Having participated in numerous negotiations, evaluations and POCs, these are three things I look for in B2B Software (particularly startups):
I saw multiple opportunities missed because the pricing model was too rigid.
When the first quote is presented to a manager or executive, their immediate thought should be “that’s not too bad” before she even knows what the product does.
Perception matters more than the value. Make it look like a bargain, regardless of how great the product is.
- If total costs are higher than hiring an engineer, it will immediately lead to the "we can build it ourselves given enough time" thought distortion. If possible, avoid that.
- Give it for free for as a long as you can. It is more important to get product into customers hands for thorough evaluation than making a sale.
- Provide cost management as a feature. Monitor how the product is used (or not used) and detect optimization opportunities proactively. Ensure the customer gets the biggest ROI.
- If you charge for traffic or data volume, make margins low. Such models become cost prohibitive at scale. Avoid if at all possible.
- Give discounts for economies of scale.
- Allow customers to run software on their infrastructure, if desired.
Software should be built to and integrate with proprietary code, popular open source and paid tools and ecosystems.
- Streamline installation into customer’s infrastructure and environment. This is crucial to making a good impression during evaluation and POC.
- Provide out of the box integrations with everything that the customer may be using (AWS, GCP, GitHub, Gitlab, Atlassian, Jenkins, k8s, CNCF projects, etc.)
- Make it easy to build custom plugins and integrations, including for the UI. Provide flexible API.
KISS principle is a standard best practice in software development. It is often violated in order to inflate the perceived value.
The impression is the opposite: the customer may think they are paying for more than they truly need. Additionally, the architecture of the solution might appear inflexible.
- Simpler means easier maintenance, better resiliency, more frequent updates.
- Even if you deliver a polished E2E experience, prefer specialized granular products, different packages and plans.
Great sentiment here. Thanks for sharing Alexander