Enterprise will always be different than the consumer market until the nature of the enterprise decentralizes.
The key driving distinction between enterprise and consumer is that in the enterprise the person using the software had almost no say in its purchase and thus has almost no say in its development. Consumer software works well when you use it, enterprise software looks good when you see it in a powerpoint presentation next to a feature checkbox, or hear about it on a golf course. Since no one making the purchasing decision will ever actually use it, you're pretty much guaranteed sales. Especially if you can pair it with expensive training that is necessary because your software is designed so poorly.
Having features is generally how you get through an RFP the purpose of an RFP is to CYA. Thus if you have the RFP approved by management and the proposal meets the RFP you're guaranteed a sale if no one else can check the boxes. If you ever get approved for an RFP you should immediately apply to become the vendor of record / preferred vendor for everything in that space guaranteeing more sales of your atrocious software.
Never design software that works in the enterprise as you'll lose out on massive support / training revenue. The worse your software is the better it will sell. Hopefully you can figure out how to sell software that doesn't actually do ANYTHING until they hire programmers to customize it. (I'm looking at you CRM vendors)
Once you've been through a couple of these things you'll understand how it works and how crappy software is incentivized by the RFP system.
You should also have an RFP template ready that contains all the features your software has so that lazy employees from megacorp can submit it for approval. Your sales people should be all too ready to help the employee out with this task so that they have a very professional and tailored RFP. Now that they don't have anything to do that day you should take them out for a beer to celebrate how fast they submitted the RFP to management. Management will remember them as the guy who gets stuff done so quickly and professionally, they'll move up quickly.
The key driving distinction between enterprise and consumer is that in the enterprise the person using the software had almost no say in its purchase and thus has almost no say in its development. Consumer software works well when you use it, enterprise software looks good when you see it in a powerpoint presentation next to a feature checkbox, or hear about it on a golf course. Since no one making the purchasing decision will ever actually use it, you're pretty much guaranteed sales. Especially if you can pair it with expensive training that is necessary because your software is designed so poorly.
Having features is generally how you get through an RFP the purpose of an RFP is to CYA. Thus if you have the RFP approved by management and the proposal meets the RFP you're guaranteed a sale if no one else can check the boxes. If you ever get approved for an RFP you should immediately apply to become the vendor of record / preferred vendor for everything in that space guaranteeing more sales of your atrocious software.
Never design software that works in the enterprise as you'll lose out on massive support / training revenue. The worse your software is the better it will sell. Hopefully you can figure out how to sell software that doesn't actually do ANYTHING until they hire programmers to customize it. (I'm looking at you CRM vendors)
Once you've been through a couple of these things you'll understand how it works and how crappy software is incentivized by the RFP system.
You should also have an RFP template ready that contains all the features your software has so that lazy employees from megacorp can submit it for approval. Your sales people should be all too ready to help the employee out with this task so that they have a very professional and tailored RFP. Now that they don't have anything to do that day you should take them out for a beer to celebrate how fast they submitted the RFP to management. Management will remember them as the guy who gets stuff done so quickly and professionally, they'll move up quickly.