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Product-market fit for a B2B company

dayzero.substack.com

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Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#31

Post by saastring »

tchock23 wrote: post #27
chaBha wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an approach called QVC (Question, Value, Call to Action) that can be surprisingly effective if used appropriately. Templates and more here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.leadfuze.com/cold-email-out...

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.

Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#32

Post by th3iedkid »

codingdave wrote: post #2

> 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%…

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

Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#33

Post by Toenex »

kpowerinfinity wrote: post #15
kevsim wrote: post #6

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. 0: https://kitemaker.co 1: https://firstround.com…

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…

Yes in this case it can be seen as a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#34

Post by cheschire »

peterwoerner wrote: post #30
davidivadavid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also affects us subconsciously even when we make a conspicuous effort to ignore it and are cognizant of the underlying bias.

Anyone who doubts this should try shopping for medicine in a foreign drug store.

Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#35

Post by kevsim »

kevsim wrote: post #20
kpowerinfinity wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

*sometimes happens

Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#36

Post by tcgv »

codingdave wrote: post #2

> 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%…

> 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.

Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#37

Post by kevsim »

thestepafter wrote: post #22
kevsim wrote: post #6

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. 0: https://kitemaker.co 1: https://firstround.com…

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?

We added the pricing with monthly billing cycles now. Thanks for catching it!

Re: Product-market fit for a B2B company

#38

Post by akamia »

rpedela wrote: post #28
akamia wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Yeah those logos help with the stability part. Obviously logos alone does not prove stability, but it is one signal.

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.

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