Exactly, one of these two things is more likely to get you in the door, look splashy on demos, and convert an evaluation into a PO.

The other might help get you a renewal after the initial contract is up, but on the other hand, once something is in the budget and established, it has to be really, really awful to get kicked out and go through the process of finding a replacement. Voila, enterprise software!

I feel you can also sell from the bottom.

Slack, for example, a lot of the requests came from engineers to work with it.

The product has to be REALLY good though, for most, this is a very hard sell

Ehh, most of the engineers at our org would have been happy to stick with Hangouts and just commenting on PRs and JIRA tickets. Slack adoption ended up being driven from non-engineering groups like marketing and sales, and then eventually mandated from the executive level.

Too many conversations are held in Slack and not in the tickets, now.

It's a weird thing, because JIRA can end up having so many fields and so much enforced process that it feels like there's a lot of overhead associated with creating and closing tickets, and you always know that those actions are potentially feeding into and messing up someone's reporting somewhere.

So you end up talking on Slack about an issue someone's noticed, and then trying to decide whether it's "worth" the bother of creating a ticket for, or if someone's aware of a ticket already for it, or or or.

You also have to know your audience.

storytime:

We had a demo scheduled with a company. We were shopping for a security auditing system for dependencies across all GitHub repositories.

The person going through the demo did an absolutely terrible job at reading the room and understanding who they sell to (right now). Focused a lot on reporting, compliance while we cared more about the mechanics.

Sales pro tip: The first thing out of your mouth when trying to sell someone is to ask who they are and what they need. Once you have established those two things, you then tailor your pitch to match exactly that and no more. For example, if you're selling a Thingmabob and your target is a small dentist office in the mid-west concerned about filling their schedule, then spend the time telling them about how other dentists' offices have used your product to attract new customers. Don't spend any time telling them about how Thingmabob helps to drive down costs even though it does this 3x better than the competition. Sell people what they are buying not what you are selling!

You can present to people, or be present to people. Sales would be much better if it was much more of the latter.

Kevin from http://fossa.io here. Did this happen to be us?

If so, I’d love to hear you feedback on our demo, if not I’d love to offer you a demo.

[email protected]

funny how Kevin's nick is XiZhao

Not really that funny -- a lot of people with Chinese (I think?) names also adopt an American name to make it easier for people to spell, pronounce, etc.

Yeah, my name is Kevin (Xi Zhao) Wang.

But the funny thing is that a slightly different pronunciation of "Xi Zhao" changes the meaning from (roughly) "western prosperity" to "morning bath".

Can confirm. I have basic Mandarin and I would have definitely thought of you as the guy named "take a shower" if you never explained.

I've been a member of a very traditional Chinese martial arts club for years. I've only ever known most people by their Chinese name and been surprised at times when I catch them being referred to by a Western name. Others use either inconsistently or are mostly known by the Western name, so it happens here in Australia too.

Wasn't you :)

But I am now actively looking at it.

Look at https://datree.io also. Disclaimer: They’re a client.