I've been involved in this for the last 3 years and what works for me is building Proof of Concepts. Neo4j sells an empty database. What I do is take the probl

I've been involved in this for the last 3 years and what works for me is building Proof of Concepts. Neo4j sells an empty database. What I do is take the problem the customer is trying to solve, find the boiled down essence of it, spend about a week building a solution to that problem, and have it ready to show off to upper management by Friday. It brings the risk WAY DOWN to see that in such a short time I can solve the problem. They know that if they spend the next 3 months building the "real software" from what they learned from the POC, they will be successful. It's the best job I've ever had. You get 1 day or so to learn "the business", another day to come up with model and create sample data, a day or 2 to write the queries that solve the problem and finally a day to show it all off. At the end, all the customer cares about is that their problem is solved.