Interlude - Index of

134 | Grown-Up Company
For enterprise customers, change equals risk. Consider the
cost of an airline grounding every plane or of a Wall Street
firm not being able to execute trades. The downside is so
painful that they need a very, very good reason to change. If
they have plenty of money and a solution that works, there is
almost no amount of savings that would justify a new vendor,
and especially not an unknown newcomer. Remember Tom
Mendoza’s saying: Customers only open their wallets when
they are in pain.
Fortunately for us, the tech crash sent the economy south,
and the recession was good for us. It created so much pain that
conservative enterprise customers were forced to consider new
solutions. The attitude changed from, I’ll be promoted if I keep
things working to I’ll be fired if I don’t cut costs. The tech crash
also gave us extra incentive to go after the enterprise companies,
because our Internet and technology customers—70 percent
of our revenue—pretty much stopped buying.
••
We had actually been going after enterprise customers for
several years before the crash. Dan was paranoid—in a good
way—and relying so much on tech and Internet companies
scared him. In the late nineties, Dan decided to target five
additional market areas. The first was financial services, which
was why Tom kept trying so hard to get into Wall Street, and
the others were telecommunications, oil and gas, major manufacturing,
and the U.S. government. Today we’re a major vendor
in all five areas, but early on it was tough going.
I got an early hint that selling to non-tech companies was
different when I made a sales call on Georgia Pacific, the paper