TriGeoSphere

I yelled that to a crowd of over 300 at last year’s Gartner MidSize Enterprise Summit while I was accepting an award on behalf of TriGeo for “Best of Show” – where, by the way, we beat out HP.

I’ve been selling to the midmarket for arhummm 20+ years! (My how time flies….) I know these people really well. At conferences like the Gartner MidSize Enterprise Summit and CIO Decisions, I get the pleasure of spending a lot of time with midmarket executives who always voice their frustrations with vendors who simply, “don’t get them.” One executive at a dinner said, “We’re sick to death of companies like XX and XXXXX, who want to shove their enterprise products down our throats.” There was laughter while someone said, “Tell us how you really feel!”

These executives have got “Rodney Dangerfield Syndrome” because they feel that they “get no respect.” We’ve seen it time and time again. The big players announce midmarket initiatives that are worth about as much as the cyberpaper they’re distributed on. They frankly don’t know what or how to sell to the midmarket and are surprised when these initiatives flop.

There seems to be two corporate strategies by enterprise-focused companies that are going after the midmarket.

• They use their current organizational structure to get economies of scale. Sounds reasonable. You’ve already got a support team, a professional services group, and a sales group – just use them for the midmarket too! Wrong! We saw how poorly this worked when Cisco purchased Protego and released Cisco MARS. Customers were calling support in a foreign county and talking to reps that knew nothing about the product. Along those same lines, their sales people tend to run a 12 – 18 month sales cycle with a deal size of $225,000 aren’t the same people who do telesales to the midmarket, where our average deal is $37,000. Simply put, you can’t put people on airplanes to wine and dine prospects over an 18-month sales cycle for a $37K deal. You have to be smart about how you market, sell and support midmarket companies.

• This one is even worse than the first one. You can’t have a product strategy where one size fits all. Taking an enterprise product, renaming it, clipping some of the features and then slapping a different price tag on it is not the same as engineering a product specifically for the needs of midmarket companies. Despite their best efforts, trying to put square pegs in round holes just doesn’t cut it.

I had someone from the business development group at a very large security vendor (competitor) tell me that they, “just couldn’t figure out why they weren’t getting any traction in the midmarket.” I told him it was very simple, “You don’t have a product for them.”

At TriGeo, we’ve been called dogmatic in our commitment to the midmarket. To those that said that, I thank you. The midmarket has always been the most consistent buying segment, even during times of economic uncertainty. In fact, according to Forrester Research the midmarket is predicted to increase its spend a full percentage point over 2008 with the bulk of that spend going to security products. Not a bad target market during an economic downturn.

An executive from a log management vendor told me that everyone thought we were crazy because we were going after the midmarket and that we’d be out of business in no time at all. Now, he says, “We look like geniuses.”

Astute observation or 20/20 hindsight? You tell me.