Enterprise Irregulars: Silos-in-the-Enterprise: Good. But Not All They Are Cracked Up to Be.

InsightaaS: Jason Lemkin – Co-Founder and CEO of SaaS firm EchoSign (until it was acquired by Adobe) has published a piece in the excellent Enterprise Irregulars blog site looking at how – or whether – selling SaaS solutions to a department within a large organization is actually helpful to a SaaS firm looking to build major account presence. In his post, Lemkin urges SaaS executives to “Figure out how you can really grow the account, proactively, aggressively into a much larger deal. Because I’m skeptical that on their own, these Silos will connect themselves very often.  After all, they’re Silos.

Just a few years ago, as the next generation of SaaS companies were beginning to scale, the idea of building a Big or Biggish SaaS Company using Silos-in-the-Enterprise was all the rage.   For many it still is.   But there are a lot of flaws to this thinking it’s worth taking a look at.

First, just to get on the same page … a Silo-in-the-Enterprise is a small or smallish group in a BigCo that adopts your product.  Sometimes rogue, outside of procurement or financing using their corporate credit card.  More often these days, officially, but just for one team.  A group at eBay decides to start using your CRM tool.    Part of Google’s HR team starts using your project management tool…

Read the entire post: http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/65736/silos-enterprise-good-cracked/

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