> Enterprises buy what other enterprises have already approved.
I understand why vendors believe this. But I had my share of purchasing discussions when I worked in Enterprise IT, and this was a factor in our decision-making literally zero times.
But we never told the sale guys that when they put a bunch of logos into a presentation. We smiled and nodded at all the crap they threw at us, and then promptly ignored 80% of it and discussed the 20% that really mattered behind closed doors once the sales guys had gone home. And most of the time, it was an analysis of many factors, including how well their capabilities matches our needs, whether their pricing was cheaper than the "build" option with internal talent, and how low-maintenance it would be. We loved buying solutions that affordably provided direct solutions to business needs that did not impact the work of IT department at all. That is why SaaS has taken over, BTW... not because the solutions are better that what could be built internally, but because it lets the internal IT shop just get rid of one problem, so they can spend their time on other problems.
That is truly how to hit product/market fit for an Enterprise product. Just make a problem disappear for the IT folks, and they'll buy.
With all due respect, this is more often than not what IT people think is happening, meanwhile the person signing the check is talking behind their backs to see if anyone else in the industry is using the product and how they're using it.
It's more prevalent in certain industries than others, and some IT people may have more sway than others, but inferring that logos aren't valuable is a terrible take.
Not necessarily the logos in the presentation, but I saw a lot of purchases where knowing someone who used the product in other similar companies was a decisive factor in the purchase. These meetings that you mention would almost always involve something in the lines of ”I will ping a friend on company X using this and check what they think of it”. Or the product was being considered in the first place because someone had worked on a company that used it or a friend working on another company have recommended it.
OP here. Agree with this. Lack of logos means that you need to do a lot more due diligence so the buyer has to really sneak their head out and put a stake on the ground to buy the product. References & logos make it far easier to justify that the product is well respected and make the process easier. It helps avoid the question: "am I the sucker?"
When I worked in Enterprise IT evaluating new products for a Fortune 50 company it was pretty much the same way. The three biggest things that we looked at were functionality, support and the stability of the company.
We needed to know that it could do what we needed it to do and that there were enough support resources that we could get someone on the phone if we had an emergency. It is not cheap to integrate new software into the systems and processes of a large company so we also needed to know that we weren't going to put in that effort and then have the company go under a year later.
Support and stability were the two biggest issues that limited adoption for early stage startups. We didn't care if you had any big name customers. We just needed to know that your product did what we needed and you'd be able to support us for the long term.
Not really. Longevity and financials were how we identified stability. If the company had been around for a while and/or could demonstrate that they had enough runway to last for a couple years, then we considered them stable.
We had enough experience with startups who would sell one license to a big company and then throw their logo on the slide that knew the logos didn't mean anything.
Good traction is a useful proxy for stability no? Not necessarily “big names”, but being the first customer of startup would probably be an automatic no according to your criteria, no?
Agree with all of that, except that for some companies logos are used as a substitute for internal expertise.
Most people who know what they're about will also know that companies sometimes pay to have other companies use their product, just for the logo on the presentation. Or that it could just be used in one little local office of a multinational. Or that it's just shelfware, bundled with whatever it is they bought that they actually wanted.
Everyone else thinks, "Oh wow, X are using it? Must be good!" And it grabs those people as customers. And that's why it's done.
I speak to a lot of enterprise buyers ands startups and it's definitely a major issue when it comes to buying products, especially from a startup.
There's a big difference between what a product does in theory vs in practice - and social proof is a big guiding factor for what it can do in practice.
> when I worked in Enterprise IT, and this was a factor in our decision-making literally zero times.
I believe this (i.e. credibility) is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement in B2B sales. If a company/product doesn't establish enough credibility it won't even be considered for further discussions/approval in many cases. It seems that in your purchasing experience the credibility criteria was already met, so your team didn't even bothered to review the "many logos" slide from the sales pitch.
Many B2B startups (including my own mobile market research startup) struggle to reach this credibility threshold. It's a critical factor for scaling sales. Most big companies aren't willing to buy from a startup they've never heard of, no matter how great their product is.
