Require me to give you my contact information just to download something. Have sales people blow up my phone and/or email and ignore polite brush-offs. Keep reaching out to me periodically with requests to have a meeting about how you product can help me.
I don't have buying power, but I do have bitching power and your product will wind up getting bad-mouthed by the whole team eventually. And when the engineer asks us for recommendations, guess what we tell him?
IT Manager here, and deal with this almost weekly at this point. I'll add to your list of how not to do it - ignore my brush-offs and start email blasting others on my team or within the company to get around me. Quick way to get your domain blocked all together.
Also please don't make me sit through a demo just to get a quote. If I want a full demo I'll ask for it, and I need to know pricing first before even considering going any further. I've probably already researched your product, maybe even did a trial if available - I don't need to sit through any number of sales pitches, just give me the numbers.
I fairly recently got to switch sides on this. I never take sales calls or want to get on demos as a developer ... but I moved roles a bit and needed to join some calls with the reps at my company for a product I now manage. It has no public pricing.
I was surprised by how much the people who show up for demos seemed to like them and have good relationships with their reps. They thank us for saving them a lot of time they would have spent reading docs and marketing materials to learn the specific things that applied to them, or for us talking about roadmap stuff they don't get to see in the public materials.
Sometimes the price is a surprise to them and it needs a bit of context. Customers who are used to buying software this way seem to read between the lines really well and ask suitable questions about discounts or whatever, when they are surprised by pricing. Often we are able to make something work at a different price than the typical quote, or we can connect the dots so that the rationale is more clear, or the value requires some customization to be done.
My reps tell me this sorta thing is difficult over email, that nobody makes $10k+ purchases without talking to somebody, so if we can't get you on a call the deal falls over.
So I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the requirement for calls really, but I can understand why reps don't just throw quotes around without some conversation.
Adding Auth0/Okta to the list. Funny enough I had buying power and budget for it, and was gonna ask a Senior engineer to look into it, but the calls got so crazy that I just soured on it.
Love the idea of "bitching power"; basically anti-"word of mouth". Even if you make something freely available, your sales/marketing/GTM folks can hurt your company's name by being too aggressive.
You should contact to people how they want to be contacted, not how you'd want to be contacted.
I've seen some insanely obnoxious email saturation bombing from some SaaS marketing teams. One was emailing me every 5-15 minutes.
Sometimes it could just be a rogue sales/marketing person. But other times it looks like it's probably blessed from the top, if not the startup-CEO personally setting the email marketing tool slider controls to maximum trashy level.
Requires a "professional account" just to register. And tend to refuse gmail accounts to create said microsoft professional account.
So the 30 day trial period you could use to check what's possible and see if you can integrate their shit with your IT infrastructure? Not happening. And if it's a bother just to get to try your shit, I can't fathom how bad the rest of the experience can be so you can keep your AI enhanced CRM, ERP, Dataverse etc.
No, I'm the lead integrator at a small-to-medium-sized company. Which means when an engineer brings me in on a project, I have a decent amount of influence on the software and controls hardware we use.
The customer may specify a PLC manufacturer or a particular SCADA system, but unless we're expanding an existing system we usually have a lot of leeway. I know this stuff better than the engineer does (that's my job, after all), so my recommendations are usually accepted.
In this case, corporate management holding the purse strings but their workers (devs) using the actual tools. The solution they offer to founders is to make the user your champion and have them sell your product for you.
"The meta point here is that you're not going to talk to the credit card holder; the user/dev is going to do that for you.
Give them the best possible chance at convincing the leadership. Make them look awesome for even bothering the leadership with a choice like this. Make it obviously awesome for them to decide “yes”. These users/devs are your sales people."
Maybe that works for dev tools with freemium models, but in many industries where this problem arises its just not possible to even get your product in front of the users. Take hospital systems and EHR purchasing where Doctors and Nurses are the users of the EHR day in and day out but it is the hospital administration that ultimately gets to decide which EHR is deployed. How do you get users to be champions of your product if you can't even get it in front of them?
