Mark Suster has a great series about enterprise startups on his blog. Here are a couple excerpts from the 3 articles he wrote so far.
But the “no sales people” mantra isn’t what I’m here to take on. It’s the second belief system that is even more engrained and even more wrong. Many young startups are being advised not to have a professional services business and in my opinion this is a big mistake.
The line of reasoning goes, “Services businesses are not scalable and the market won’t reward this revenue so make sure that third-parties do your implementation or clients do it themselves. We only want software revenue.”
This is a huge mistake. If you’re an early-stage enterprise startup, services revenue is exactly what you need.
From http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/03/19/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-enterprise-startups-make/
How to Make Sure Professional Services Don’t Take Over Your Software Company
I recently wrote a blog post in which I pointed out that many investors & advisors discourage enterprise startups from having a professional services (PS) business and I think this is a big mistake.
I think it’s important for enterprise startups to layer in professional services into your revenue stream. [...]
BUT! You don’t want to run the risk that having a PS business that takes your eye of off the ball of growing a large software business.
How to Sell Your Roadmap Without Selling Your Soul
When we published our roadmap to our platinum customers we would inevitably get some complaints that some features were coming too many quarters out and they preferred them done sooner.
There was an easy solution to meet their requirements and our own. We would allow them to accelerate some Q3/Q4 initiatives to Q1/Q2 if they would fund the development. Often 2-3 customers would band together to fund an accelerated plan.
Before you think it, this was not prostitution. These were always features we knew we needed to build anyways – we were just willing to accelerate / prioritize them.
From http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/04/15/how-to-sell-your-roadmap-without-selling-your-soul/
I encourage you to go and read all 3 articles in full. They have plenty of useful and actionable advice.