So the near universal consensus from the technical community is that SAP makes crap software. Yet here we are obsessing over monads while they laugh all the way to the bank. So what’s the lesson? Maybe good software is a waste of time and smart money just focuses on the marketing. Unfortunately that’s what I’ve seen over many years.
Opinion: SAP focused on the buyer, not the user. I see this in technical software sales all the time: vendors have an X, so they target the team that might X or currently use the inferior Y when they could be using X.
But in reality, those people are rarely if ever the buyer, as in, the person who has the budget and the authority to actually issue a PO. In the size of company that uses an ERP, that person is not going to be Raj in Accounting who likes your webified TrelloAsana travel and expense dashboard, or Sara in IT who enjoyed your demo of the JSON export to PowerBI. Its going to be a committee of Finance EVPs who give a final thumbs up to the CFO to write the check.
The other part to this story is that at this level, SAP (and peers) are using highly skilled partners as force multipliers to sell. I can honestly say after years in technology that I have never actually seen a SAP employee so to me. But I have seen a boatload of folks from Accenture and Deloitte and Tech Mahindra try to sell digital ERP transformation via a $$$$ contract that used SAP in the tech stack.
In short, SAP doesnt need to be the best. It just needs to win the CFO and make partners money.
What does better really mean, though? For the CFO, a SAP implementation solves multi-million dollar problems in inventory, sales taxation, expense management, compliance, etc. That is "better" for their organization. If it comes with a slighty cruddy travel and expense system, oh well. That piece probably represents like 1% of the deal value.
Enterprise sales at this level requires a deep understanding of what the buyer values in your product, not what you think is valuable. I dont claim that SAP delivers on these claims (ie I'm not carrying water for them) but they are good at hitting this button.
