From the customer care side of it, responsiveness matters a lot in the enterprise world (and the non-enterprise world as well). Even if a very complicated issue takes 3 months to fix, responding to an email or opened ticket within an hour and keeping continuous communication with the customers. I have seen customers happy when an issue takes 3-6 months to solve because the person helping them talked to them every couple days asking for more info or giving updates on the the progress. At the same time, I have seen customers mad as hell because the initial response to an new ticket took 3 hours enough though the it was solved 15 minutes later.
While both articles address a company's outward image, I'd say that the two touch upon very different things. I understood OP's post to be more about the quality of marketing collateral and making sure that the client experience was well fleshed-out, and I read your link to be a lesson in messaging. I didn't find the two to be mutually exclusive.
I think that both articles are saying the same thing, fundamentally:
Your brand should be something your customers expect, but only just.
Smart Bear was a small, upstart company, selling cutting-edge tools for developers into a relatively new market.
Developers and their managers value directness, especially at small companies. A vendor that shows all the signs of being a peacock while obviously being a pigeon will come across as scummy, because your market is expecting one of "small upstart dude in shed" or "massive enterprise company with a headcount greater than many cities", and not something in the middle.
Iron Port's customers, on the other hand, are buying security products, and frankly, the security industry is almost all theatre. An impressive-looking website, bespoke-looking product, and glossy sales brochure is all in the ante of playing at the security-vendor table, especially before Web 2.0.
It looks to me like these two posts are perfectly complementary. One is right if you can only sell to big customers - and if you sell a $50,000 email appliance, you're not going to sell it to small businesses or individuals.
The other one is about selling to small businesses (and the same could be true for consumers). It only makes sense that you should use two completely different approaches.
One important corollary of the first article is, imho, that you should never start a business geared towards the big guys if don't have enough investor money, even if your technology isn't so expensive to develop. You will be very difficult to be taken seriously otherwise. And this resonates with my personal experience with multinational customers at my day job.
It's not just about the size of the sale. It is also about what you are selling and how critical that is to the company's day-to-day operations. If your code review tool goes down for a few hours, meh. If your email goes down for a few hours, the world is on fire and somebody is losing their job.
In the later case, companies want to feel that the "if" scenario will never happen. It's not that outages can't happen, but, rather, that if an outage occurs, you will be taken care of. If UserVoice is your only support tool, you are unlikely to give that feeling.
The thing that bothers me about that post is that Jason's company did OK back then. Smart Bear Software didn't crash and burn. Instead, it sold stuff and made money.
Of course, the post doesn't go into details about the company's early days. But still, saying "here's what I should have done" sounds like pure speculation.
I would urge though that early stage startups be careful to not prematurely scale (with graphics). This info seems more for those that are wee bit further down the lifecycle. Just keep that in mind.
If you've already got a few customers and are trying to spur the engine of growth then going this way will surely help you.
Carefully make the correct decisions based on who your customers are (and in this facet if they really are Enterprise).
My experience with Enterprise is that it can seem like a networking game. Either your intro'd somehow, reached out to (the easy way), or part of a 'approved vendors' list (take a guess on how you get in to that... '*sometimes' requires insured...).
TL;DR - Nobody in enterprise took us seriously, so we did a bunch of cosmetic stuff like put fancy faceplates on our hardware. We also made our documentation top notch. Then people took us seriously.
I wonder which was more of a win, doing the great documentation or making the equipment not look cheap. I'm betting it would depend greatly on who makes the purchase decisions in the customer companies.
As someone who used to make these decisions, the answer is both.
On a device like this the life-cycle support is just as important as the initial sale. By creating great documentation, a safe package for the delivery, and caring enough to make it not look like a repackaged Dell system, it's a good indication that you'll care enough when I call at 3AM with an urgent issue.
