You’re a big company, now act like a little one.

09 Sep 2009

Very good article over on Smart Bear about small companies behaving like small companies when it comes to interacting with customers, and not pretending to be something they aren’t.

 

I won’t claim to work for a big company, it’s still very much the opposite.  But over the past 5 or 6 years, I have seen a transition in how customers are marketed to and interacted with from sale to solution implementation and beyond.  We’ve gone from a group of 2 to a company of more than 70 complete with departments, budgets, vice presidents, BoDs, etc. 

I’m not a marketer so I’m not going to comment on our web presence or our quarterly e-mail campaigns.  They seem to be working as that mythical funnel remains full.  Needless to say, our sales process was very rudimentary back in the day, there certainly was no funnel.  We develop enterprise solutions and have always made the $100k+ deals.

 

All things aside, when you start considering customers as a number or percentage point in some quarterly metric you’re trying to hit, you’ve lost an edge.  The startup isn’t even going to have the metric in the first place, they’re going to be concentrating on getting the customer’s attention, getting them product, iterating on said product, and maintaining the relationship.  The product may suck (our first few releases definitely did) but that’s addressable over time.  The relationship is far more important and can be lost very quickly. 

The other thing that changes as a company gets larger is focus.  No longer do you have that laser guided focus on getting product to a single customer, you’re now dealing with existing and new customers simultaneously.  Your decision making ability slows as you’re forced to consider the implications of change to all customers.  It’s one of those annoying but necessary evils that comes with maturity and customer successes.  :). 

I shouldn’t say it’s impossible to maintain the focus, it just becomes more difficult.  Your ability to focus on a particular customer is, in my mind, a key indicator of your ability to be successful.  It’s one of the reasons we track a customer satisfaction metric.  I won’t get into how it’s calculated, but essentially its a gauge of how often we’re communicating with a customer and whether or not the relationship is positive and if they’re happy with their particular solution.  Green is good, Red/Yellow is bad.

The other key indicator in my mind is not making the same mistake twice, but that’s a topic for another post.  It’s an item of significant competitive advantage that the slightly larger company has over the startup.