protected] @grinich