The enterprise sales process isn't what it used to be. Before, you had to get an audience with the CIO (or whoever controlled the department budget) to have a chance.
The shift has been that employees and individual teams now have a lot of say in what tools they use -- sometimes without the higher-ups knowing about it until it's seen a good amount of adoption amongst internal teams. SaaS with instant access and 0 deploy times makes this possible.
Another shift is that employees will now carry their championed products with them from one company to another. In an area like Silicon Valley where job hopping is common, the social/word-of-mouth effects on enterprise software is significant.
Slack has already been mentioned and is a prime example of both.
With our own "enterprise" product, we're seeing the same -- adoption from teams and employees that eventually can become something more. But, this can only happen if you're resonating with some group of users that love your product.
But we did not follow Sam's path.
1/ we made resellers and developers happy (being open source played an important role early on)
2/ we grew
3/ we made end users very happy
4/ we grew much faster
The reason we took this part is that it takes a lot of time to both build the enterprise features, and make it great. We built the scope first and made it great after, which is not an usual path.
JIRA would be my example of it. Of course, it seems old and clunky now, but when it first came out, it was a revelation in a world that had been stuck with the likes of Remedy.
Salesforce is another example. Again, it seems dated now, but when it first hit the scene, it was seismic.
It's actually pretty straightforward to make a loveable product for the enterprise, if only because the pain can be so great. The problem is wading through the sales process.
Any examples of this?