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Comment by goatherders | Hacker News Reader

I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that. Solutions that sell upwards in an org (yammer for example) are very much the exception.

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> I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that.

It's possible to "sell" directly to users, but you have to have a particular pricing structure: free to individuals.

This is what TravisCI, Dropbox and Slack did.

You actually have to have a really good product to pull this off, though.

Slack? In every company I know that uses it, it was blessed by IT. It’s hard to adopt for a subset of users in the company.

People can use it outside work though, and then propose it at work.

I've had the opposite experience. The developers start using Slack, then invite PMs, BAs, QAs, etc, they work with. Then the PMs start using it to talk to each other. Eventually, someone from compliance says "we need to pay for this to have a full audit log", and someone from IT says "what's the JML process for this?".

Dropbox ultimately failed at B2B, and Box/Azure/Apple/Amazon/Google/ and others have taken their spot way before Dropbox opened up a B2B product.

Yes though it’s more complicated than this. Executives often don’t have time for every purchasing decision. And a lot of “CEO plays golf with other CEO” don’t lead to purchasing decisions that gain traction with anyone at the client that has to work in the problem domain, and can lead to dissapointing results for the purchasing org.

What you want is the right level of decision making for what you’re selling. Sometimes it’s a skip level manager with budgetary authority and expertise to champion purchasing. Other times it’s many different stakeholders up and down the org chart (from end users to execs).

In my experience you won’t get exec buy in if you don’t have their subordinates and others championing you as the best choice. If the in house expert in the domain isn’t interested, you won’t succeed with the executive.

This depends on how much the executive values the experts opinions. For a callcenter, or any other support group, I think this is close to zero (e.g. anyone can do that job).

This is spot on. I'm working on a blog post about a superset of this: the product IS the go-to-market. Messaging, sales/marketing strategy, pricing are just as much The Product as any feature.

Ideally you maximize value/experience for users while you figure out how to get execs to buy your thing, but the sad state of most B2B software is a testament to how insanely hard it is to be good at both.

Can you post a link to your blog ?

https://www.ft.io/blog/

I would hope that making employees effective and efficient would be a selling point for executives. And the idea of charts and graphs shouldn't just be for execs.

If someone wants to really optimize for exec only, just do it the old fashioned way and bribe them. That's probably cheaper than making functional software, right?

You would hope, but that is a macro decision that rarely gets into the details of the tools themselves. I've been C level at two tech companies that both grossed more than 70m annually and served tens of thousands of customers. In all cases at both companies the decisions made on SW tools were about cost, ROI, ease of migration/implementation and what present pain the tool solved at the exec level. "Will our support people be more efficient with this tool" and similar questions never ever came up. We migrated from ZenDesk to ServiceNow for support ticketing and the decision mostly hinged on the integration with Salesforce and the TCO, not on the functionality of the tool itself.

It’s not selling to executives vs users. Good sales process targets both - with different messages.

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