Too often we get the reverse. Slick salesman targets the person with budgetary discretion while avoiding letting the users in in the transaction, so by the time they can complain about how terrible the product is, the check has already cleared.
Speaking as software developer and company co-founder for a product for use by other developers, the company employing those salesmen is very possibly overall losing money on these deals.
In our early days we had on occasion managed to directly convince non-developer decision makers in an organization to use our product (even though it wasn't an intentional strategy) and this invariably failed unless we also managed to get full buy-in from the developers who will actually use it.
These days we have an explicit rule that we don't go ahead with any customer engagement until we can see that a project's lead developer is fully sold on our product, otherwise we waste loads of time (which is essentially money) on ultimately fruitless retention attempts instead of using the time more productively on ideal customer opportunities.
Now it does depend on the nature of the product though. For a product used by only a small subset of a company (like our product), it's probably a bad strategy to sell to the execs instead of the users. But for a product like an ERP (think SAP, or Oracle ERP), these are deals worth USD millions (sometimes 10s of, or more) and convincing the execs is a highly (or possibly the only) effective strategy.
Yup, then the technical people have to deal with the bullshit and nightmare that is implementing the shitty thing that was purchased. Hard to get around this in large enterprises, someone just decides they're going to use some shitty tool (like that cloud provider no one uses but has great sales folks) and you just get a notice you have to migrate all your apps to the new thing in 3 months cos they got a better contract there.
The school district my kids are changes the parent app almost every year, its always a nightmare for everyone involved, I can't imagine what it is like to work IT in such a place.
This is a bit of a simplification of how enterprise sales works. A few extra dimensions are sometimes required. For "decision makers" their own personal view of reality may not in fact be accurate. You sometimes must vet that what they tell you (and may in fact believe) actually reflects the actual power dynamics of a big enterprise. There are extra dimensions to consider; The first is: are they in a cost center or are they generating revenue. The second is: are you trying to get new technology adopted or is this considered "standardized". The third is: who might perceive your product as a risk, or a threat to their power? These data points inform your sales strategy both in who you sell to, who you avoid, and when you might choose to engage a particular persona, when to go small and when to go big.
This works if the users are able to use the product (in this case on their personal device maybe) first, and are part of the same organisation.
But what about cases where the user isn't directly related to the decision maker? Doubly so when it's a hard to justify purchase? (I.e. you're not selling bread or IBM machines.)
For example, say, a keyless entry fob for a car. The driver benefits immensely. The CTO of Ford may probably not even entertain a meeting ("Huh, what does he think, locks are bad or something?! What's wrong with a secure lock?")
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach such a situation if you developed the fob and now want to sell it?
In your scenario, you're looking at a bottom up approach. Instead of going to Ford, you start at the bottom of the food chain. Used car dealerships, auto body shops, and other places that sell/install accessories for your car.
A great example is remote starters. Same idea. Great for the user, not so much for say Ford. The first places I saw these being installed? Stereo shops would use it as a cross selling feature whenever they were selling something else to a customer. I could be wrong, but it took a few years for the manufacturers to start including remote starters as an add-on. Before then, it was all kinds of other shops selling and installing them.
But its a trench warfare type of deal. You have to get into the hands of the people who can install them, then work your way up to approaching dealerships and larger clients.
I've done this with an anti-theft device. Start small, then build your client base and use that as a springboard to get interest from larger clients.
Interestingly I'm currently doing a version of that except with top-bottom and bottom-up approach.
I.e. like you describe I the younger sales rep on the team am going bottom-up after the smallest guys. And my boss, the CEO is going after the top management. We're both selling the same thing but with different argumentation.
The idea is that the buzz of excitement will turn into consensus when everyone in the middle sees approval from the top and positive feedback from the bottom.
Just be sure your product actually works. Third party/aftermarket remote starters and car alarms are (were) nortorious for causing a varity of intermittent, obscure electrical issues. Not sure if it was the devices themselves, or the installation, or both.
It sounds like a trivial question to answer, but it just exposes the level of detachment that exists between who makes the purchase decisions and its users in SME context.