> cheaper than the "build" option with internal talent
I'm curious how that gets evaluated, is it more of a ballpark estimate or is there a more formal process involving engineering teams providing time and effort estimates?
It’s got to do with buy-in-risk. How much of a risk are we willing to buy into? If they have other enterprise customers, there are things they should already set their org for , like uptime-support for SLAs etc
Hm. I think of my time in IT at big finance. Where the software solution was bought and paid for before IT even knew what was happening. For many enterprise IT is not the King you make them out to be.
At my startup [0] it's still early days, but we're trying to use the Superhuman "engine" [1] for testing PMF. Basically this is a survey where you ask your users how disappointed they'd be if they couldn't use your product anymore, and if enough say "very disappointed", then you're on to something. By no means is it the only/best measure of PMF, but it's a data point.
OP here. Superhuman's framework is great, but in many enterprises the buyer and decision maker is different - most times you have to build a stronger justification for the exec sponsor to pull the trigger using the value/RoI framework unless the product is cheap enough to flow below the radar. You also need to justify why it makes sense to yank out what you have right now and replace with something else causing a lot of disruption.
Superhuman is not a b2b purchase but more of a prosumer purchase, so the framework works really well for them.
This definitely resonates. We’re building a product management/issue tracker and it sometimes happy that we have very satisfied users who are then forced into using Jira or something else because of company-wide mandates.
A company I worked for used this measure and customers were consistently confused by the wording. Happy customers would respond Not Disappointed At All and we'd have to followup and double check if that's what they actually meant (it wasn't).
In your experience, how does that compare to measuring continual "use" of your product, like churn, cohort tracking, and others?
From the linked article, I'd say the "what's missing" question is perhaps the best signal, if customers list tons of missing things yet continue using the product despite those shortcomings, as measured by usage stats for instance, then you know you not only have PMF but also the beginnings of a lock on the market.
OP here. Always a good place to be in. Hard numbers is more valuable but you need to think about how to address the concerns else you will hit a glass ceiling, or the moment they find an alternative they will jump. Thinking about lock-in is very important.
Your product looks interesting. Only blocker for me is that you only bill annually. This is SaaS, there is very little onboarding cost, why lock people in?
Help me understand what strategies you used to get response from potential customers? I can't even get people respond to me. Reddit and forum bans surveys. Folks joining communities rarely respond to PM. How can I see product-market fit then?
Do you any reference material I can read for writing cold emails and fine tuning the content? I have sent nearly 70 emails but so far I do not have a single response. May be my content is not powerful or emails are not reaching right audience.
It's incredibly hard to get 'qualitative' feedback. Cold emails, or phone calls work best. However, the best thing is to look at the data and if customers vote with their wallet or with their feet.
I like the idea of asking for payment during prototype demonstration, and watching how the surprise plays out (an idea I saw somewhere in one of the links in this article), but I could see it being fairly risky. Are there downsides to trying this that folks have experienced?
Strongly believe that you should ask for payment - until then everybody gives nice feedback. But the proof of the putting is in pulling your card/checkbook/Purchase Order out and eating the pudding.
I understand why vendors believe this. But I had my share of purchasing discussions when I worked in Enterprise IT, and this was a factor in our decision-making literally zero times.
But we never told the sale guys that when they put a bunch of logos into a presentation. We smiled and nodded at all the crap they threw at us, and then promptly ignored 80% of it and discussed the 20% that really mattered behind closed doors once the sales guys had gone home. And most of the time, it was an analysis of many factors, including how well their capabilities matches our needs, whether their pricing was cheaper than the "build" option with internal talent, and how low-maintenance it would be. We loved buying solutions that affordably provided direct solutions to business needs that did not impact the work of IT department at all. That is why SaaS has taken over, BTW... not because the solutions are better that what could be built internally, but because it lets the internal IT shop just get rid of one problem, so they can spend their time on other problems.
That is truly how to hit product/market fit for an Enterprise product. Just make a problem disappear for the IT folks, and they'll buy.