Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Lenta: Enterprise sales injects friction, whereas consumption models must remove it

Ed Lenta · Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks · Mar 21, 2023 · at 9:14

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.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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 Lenta Mar 21, 2023 ▶ 10:30 Lessons 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 Lenta Mar 21, 2023 ▶ 24:11 Lessons 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 Lenta Mar 21, 2023 ▶ 30:49 Lessons 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 Lenta Mar 21, 2023 ▶ 4:22 Lessons 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 Lenta Mar 21, 2023 ▶ 11:06 Lessons 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 Lenta Mar 21, 2023 ▶ 14:36 Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.