How do I convert an individual license customer to an Enterprise license customer?

Discussions
#1

Some of our customers are developers who work at a large corporation: IBM, Disney, Thomson Reuters, Rackspace to name a few. They have purchased a license for themselves, very likely out-of-pocket to avoid the wait and hassle of license acquisition at their company. They’ve signed up with their company email address, that’s how I can identify them.

  1. How do we convert this individual license into an Enterprise license that will cover their organization?
  2. How do we position ourselves to appeal to Enterprise purchasing? We have an Enterprise option on our pricing page, but is that enough?
  3. How do we get our product in front of Enterprise purchasers?

I understand the Enterprise sales cycle is measured in months and is high touch which differs drastically from our current sales cycle measured in hours and days and is self serve.

  1. What do we need to do organizationally to equip ourselves to deal with Enterprise sales?
  2. Is it even worth pursuing this?
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#2

More questions than answers but may lead you in the right direction.

First I would ask “is this product (assuming WP Migrate DB Pro - you might want to confirm and add link as the product type will be very relevant to the discussion) something that is likely going to be purchased as an Enterprise license”- and I think the answer is NO.

I would imagine that even in a huge corporation they typically only have a few (or a dozen, or even 100 it doesn’t change the argument) wordpress installations and its likely that a single person or small team is responsible for them - and your other options fit that just fine.

I am guessing that Agencies / development shops would be a better fit for ‘enterprise’ or site licenses but I think you already know that with the Studio/Agency options.

Have you thought of trying to contact some of those who’ve purchased and asking a few questions such as

  • is this your primary responsibility
  • do you work in a team of people - might they need the tool also
  • did they consider the enterprise licensing option and why went for other one.
#3

@Rhino makes some good points. I’d like to offer a different perspective:

For your product, enterprise licenses may very well be more about support than number of users/sites. I would imagine that an “enterprise” might be willing to pay 5-10x what a normal customer does in order to get e.g. “Priority phone support”. Whether you want to offer that is up to you, of course :slight_smile:

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#4

Very good point - I got stuck just thinking along the existing segmentation lines.

#5

Are you sure they aren’t buying 1 licence which they think they can share between their team? See:

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#6

This sparked an idea. What if we made the team licenses “Unlimited installs” and differentiate them by the number of people they cover? That would reinforce the idea that the team licenses are about people, not installs and would give people sharing an individual license a great incentive to upgrade.

Also, I think we’re going to need to change it to a per person cost rather than packages. For example, a company with 4 developers is not going to want to pay for the 6-developer package.

Possibly. We could definitely do a better job reinforcing that they have an individual license. We only introduced the team licenses in December, so anyone who bought before that probably doesn’t even know about it despite the email announcements we sent out.

Excellent points here, thanks folks!