What Are the Biggest Challenges Within the Enterprise Software Industry? Godard Abel Has the Answer

Table of Contents

•  G2 is playing an integral role in more transparent selling.
• ”We first have to clean up our data so we can do it in a way that delivers a great experience versus horrific experience if the data’s wrong,” says Godard
• The enterprise software industry’s future goal should be to make software buying and software selling efficient.

Godard Abel has been a SaaS entrepreneur for over 20 years, and G2 is the third company he’s building.

The journey of G2 was quite challenging. The company had no revenue for about three years. Fortunately, they had a successful exit with BigMachines, which Oracle acquired, so they self-funded most of the initial build, putting in almost all the original $2 million themselves.  But a story about G2 had a few exciting twists.

Godard Abel and another G2 co-founder Matt Gorniak started SteelBrick. Their vision was to create a CPQ specifically for Salesforce because they knew that Oracle buying BigMachines would leave a vacuum in the ecosystem.

They focused on SteelBrick at the same time when Tim Handorf became CEO of G2. According to Godard, Tim did a great job getting into critical mass. While the G2 team worked on building the platform and getting to a critical mass of reviews and more categories, Godard was dedicated to making SteelBrick. The company got acquired by Salesforce, and Gordon came back to G2.

Today, G2 has over a million users. However, they have over six million software buyers coming to g2.comevery month.

As Godard explains, one of the biggest challenges software buyers faced was discovering apps like BigMachines. It was a problem the BigMachines team decided to solve. Their goal was to make it easy for buyers to find apps most suitable for their businesses. Another challenge they saw was a vendor’s recognition.

Having to wait more than a decade to become the leader can be frustrating from an entrepreneur’s perspective. The BigMachines team wanted fast results, and they wanted to focus on customers.

The G2 team decided to focus on CRM software because it was part of a familiar field. With BigMachines, they partnered with companies like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. However, it took them a long time to get enough reviews right on the product. Therefore, they built one category at a time.

Another opportunity coming across their path was data. The enterprise software industry acknowledged the importance of data, and more and more software vendors rely on it to define the ideal customer profile.

Data has become an integral part of the G2 business. It is an opportunity no one forced when they started the company.

Godard says his dream for the enterprise software industry is to come to the point where software buying and software selling is much more efficient.

There’s also a considerable information asymmetry and, as already mentioned, software buyers still don’t know which apps are out there and which one to choose.

Buying on AWS marketplace is like buying on Amazon

There’s a considerable number of software buyers purchasing products on the AWS marketplace. Buying there is almost like buying on Amazon. That’s the reality. More and more people purchase online.

The multiple dataset world as part of the reality

Building a data foundation will be of the utmost importance in the future.

Another important topic is how to deal with challenges within privacy management, especially in a multiple dataset system. G2 has a software category and privacy data management.