Ask HN: Why should businesses drop their software for my enterprise solution?
Businesses will switch to a third-party solution if the perceived cost savings, benefits, and risks line up. SAP, SalesForce, and WordPress successfully replaced custom software, just to give three examples.<p>You have to frame your pitch or proposition to address what a business owner (or whomever makes the decisions) will care about: cost, savings, benefits and business value, and risk. I’ve sat in on presentations and seen the software sales people unprepared to address what should have been obvious concerns about risk. A business owner will probably want to know if they will own and control their data, how it might be used, if they can get their data out. The CTO will likely ask about integration, customizing, and migration.<p>Asking a company to commit to a new platform or solution means asking the company to trust you. Potential customers have to trust that you can deliver a working solution, that you can maintain the software and support them, and that they won’t experience a lot of headaches.<p>Getting early adopters is tough because you won’t have a lot of success stories to point to. You may find it easier to pitch to businesses that need but don’t have a solution in place rather than to those that do, to ease the credibility question.<p>I think Steve Jobs said that you need to show customers something ten times better than what they have, not just an incremental improvement. You can focus on the improvements in terms of cutting costs, greater functionality, or reducing risk.<p>I would be careful about framing savings solely in terms of reducing software development cost, because some customers will interpret that as eliminating jobs, and that will cause internal resistance. Instead frame the savings as freeing up resources from mundane tasks for more important things.<p>I’ve seen companies resist and reject third-party solutions because they have invested in custom software. It may be sunk cost fallacy, it may be ego. You want to avoid criticizing what they have done internally and present your solution as a good path forward.