Sell at the top and wow at the bottom

While at Predikto, one of the mistakes we made is that we focused too much on middle management from a sales and product fit perspective.

I have seen companies like IBM, Palantir, AWS, and Microsoft do a great job selling at the top. They try to get into the C-suite of their customers to influence at the top and get a large value based contract in place worth millions. But, if the product does not work or does not deliver value to the boots on the ground, you will struggle to get adoption and penetration.

I think Palantir does a great job of selling at the CEO level and focusing all of their energy and attention to the users of their software at the lowest levels of the organization. They literally ignore middle management. If the end users without direct reports and zero purchasing power are turned into heroes with the use of that “technology” or “platform”, they will become your biggest supporters and influencers inside the large enterprise.

The power of having users go to their boss with a report, analytical insight, or an aha moment is priceless. It allows the users from within do all the selling and influencing for you.

If the lowest level users can make their boss look good and in turn this boss can turn around and show the nugget of insight or value to their boss, it will eventually become an avalanche of support that will make it to the top in order to get the green light to sign the deal.

I have seen too many software companies focus a lot of time and energy with the middle managers who have the purchasing power to buy, but will always need the input from their team (the users) to pull the trigger on the purchase.

Uptake, Chicago based startup, is an example of a startup with immense access and ability to get to the top of an organization, but the product never delivered value to the end users. Therefore, the deals would never expand.

Another example of a company who mushroomed quickly with user adoption is Splunk. In the early days, you can download a free version of Splunk, install it on your desktop, and upload a huge amount of log files quickly to slice and dice the data. Users were walking into their bosses offices with insights within the first hour after getting started with the tool. It created fans within minutes and fueled their growth.

Have you seen other companies sell software at the top, focus on creating heroes at the bottom, and ignoring the middle?