Jen Abel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. Okay, so the first thing that I haven't heard anyone talk about before is this point that you often make that the mid-market does not exist. People often hear about enterprise companies. There's obviously SMBs and startups. There's also people just, "Oh, I'm going to go after the mid-market." Somewhere between. You don't think that's real? Talk about your experience there, what people should know. It's fascinating because if you ask someone to describe the mid-market, actually, if you ask someone to describe the enterprise, every single person has a different answer. It's either based off of revenue, it's either based off of market cap, it's based off of employee size, and I think a lot of people can get lost because selling to a hundred person organization is a radically different game than selling to a thousand person organization and there's no hybrid approach. So the best way to think about it is you have small business which typically can be really powered by marketing, and then you have enterprise, which is typically going to be sales led. If you bucket them into these two very specific silos, it makes it much, much easier to understand what game you're playing. Now, when we talk about mid-market, I usually will say, "Are we talking about the upper end of small business or are we talking about the lower end of enterprise?" And most people are usually saying the lower end of enterprise. And I say, "Great, know you're playing the enterprise game. Know the type of people you need to hire, the type of ACV they need because it makes it a lot easier than trying to have this middle ground that catches everything that doesn't distinctly define SMB and enterprise." So I say the mid-market doesn't exist because what is a mid-market hire? It's either low end enterprise or upper end SMB, and if you bleed those two games you're going to lose. They're so distinctly different. So that's kind of my theory on it. You have this chart that you shared with me that will link people to where you kind of show the number of companies within each of these segments and there's basically nobody in this kind of middle segment, talk about that a bit.…

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