>There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.
For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.
This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.
Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.
For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.
This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.
Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.