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doesnotexist | 6 months ago

Situations like this are instances of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

In this case, corporate management holding the purse strings but their workers (devs) using the actual tools. The solution they offer to founders is to make the user your champion and have them sell your product for you.

"The meta point here is that you're not going to talk to the credit card holder; the user/dev is going to do that for you.

Give them the best possible chance at convincing the leadership. Make them look awesome for even bothering the leadership with a choice like this. Make it obviously awesome for them to decide “yes”. These users/devs are your sales people."

Maybe that works for dev tools with freemium models, but in many industries where this problem arises its just not possible to even get your product in front of the users. Take hospital systems and EHR purchasing where Doctors and Nurses are the users of the EHR day in and day out but it is the hospital administration that ultimately gets to decide which EHR is deployed. How do you get users to be champions of your product if you can't even get it in front of them?

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hinkley|6 months ago

Too often we get the reverse. Slick salesman targets the person with budgetary discretion while avoiding letting the users in in the transaction, so by the time they can complain about how terrible the product is, the check has already cleared.

jonathanlydall|6 months ago

Speaking as software developer and company co-founder for a product for use by other developers, the company employing those salesmen is very possibly overall losing money on these deals.

In our early days we had on occasion managed to directly convince non-developer decision makers in an organization to use our product (even though it wasn't an intentional strategy) and this invariably failed unless we also managed to get full buy-in from the developers who will actually use it.

These days we have an explicit rule that we don't go ahead with any customer engagement until we can see that a project's lead developer is fully sold on our product, otherwise we waste loads of time (which is essentially money) on ultimately fruitless retention attempts instead of using the time more productively on ideal customer opportunities.

Now it does depend on the nature of the product though. For a product used by only a small subset of a company (like our product), it's probably a bad strategy to sell to the execs instead of the users. But for a product like an ERP (think SAP, or Oracle ERP), these are deals worth USD millions (sometimes 10s of, or more) and convincing the execs is a highly (or possibly the only) effective strategy.

mlinhares|6 months ago

Yup, then the technical people have to deal with the bullshit and nightmare that is implementing the shitty thing that was purchased. Hard to get around this in large enterprises, someone just decides they're going to use some shitty tool (like that cloud provider no one uses but has great sales folks) and you just get a notice you have to migrate all your apps to the new thing in 3 months cos they got a better contract there.

The school district my kids are changes the parent app almost every year, its always a nightmare for everyone involved, I can't imagine what it is like to work IT in such a place.