Never compete on price in enterprise. You compete on value prop and ROI - it's the profit and/or savings using your product will bring that are relevant, not the pure license costs. Price also signals worth, you get what you pay for, etc.
As for the competition - compete. Don't assume just because a large corp announces something their product will be good, useful, successful. Might just be programmed in Powerpoint for all you know.
That's a pretty blanket statement. I work for a relatively large service company, and we're looking to make a big purchase (a replacement of the core system), and one of the main decision points is price, especially because there are orders of magnitude in difference between several competitors.
In the market we're evaluating there are:
- a dominant, best of breed solution, which is priced out of the budget
- several good systems that can't compete with the dominant one and thus either compete on niches or price
- several decent systems by companies that serve a geographic region
- several small systems for niche companies.
The price differences range from a 22.000 dollar quote to a seven million dollar quote (and both were tossed out).
Between similarly-priced products, yes, price is not a factor.
One point which might be of interest is that we're valuing the user experience a lot - our previous software "ticked all the boxes" feature-wise but is an unusable mess, and the best-rated product among the mid-sized ones also has the same problem (maybe designed to win feature-checkbox government or bigco contract bids).
I only hope the people which will actually make the decision listen to the technical sides' arguments and don't go for the feature-rich but bad-UX solution (I also expect bad UX to be a proxy for yet-to-be-discovered hidden limitations).
Comments
Never compete on price in enterprise. You compete on value prop and ROI - it's the profit and/or savings using your product will bring that are relevant, not the pure license costs. Price also signals worth, you get what you pay for, etc.
As for the competition - compete. Don't assume just because a large corp announces something their product will be good, useful, successful. Might just be programmed in Powerpoint for all you know.
"Never compete on price in enterprise"
That's a pretty blanket statement. I work for a relatively large service company, and we're looking to make a big purchase (a replacement of the core system), and one of the main decision points is price, especially because there are orders of magnitude in difference between several competitors.
In the market we're evaluating there are:
- a dominant, best of breed solution, which is priced out of the budget
- several good systems that can't compete with the dominant one and thus either compete on niches or price
- several decent systems by companies that serve a geographic region
- several small systems for niche companies.
The price differences range from a 22.000 dollar quote to a seven million dollar quote (and both were tossed out).
Between similarly-priced products, yes, price is not a factor.
One point which might be of interest is that we're valuing the user experience a lot - our previous software "ticked all the boxes" feature-wise but is an unusable mess, and the best-rated product among the mid-sized ones also has the same problem (maybe designed to win feature-checkbox government or bigco contract bids).
I only hope the people which will actually make the decision listen to the technical sides' arguments and don't go for the feature-rich but bad-UX solution (I also expect bad UX to be a proxy for yet-to-be-discovered hidden limitations).