Look like the brand you want to be

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.

Counterpoint: <a href="http://blog.asmartbear.com/youre-a-little-company-now-act-like-one.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.asmartbear.com/youre-a-little-company-now-act-li...</a>

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.<p>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.<p>Carefully make the correct decisions based on who your customers are (and in this facet if they really are Enterprise).<p>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...).<p><a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2700-the-best-visual-description-of-a-company-ive-ever-seen" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2700-the-best-visual-descript...</a><p>Just keep in mind where you stand to make a better choice.

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.<p>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.

Organizational Mimicry? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimicry" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimicry</a>

This seems to be the corporate version of the adage "dress for the job you want, not the job you have."