Because you want to control who uses it (offboard separated employees, onboard new employees automatically), integrate into your auth systems to make it easier for employees to access, get an SLA if something goes wrong, connect to your data auditing systems, etc, etc. Companies have a lot of needs outside of just the core functionality of a product.
That used to be the case much more strongly in the past. At least dominant players now much more often expect institutions to buy bulk licenses for their students, because if they don't, the students won't have practical knowledge for the job market in the industry standard tools.
this happens all the time at large companies with small teams, plus if there's a security team they hate it so that's always an angle to lean on "hey 400 people are using 12 different slack workspaces, wouldn't it be nice to manage them all from one corporate account?"
Except for that whole every company that tries it ends up either not making money money on it, get Amazoned (where Amazon offers a hosted version and makes money), or ends up seeing the error of their ways and using a more restricted license and still struggles.
The company I founded previous faced this problem - we were selling to a part of the development team that often had no clout in making financial decisions. We were able to sell to smaller companies and larger ones that happened to have people who had enough power to purchase. But the majority of companies had super long sales cycles where we had to work with them to prove out the cost savings to people higher up. Most of the time this went nowhere and cost us a ton of time. It wasn't the only reason the company failed, but a major contributing factor. Glad to see people talking about it because it's something a lot of small b2b companies face and there's surprisingly little advice on it.
For enterprises its not usually as simple as sell to the CTO. Some things you need that, if you are AWS or Azure, the CTO and some principle engineer are who you have to convince to move the whole 20k person org over. But for a lot of software its the Line manager or director who is calling the shots, or a division head since division A may use different software than division B.
B2B2C marketplaces - especially ones that don't charge the "B2B" users, but take a cut of each transaction, and empower users to encourage transactions through a customized instance of the platform - are a fascinating "final boss level" for this mindset.
Your user is not your buyer, but they can be a distributed salesforce. You need to growth-hack not only for your penetration at the B2B level, but to give them the tools they need to growth-hack their own B2C client bases, with your product at the forefront.
That's a lot to build as a founding team, and occasionally it can be like herding cats - but it can be incredibly lucrative, because you have an incredibly low barrier to entry at the B2B level, but every account naturally scales with value delivered to the end customer.
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Require me to give you my contact information just to download something. Have sales people blow up my phone and/or email and ignore polite brush-offs. Keep reaching out to me periodically with requests to have a meeting about how you product can help me.
I don't have buying power, but I do have bitching power and your product will wind up getting bad-mouthed by the whole team eventually. And when the engineer asks us for recommendations, guess what we tell him?
Lookin' at you, Veeam, AWS, and Keyence.
Also please don't make me sit through a demo just to get a quote. If I want a full demo I'll ask for it, and I need to know pricing first before even considering going any further. I've probably already researched your product, maybe even did a trial if available - I don't need to sit through any number of sales pitches, just give me the numbers.
I was surprised by how much the people who show up for demos seemed to like them and have good relationships with their reps. They thank us for saving them a lot of time they would have spent reading docs and marketing materials to learn the specific things that applied to them, or for us talking about roadmap stuff they don't get to see in the public materials.
Sometimes the price is a surprise to them and it needs a bit of context. Customers who are used to buying software this way seem to read between the lines really well and ask suitable questions about discounts or whatever, when they are surprised by pricing. Often we are able to make something work at a different price than the typical quote, or we can connect the dots so that the rationale is more clear, or the value requires some customization to be done.
My reps tell me this sorta thing is difficult over email, that nobody makes $10k+ purchases without talking to somebody, so if we can't get you on a call the deal falls over.
So I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the requirement for calls really, but I can understand why reps don't just throw quotes around without some conversation.
Salespeople are the devil.
You should contact to people how they want to be contacted, not how you'd want to be contacted.
It's a difficult incentive design problem though.
Sometimes it could just be a rogue sales/marketing person. But other times it looks like it's probably blessed from the top, if not the startup-CEO personally setting the email marketing tool slider controls to maximum trashy level.
Requires a "professional account" just to register. And tend to refuse gmail accounts to create said microsoft professional account.
