• The best products win: Modern design, seamless UX, speed, and features that get the job done are the competitive dimensions that matter to the end user. Today’s best products are often far simpler, having never been put through the endless RFP process checking feature boxes for a technical buyer. And when users can vote with their feet, the best product wins. For an obvious example, compare your least favorite old-school CRM to the new generation of work productivity tools.
  

• Product discovery driven by word of mouth: When users really love your product, they tell their peers, friends, anyone who will listen. This beachhead enables a much faster direct enterprise sales process than going in cold with no existing end user presence. When enterprise buyers are overwhelmed with vendor fatigue, they’re not interested in exploring relationships with new vendors without organic momentum inside their orgs to champion products. The interaction between the growth motion and the sales motion reinforce each other, significantly accelerating adoption at scale when sequenced effectively.
  

• Consumer-style growth tactics: When a startup really nails the product experience for the end user, the go-to-market advantages incumbents maintain in the traditional world of enterprise sales fade away. Not only is the recipe for a winning product in bottom-up enterprise adoption the same as in the consumer market, but the actual mechanics of growth are similar. If the end user is the decision maker, consumer-style growth tactics are often the only way to get their attention. Building viral loops into the product, understanding which marketing channels matter, building a brand users trust, cultivating community around the product, and supporting a user journey that makes it easy to adopt (and pay!) become table stakes.

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