Ed Lenta, SVP and GM at Databricks, contrasts the go-to-market strategies required for traditional committed enterprise software contracts versus usage-based consumption models.
“Because where enterprise sales is about injecting friction, like value engineering, or proof of concepts, or business cases into the sales process, when you move to a consumption model, it's actually about removing friction. It's about doing exactly the opposite.”
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More from Ed Lenta
Insight
Lenta: Linear sales hiring models fail across diverse international markets
“It's not enough to take the advice of typically Silicon Valley-based, ah, ah, VC companies and say, well, build a productivity model around hiring salespeople, assign productivity to salespeople, and scale your organization in that way, because it turns out th…”
Ed LentaMar 21, 2023▶ 10:30Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks
Insight
Lenta: Scaling revenue purely by adding sales headcount leads to mass layoffs
“Do not make this a game of linear expansion. Do not say, hey, I'm going to have a productivity metric that I assign to salespeople in my organization. I'm going to all, I'm going to just keep hiring salespeople as I want to scale revenue, and one day end up li…”
Ed LentaMar 21, 2023▶ 24:11Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks
Opinion
Lenta: Consumption pricing models are best for customers, full stop
“Consumption economics is the way to go, right? Consumption models are the best thing for your customers, full stop.”
Ed LentaMar 21, 2023▶ 30:49Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks
What-if
Lenta: VMware, AWS, and Databricks were destined to succeed inevitably
“All of the companies I've worked at, VMware, Amazon Web Services, and now I hope Databricks, they would have been successful with or without me. There was an inevitability. Customers were going to virtualize their data centers. People were going to consume tec…”
Ed LentaMar 21, 2023▶ 4:22Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks
Insight
Lenta: Entering new markets requires minimal upfront investment to test demand
“It's necessary in every new market that you work in to go in and soften the beach. To create the conditions where not just product market fit, but where demand is actually starting to be facilitated. And to do that, you want to expire expend as little energy a…”
Ed LentaMar 21, 2023▶ 11:06Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks
Insight
Lenta: Customer segmentation is only justified by different buying behaviors
“You shouldn't segment your customer base at all if all of your customers are uniform. But if there are some valid discrepancies in the way that your customers wanted to be sold to, you should acknowledge that, and you should segment your customers really, real…”
Ed LentaMar 21, 2023▶ 14:36Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks
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