The main insight here is that people don't need more software. There are a lot of people out there that can validate whether your product is cool, or provides something that nobody else does, or that there is a pain point they're currently working around. But especially in B2B, most people aren't in the business of buying software.
To get around this, you need to paint the picture of what life will be like after they've bought your software. With good products, this can be as easy as explaining it to them, then helping them rally the support to sign the $25,000 check to purchase the software. With less good products, this can mean doing providing real, actionable advice that the software sort of supports.
I'll give you an example. I used to sell performance monitoring software: think of New Relic or Datadog, but better for distributed environments. This is pretty crucial for bigger teams, as performance problems tend to cross ownership boundaries. Most engineers believe that performance is important. However, it is not easy to convince any given engineer to make performance their crusade, especially their crusade across multiple teams. So not only do they have to be convinced the product is easy to set up and maintain (a good onboarding flow in product can do most of this for you), but you also need to educate them on how to sell this to their boss and how to evangelize this to other teams. Or go evangelize for them. Our best customers had one person who was fired up about what we did, but a lot of their help was to point us to the right 5 people in their organization that might also care about performance.
Freemium helps here, but if the main problem is "getting my coworkers to care sounds hard", freemium and frictionless signup will never be the answer. So you need to sell the product, even if it's something the organization desperately needs.
The main insight here is that people don't need more software. There are a lot of people out there that can validate whether your product is cool, or provides something that nobody else does, or that there is a pain point they're currently working around. But especially in B2B, most people aren't in the business of buying software.
To get around this, you need to paint the picture of what life will be like after they've bought your software. With good products, this can be as easy as explaining it to them, then helping them rally the support to sign the $25,000 check to purchase the software. With less good products, this can mean doing providing real, actionable advice that the software sort of supports.
I'll give you an example. I used to sell performance monitoring software: think of New Relic or Datadog, but better for distributed environments. This is pretty crucial for bigger teams, as performance problems tend to cross ownership boundaries. Most engineers believe that performance is important. However, it is not easy to convince any given engineer to make performance their crusade, especially their crusade across multiple teams. So not only do they have to be convinced the product is easy to set up and maintain (a good onboarding flow in product can do most of this for you), but you also need to educate them on how to sell this to their boss and how to evangelize this to other teams. Or go evangelize for them. Our best customers had one person who was fired up about what we did, but a lot of their help was to point us to the right 5 people in their organization that might also care about performance.
Freemium helps here, but if the main problem is "getting my coworkers to care sounds hard", freemium and frictionless signup will never be the answer. So you need to sell the product, even if it's something the organization desperately needs.