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Ask HN: How to pre-sell B2B software?

8 points by 6thSigma ↗ HN
We're building a B2B specifically for software companies. We are a couple months away from a beta, but we've received advice to start pre-selling our software.

What's the best way to pre-sell B2B software? We don't have a fully functioning product yet - but we have enough of a prototype ready to get a feel for how it's going to work.

Do pre-launch websites work? Should we just cold email companies? Should we wait until we are closer to an MVP to start selling?

7 comments

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palidanx
Just my two cents, but if you know your core functionality, you can try to meet your stakeholders and build a relationship before the sale.

For my b2b saas product, I pitched the product to local businesses just to see how it would work. They gave some valuable feedback to change the product, then I cold e-mailed prospects.

As much as I don't like buying templates, the cold e-mail template from appsumo really worked well for me

http://www.appsumo.com/sumo-email-templates/

alexdevkar
If you are able to sell your product before it's ready, that is a great sign that you've found a customer's pain point. However, selling vapor-ware can be very hard. And you don't want to start your relationship with a customer with delays and buggy software.

Instead of pre-selling, consider talking to customers about what you're working on, having them take a look at the prototype and getting their feedback. You might not get the clear signal of a buy/no buy decision, but you will get help understanding what really matters in your product.

As always, depends on the particular business. Good luck!

andydrish
Very cool. What is the product?

At this point, I wouldn't put any energy into the product. I would focus all of your efforts on selling until you have 3 to 5 customers who have paid you.

Here are two case studies on people pre-selling B2B based software companies before writing a line of code:

Carl sold a few grand building software for physical therapist offices: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/research-validation-profit...

Josh - Sold $22K in sales with 73 customers. Selling CRM software. http://thefoundation.com/josh-story/

What other questions do you have? Here to help.

6thSigma
It's a real-time employee feedback service for software companies. It's kind of like Salesforce's Work.com[1] but tailored for software development teams. We also help gauge relative productivity of employees.

[1] http://work.com/

kayhi
Andy, nice seeing you on Hacker News, keep up the great work and send Dane my best.
fbliss
How about setting up a presentation/web conference? Then call and invite people over the phone. I think you're more likely to have success than cold email - I've got an ongoing project where we had 0 success with cold emailing, even with very personalized approaches. Hour for hour, the more you can engage someone via live exchange, the better.