Kupor: Decentralized department budgets increase SaaS retention and vendor advantage
Scott Kupor · a16z Podcast | Valuing Today's Fast-Growing Software Companies · Jan 2, 2019 · at 12:52
Scott Kupor (credited as Scott Cooper), Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, analyzes enterprise purchasing dynamics and why selling directly to specific departments increases software stickiness.
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“You know, and we see this a lot in companies, which is, as purchasing decisions have moved away from kind of the CIO as the central, you know, kind of purchasing control of all these things, and now you've got department level purchases, and you see a bunch of SaaS companies, you know, Marketo would be a great example, right, of a company that's, you know, selling to the marketing department, right, whereas kind of in the old world, you had to always sell to the CIO. And so, to me, part of the stickiness argument, I think, in favor of SaaS is you've got decentralized budgets now, right? So you don't have a single throat to choke anymore in the company. You actually get to go sell to the marketing department, which I think as a vendor is actually a good thing.”
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