Both just dropped their enterprise sales forces to stay focused on core businesses (self-service+ and VSB, respectively).

Generally, they start as self-service and as the accounts grow, they add a sales team to support larger deal sizes.īut … more often, one of the business lines falls to the wayside as the business scales and one segment clearly becomes immaterial, and therefore, not just a cost center but dilutive to management team and focus: New Relic and many “B2D” companies combine self-service at the low-end and more B2B enterprise sales for larger accounts quite nicely. which are primarily not sales driven / B2B. $1b+ from Digital Marketing, which is very sales driven and very B2B. In terms of successful companies that do both “B2B” (sales-driven) and freemium/B2C-ish (self-service / non-sales driven) successfully, there are many. If so, it’s worth investing in - relative to its overall contribution to the top and bottom lines. So … to me, the question is, can the smaller segment of your business at least do 10% or more of your revenue (i.e., be material), and/or drive 10% or more of your leads. And the customer lifetime value is much higher. The deal sizes are much, much larger in the enterprise / B2B customers.

On the one hand, the sales-driven side of the business, B2B, “costs” a lot more - you need sales people, customer conferences, booths, customer success, etc.īut. It’s definitely dilutive in that there’s a constant tension between management time and resources.

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