Looks like...

Question

Looks like AEs in SMB and MM at MongoDB are hitting quota at a much better clip than Enterprise or Strat - why is that?

Former Employee · Accepted Answer

It's what the person below said... an SMB / MM, digital native or high-tech account might have one or two primary customer-facing applications and the decision making is relatively streamlined.

In the Enterprise org it's: Acquisition, Growth, Strategic. Quota's are relatively high despite an average application running at about $100K ARR. If you land a strategic application, yes it can run into the multiple millions of dollars to run this app on Mongo, but most customers aren't quite there with putting their mission critical workloads on Mongo -- either they have and they're all in and they quickly grow to Strategic (which carries a $1.98M quota) or they're a newer customer dabbling with onsey-twosey APIs and microservices. It's tough sledding to take 5 growth accounts that are just getting started with Mongo to $600-1M in spend annually when they're only deploying really small APIs on Mongo. At Mongo, it's really about going and finding one strategic app or initiative that a company will put on Mongo, then you might watch a company explode to $1M in run rate over night.

Most are out there looking for that app or initiative across their 5 customers -- and they're hard to find, even harder to convince to migrate away from SQL to Mongo. Your best bet is a new app launching on Mongo that has a high possibility to grow rapidly.

Current Employee · Answer

Honestly, I don't believe this tiering exists anymore within MongoDB. They are currently divided into:
- Growth (existing customers). This is across all customer sizes
-  Strategic (largest customers) typically manages 1-2 customer per rep
- Acquisition (greenfield accounts). Here they divide between smaller companies (including SMB, MM) called High-tech. If you work on closing new logos with larger companies it's called Enterprise.

My view on why it's easier to close new logos with smaller companies: quicker decision processes. MongoDB is strongest within digital natives.

Former Employee · Answer

This is a bit longer answer, but I think will show you multiple reasons why this is the case.

Think about your larger, enterprise, customers. Names and brands you recognize. These companies and their IT stacks have been around for 20+ years, longer than MongoDB has had an enterprise-grade name/brand. Those IT stacks were decided years ago and people chose to go with the standard at the time, Oracle, SAP, SQL, etc. Those are the databases/data ecosystems that run the most critical parts of the business. If those went down, it'd be headline news. Absolutely no one wants to change those data ecosystems or databases for a new one in MongoDB. For the business, there's only risk in changing a system that works just fine (for an upside which may be better database performance with MDB). On top of that, if there is a reason to change, people in the company start suggesting to use their favorite database of choice (of which there are MANY) and not MongoDB. They get defensive about it, why risk going with MongoDB when we already have X number of apps that already work on X database? To wrap up this idea, in the Enterprise space, MongoDB has to either replace a non-business-critical database (where there's a compelling reason to/the company is forced to by some circumstance) or they have to win a new application (for which MongoDB is the backend) that will start very slowly and hopefully will become the company's next big app.

Think, instead, about a younger company who has just received some type of funding and has no or few existing databases. There's much less technical debt/mission critical applications. No headline news. No one has been there for 10+ years and needs to defend their "territory"/database of choice. They may have some existing applications, but a new one will come up soon because it's a new business. And hey, this MongoDB offers pay as you go pricing, so there's no need to give away 100k tomorrow. You can change this a bit with SMB, but ultimately there are less people and therefore, less potential roadblocks or gatekeepers.

Enterprise reps are focused on the first one. There's nothing but headwinds in the enterprise for MongoDB. That battle is tough for anyone to fight, even if you have the greatest of skillsets.

Midmarket and SMB are focused on the second one (as I'm sure you guessed). There's fewer potential roadblocks overall. There's 5-10-20x more companies in this space than in the enterprise, so naturally, there will be more opportunities.

Hope this helps.

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Anonymous Q&A

Looks like AEs in SMB and MM at MongoDB are hitting quota at a much better clip than Enterprise or Strat - why is that?