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Contrary to the main sentiment in this thread I've done B2B sales with no prior connections whatsoever. My approach is threefold. Build something that either do
by elorant 7y ago
Contrary to the main sentiment in this thread I've done B2B sales with no prior connections whatsoever. My approach is threefold. Build something that either doesn't exist or is considerably better and cheaper than competition. Give amply time for demoing, like six months free with no strings attached. Be patient.
If I had to choose one approach I'd say demo your service for months so they can get accustomed to it. Most companies I know give demos for very short time-spans. If you give a one month demo the client might not even get the chance to look at it because he has fifty other things to do. Let him get accustomed in using it, making it a part of his workflow.
- sandstrom 7y agoI guess this assumes that the product can be used by a single person, or a small group of people, and don’t require a lot of setup. For example systems monitoring, or a group-wide collaboration tool, makes things harder. I still like the idea though!
- elorant 7y agoYes, that's true. I should also mention that it applies to product/services in the region of a few hundred bucks annually. I guess you can't sell a $30k/year contract just by showing a demo.
- user5994461 7y agoCounter point: I've been doing integration for system monitoring things, this can be fully integrated in a few days. The new trendy (and really great tool) is datadog, a HN company. They went out the window when the trial expired after 1 week and their asshole sales were at war against any extension. How am I supposed to demo the tool and sell it internally when it can't even be accessed? As if it were not enough, they kept calling day after day to try force the sale. Then they got banned soon afterwards, after some mid level folks got a hold of both of these practices. Nobody wants to deal with that.
- tixocloud 7y agoAcross the plethora of system monitoring apps who all claim they can do everything, how do you decide and identify what fits?
- user5994461 7y agoThere are no apps that can do everything, there are different use cases that require at least 3 different tools to cover logs, system metrics, application metrics, alerts and performance instrumentation. If you've never worked in that domain, you can trial the tool and figure out what they're about. Short version is to go for ELK + Datadog + NewRelic.
- tixocloud 7y agoInteresting. What does Datadog cover that NewRelic doesn’t?
- perlgeek 7y agoAgreed on the demo time. If it takes non-trivial infrastructure (firewalls, AD integration, what have you), it can take 2 or 3 months just to get the demo running. If your demo license only lasts two weeks, no decision maker ever sees a running instance, but sometimes somebody in the chain is too embarrassed to admit it took so long.