ReadWriteWeb

In the Internet startup space, some companies choose to develop enterprise solutions they hope will attract large corporate contracts. While some entrepreneurs have experience giving investors their 30 second pitch, corporate CIOs are a bit of a different beast when it comes to selling a product. During the first day of product pitches and launches at DEMO this week, a panel moderated by Computerworld's executive editor Julia King focused on this very issue. Here are some tips for enterprise startups looking to snag those big enterprise contracts.

Sales and marketing are not the same thing. It's true they both deal with relationship management and it's true that neither of these job descriptions require hardcore engineering, but just because they're both in the realm of words over code does not mean that they are the same. At the risk of muddling your mind with HR jargon, the core competencies of a marketer are very different from those of a sales person. Surprisingly, many startup CEOs insist on hiring for a VP of Sales and Marketing position.

This morning on the Google Checkout Blog, the company announced the introduction of a new, embeddable gadget which you can place on any web site where you sell your products and/or services. An embeddable gadget like this is nothing new to the online shopping space - Checkout's major competitor PayPal has offered their own copy-and-paste code for years on end. But what's interesting about this new gadget is how it's tied to the Google Docs service for inventory management on the back-end. The gadget is also incredibly simple to set up and use.

Today eBay is launching their eBay Selling Manager Applications beta, a new platform which allows third-party developers to embed their own custom applications within the Selling Manager at eBay. If you're not a heavy eBay user, you may not be aware what this is: the Selling Manager is the part of the site where sellers, primarily those using eBay professionally, can manage every aspect of their business from invoicing, to inventory tracking, to shipping and a lot more. With the new Applications Beta, these sellers will now have the capability to pick and choose from a number of third-party apps which will help them better manage their eBay business.

In June of 2008, Seattle programmer Bill Harding launched an online marketplace called Bonanzle. The site, a completely grassroots effort with zero VC or angel funding, is in many ways the anti-eBay. Instead of focusing solely on the goods being sold, Bonanzle is attempting to build a marketplace where the people are relevant, too. On Bonanzle, buyers can chat with sellers in real-time or over instant messaging, an experience that delivers a more social experience to the online shopping process. These interactions have allowed Bonanzle to build a strong community, but will that be enough to take on eBay?

Having owned Xcreative, a web development company that specialized in websites and marketing for the movie industry, the founders of MeDeploy (Christian Taylor, Joelle Musante, and Abe Lettelleir) were very familiar with the film industry. But for every filmmaker they helped, several more were turned away. Why? Cost. So many of the filmmakers simply couldn't afford the services the company provided.