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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
by nordsieck 7y ago
> 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.
- kortilla 7y agoSlack? 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.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoPeople can use it outside work though, and then propose it at work.
- blowski 7y agoI'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?".
- jakobmi 7y agoDropbox ultimately failed at B2B, and Box/Azure/Apple/Amazon/Google/ and others have taken their spot way before Dropbox opened up a B2B product.