SaaStr 096: How To Sell SaaS To Fortune 500s, What Drives Decision-Making In Large Corporates & Why Enterprise Is Middle Up Not Top Down with Jonathan Lehr, Co-Founder @ WorkBench

Jonathan Lehr is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Work-Bench, where he focuses on early stage enterprise technology investments in areas including big data analytics, machine learning, data-defined security and more. Prior to Work-Bench, Jon founded the NY Enterprise Technology Meetup in January 2012 and organizes monthly meetups of the 5,000+ person group as a way to promote collaboration for the enterprise tech ecosystem in New York. Jon has also worked at Morgan Stanley on the Office of the CIO team in IT. In that capacity, he partnered with internal technology clients to facilitate the selection and on-boarding of emerging technology vendors. He has also written about enterprise technology trends for publications such as The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal and TechCrunch.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Jonathan make his way into the world of enterprise investing with WorkBench?
• Jon has previously said that enterprise tech is like chess, so what are the rules to play by? What can startups do to increase their chance of winning the game?
• How can startups build scalable and natural relationships with decision makers in large enterprise clients? What are the fundamentals to doing this successfully? What does this conversation look like?
• What does the buying decision making process look like in large corporates? How does that differ from space to space? How does that affect the sales cycle?
• Why is NYC the best place in the world to start an enterprise tech company? What are the pros and cons of being in NYC?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Greenfield opportunities in enterprise technology?
2. What does Jonathan know now that he wishes he had known at the start?
3. Jonathan’s fave SaaS reading material?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Jonathan Lehr