创业与商业training.kalzumeus.com编辑精选
向财富 500 强、政府及其他洛夫克拉夫特式恐怖实体销售
Selling to the Fortune 500, Government, and Other Lovecraftian Horrors
2013 — 2022，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这是 patio11（Patrick McKenzie）关于向财富 500 强、政府等大型机构销售软件的经典长文。文章解释了企业采购的运作逻辑：金额门槛、审批流程、发票与合规要求等，并教小公司如何绕过官僚障碍完成企业级销售。
为什么经久不衰：它把企业采购的'黑箱'拆解得清晰透彻，对独立开发者和初创公司至今仍是进入大客户市场的实用指南。
HN 评论精选
政府销售与企业销售截然不同，靠压低价格绕过审批的技巧长期反而有害。
政府和纯企业客户完全不同。政府对价格极其敏感，采购流程可能受法规约束，有正式的请求流程、审批、公开听证和 RFP 评标标准。把企业销售和政府销售混为一谈注定失败。文中提到的把价格控制在某个额度以下的技巧，其实叫'授权额度'（DOA），而且很可疑：无权花超过 500 美元的人往往预算也小，你的报价会撑爆他的年度预算，最终丢掉生意，或至少成为未来削减成本的目标。长期看，与其耍技巧，不如忍受官僚流程、走正式采购流程，成为高层大预算中的受青睐供应商。
codingdave查看英文原文
Government is totally different than enterprise. Government is extremely price conscious, and may even have regulatory requirements that dictate a purchasing process. There may be formal request processes, approvals, public hearings and comment processes, etc. There can be formalized criteria that dictate who wins an RFP. If you try to lump enterprise sales and government sales in the same boat, you will be in for failure. And the whole limit that this article is talking about exploiting, of sticking under a specific amount... That is called frequently called "DOA" - Delegation of Authority. And the trick stated, to keep your price under a specific DOA level, is questionable. People who aren't trusted to spend more than $500 also likely do not have a large budget, so your $500 a month would kill their yearly budget, and you would lose the sale anyway, or at best become a target for cost reductions in the future. Sure, using tricks like that might quicken a sales cycle and avoid annoying bureaucracy. But in the long run, you will still lose. You are a pain point in the budget of a 1st line manager, instead of a prized vendor in the large budget of a higher manager. When the day comes that the corporation challenges all its managers to shave 15% of their yearly budget, guess what list you end up on? Trust me, you do NOT want your monthly bill to be falling in the budget of a low-level manager. Instead, Deal with the pain. Put up with the bureaucracy. Do the PO process. Get in as a line item on a budget higher in the hierarchy. You then are really considered a cost-effective solution, and higher-level leaders don't like admitting mistakes, so they will put their political clout behind keeping you in that organization.
个人很难直觉理解公司的财务规模，这正是企业销售认知错位的根源。
'别像人类一样思考，要像公司一样思考。公司这种生物的最小货币单位，是你拿过的最大一笔薪水。'这一点很重要：公司的财务规模对不参与其运营的人来说很难想象。我部门花 500 美元买 IDE 许可证在我看来贵得离谱，但对公司来说可能还不如办公室的家具贵。
kevan查看英文原文
> Stop thinking like a human. Think like a corporation. Corporations are like humans whose smallest increment of currency is the largest paycheck you've ever received. This is a pretty important point. The financial scale that a company operates at can be hard to reason about if you aren't involved in that part of its operations. Buying $500 licenses for an IDE in my department seems prohibitively expensive from my perspective, but for the company it probably costs less than the furniture in the office.
对小公司来说，真正的恐惧不是被拒，而是被大客户的流程耗尽时间。
我们害怕大机构不是因为怕被拒绝——如果对方立刻说不，我们反而无所谓。我们怕的是他们会用无休止的邮件往来、吹毛求疵、填表、生成 PDF、打电话、开会吞噬我们所有的时间，最后还是说不——或者即使成交了也不值得。我不是说事实如此，只是在描述这种恐惧。原文其实已经回应了大部分这些顾虑。
bambax查看英文原文
> As my father always counselled me with regards to dating advice: "Don't come up with reasons for them being out of your league. Make them come up with them. Someday, someone -- perhaps someone surprising -- will say Yes." Isn't this a line from "Shit My Dad Says"? https://twitter.com/shitmydadsays/status/4811790555 Maybe all fathers say the same thing. More to the point, we're not afraid of BFEs because they may be "out of our league" and say no; if they said no right away we'd be fine. We're afraid of BFEs because we fear they will absorb all of our time in endless email conversations, nitpicking, forms-filling, PDF-generating, phone calls, meetings, and eventually say no -- or even if this results in a sale it may not be worth it. I'm not saying this is true -- I'm just trying to describe the fear. The OP clearly addresses most of those points by the way.
英国政府通过开源政策和预审供应商目录，正在简化小企业向政府销售的流程。
英国政府正在做很多工作来解决这些问题：首先新项目优先采用开源，其次建立了至少两个计划，供应商预先审核后可以在在线目录中提供产品和服务。我没能及时了解到这些，但目录上已有 700 多家中小企业。不是说问题全解决了，但 patio11 描述的大部分流程对进入英国中央政府的新服务来说被'跳过'了。
lifeisstillgood查看英文原文
The UK Government is doing a lot of work to get around these problems. Firstly all new development is preferred to be open source (1), secondly they have created at least two programs where suppliers are pre-vetted and then can offer their products (and services) in an online catalog. (2). I failed to know about either of these in time but there are 700+ SMEs on there. I am not saying that this is all solved - but a large chunk of the process patio11 described is explicitly "blipped over" for new services into central UK Government. There are some rays of hope - I will let you know ! (OMG - GCloud 4 is open - if you are a UK software company then I urge you to join if you can.) (1) https://www.gov.uk/service-manual (2) http://gcloud.civilservice.gov.uk/about/ (3) http://blog.mikadosoftware.com/2013/08/22/how-hard-can-it-be-selling-software-to-the-uk-government/
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