What are the necessary features for a SaaS company to sell to enterprise clients and how have enterprise buying habits changed?

I think the “base minimum features” needed to start selling into the enterprise is actually the same as selling to a startup. The “land and expand” strategy can really work if you target a small team within an enterprise business and then drive adoption across the organization by proving your value. You still need a strong sales team to pitch and help the buyer convince their managers to provide the budget, but the features stay about the same.

Now if you’re talking about closing the entire company and onboarding thousands of people onto your app, then you’re going to need a longer selling cycle and larger sales team and the features required will be different. If we’re talking about Secureframe, enterprise businesses will be very interested in our reports and dashboards to quickly understand their security posture. Our platform also scales to match the needs of an organization with a complex infrastructure. For example we can monitor multiple CSP’s at the same time and scale up to hundreds of instances.

I don’t think enterprise buying behavior has shifted a ton. There might be instances of some types of software moving to move off-the-shelf, but others are moving the other way. Atlassian, which owns Jira, famously built their business on the self-serve mode. But even they have recently moved to a more sophisticated selling motion and they had a large amount of resellers that sold their product to enterprise customers.

Most companies eventually hire a sales team. Even Slack staffed up their enterprise sales team and that drives a majority of their growth today.