So the 30 day trial period you could use to check what's possible and see if you can integrate their shit with your IT infrastructure? Not happening. And if it's a bother just to get to try your shit, I can't fathom how bad the rest of the experience can be so you can keep your AI enhanced CRM, ERP, Dataverse etc.
Deleted Comment
No, I'm the lead integrator at a small-to-medium-sized company. Which means when an engineer brings me in on a project, I have a decent amount of influence on the software and controls hardware we use.
The customer may specify a PLC manufacturer or a particular SCADA system, but unless we're expanding an existing system we usually have a lot of leeway. I know this stuff better than the engineer does (that's my job, after all), so my recommendations are usually accepted.
In this case, corporate management holding the purse strings but their workers (devs) using the actual tools. The solution they offer to founders is to make the user your champion and have them sell your product for you.
"The meta point here is that you're not going to talk to the credit card holder; the user/dev is going to do that for you.
Give them the best possible chance at convincing the leadership. Make them look awesome for even bothering the leadership with a choice like this. Make it obviously awesome for them to decide “yes”. These users/devs are your sales people."
Maybe that works for dev tools with freemium models, but in many industries where this problem arises its just not possible to even get your product in front of the users. Take hospital systems and EHR purchasing where Doctors and Nurses are the users of the EHR day in and day out but it is the hospital administration that ultimately gets to decide which EHR is deployed. How do you get users to be champions of your product if you can't even get it in front of them?
In our early days we had on occasion managed to directly convince non-developer decision makers in an organization to use our product (even though it wasn't an intentional strategy) and this invariably failed unless we also managed to get full buy-in from the developers who will actually use it.
These days we have an explicit rule that we don't go ahead with any customer engagement until we can see that a project's lead developer is fully sold on our product, otherwise we waste loads of time (which is essentially money) on ultimately fruitless retention attempts instead of using the time more productively on ideal customer opportunities.
Now it does depend on the nature of the product though. For a product used by only a small subset of a company (like our product), it's probably a bad strategy to sell to the execs instead of the users. But for a product like an ERP (think SAP, or Oracle ERP), these are deals worth USD millions (sometimes 10s of, or more) and convincing the execs is a highly (or possibly the only) effective strategy.
The school district my kids are changes the parent app almost every year, its always a nightmare for everyone involved, I can't imagine what it is like to work IT in such a place.
We made a "CEO Page" for this purpose:
https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html
But what about cases where the user isn't directly related to the decision maker? Doubly so when it's a hard to justify purchase? (I.e. you're not selling bread or IBM machines.)
For example, say, a keyless entry fob for a car. The driver benefits immensely. The CTO of Ford may probably not even entertain a meeting ("Huh, what does he think, locks are bad or something?! What's wrong with a secure lock?")
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach such a situation if you developed the fob and now want to sell it?
A great example is remote starters. Same idea. Great for the user, not so much for say Ford. The first places I saw these being installed? Stereo shops would use it as a cross selling feature whenever they were selling something else to a customer. I could be wrong, but it took a few years for the manufacturers to start including remote starters as an add-on. Before then, it was all kinds of other shops selling and installing them.
But its a trench warfare type of deal. You have to get into the hands of the people who can install them, then work your way up to approaching dealerships and larger clients.
I've done this with an anti-theft device. Start small, then build your client base and use that as a springboard to get interest from larger clients.
I.e. like you describe I the younger sales rep on the team am going bottom-up after the smallest guys. And my boss, the CEO is going after the top management. We're both selling the same thing but with different argumentation.
The idea is that the buzz of excitement will turn into consensus when everyone in the middle sees approval from the top and positive feedback from the bottom.
Deleted Comment
It sounds like a trivial question to answer, but it just exposes the level of detachment that exists between who makes the purchase decisions and its users in SME context.
Your user is not your buyer, but they can be a distributed salesforce. You need to growth-hack not only for your penetration at the B2B level, but to give them the tools they need to growth-hack their own B2C client bases, with your product at the forefront.
That's a lot to build as a founding team, and occasionally it can be like herding cats - but it can be incredibly lucrative, because you have an incredibly low barrier to entry at the B2B level, but every account naturally scales with value delivered to the end customer.