How we get users
Life lessons from an enterprise software consultant
Enterprise is hard. Sales is hard. That’s why we are really trying to avoid both.
From my experience as a consultant, spending months trying to close a deal with a potential customer is a grueling gauntlet that slowly chips away at your sanity, sale after sale. And that’s just the sale! There is still the month/s long implementation, go-live, transition to support… and on and on and on. I do think you have to be a special kind of individual to persist in that industry and that soulless corpo-speak is the end state for any business targeting that market.
We are focused on one thing and on thing only - the users of our ICP - and therefore by extension the ICP itself.
This means no sales team, no cold outreach and no shady sales tactics. For us we prefer story telling - useful content is our marketing. Our Customer Success Teams are focused on helping our users succeed on Lucrii and in their businesses, not to sell additional SKUs.
From my experience, the death spiral starts early on. Building sales, you begin optimising for sales (rather than your users) slowly over time you consume your good will and word of mouth growth growth and end up with having to sell more to make up for that loss. An ouroboros. A self-eating prophecy.
Our products and our users above all
In an ideal world our product sells itself. Everyone talks about product-led sales, and many claim to do it. But it’s an ideal state, which means few do it well, if really at all. We understand the pitfalls and so we use it as our baseline, our guiding star. For us that means relying on word of mouth of our users to drive our growth, coupled with effective content and story telling. It’s important we also remove as much friction as possible for anyone to get started with our products. There is nothing worse than a ‘Contact Us’ button on a website to just see what the product does.
In order to even begin to achieve the above it means we need a really good product, and we need to be able to understand our users inside and out. With all that in mind, hopefully it will help frame a lot of how we operate as a business and how we govern our approach to product development.
Marketing is story telling
We are in a bloated market, dealing with some big players who have far greater resources than we do. We are a small team with a small budget. So any kind of volume or placement marketing is out of the question. Sure we could spend $100,000 on google ads, but then thats $100,000 that hasn’t been spent on bettering our products. It’s an equation that just doesn’t make sense to us.
So instead, we focus on quality, we focus on honesty and we focus on story telling. All these things help build our brand and drive our product-led and word-of-mouth growth. This is not too hard when your focus is already on building outstandingly good products.
This also means we try to be a bit different, and have a bit of fun with it. So many companies are very serious in the way they operate, in the way they build produts. Why? Achievements in our product, Hermes, our fun dither art style, our jokes - they are all part of that story telling.
Our website, our brand, our business are all products
Lucrii isn’t the only ‘product’ we build. Our brand, our company and our website are all products as well, and our approach we take to them reflects that. In this sense our website and our marketing is our sales team, and deserves the same respect. For our business and our brand this means reflecting hard, reflecting often and ensuring that we are always aligned to our users.
So many businesses treat these other aspects as tertiary, but I do think they are as equally important. I always roll my eyes when companies refer to their website as a “marketing website” or ‘lead funnel’. Have you noticed our website doesn’t have a ‘Contact Us’ button anywhere?
No friction, all fun
NO CONTACT US NOW BUTTON. Jokes aside, this means that customers buy from us, we don’t sell to them. Most companies in our space, you have to:
Fill in a contact form —> Wait a few days —> Get a response to set up a meeting —> Have a meeting to discuss your needs —> Have another meeting to get a demo —> Then another meeting to hear commercials and FINALLY get a price. Then and only then can you usually actually trial the product where you quickly learn what they showed in the demo was just the shiny bits and your day to day use of the tool is a warts-and-all experience.
It really doesn’t have to be like that at all. So… we are just not doing any of that. Ever.
Things change, we keep learning - and thats ok.
One thing to keep in mind is that all of the above is our view of the world right now. Our ideals and our philosophy won’t change, but our methods and approach might. We don’t have all the answers and we constantly reflect on what works, what doesn’t and whats right for us and our users.
This is a journey and we will continue to evolve but we will never compromise on delivering world-class products.