Enterprise companies are often large, quite slow, and messy. Which means that the buying process for enterprise software is often large, quite slow, and messy. This process is vastly different to the world of B2C because rather than selling your product to just one individual, you’re selling it to an individual, who’s part of a team, that is part of an organisation with hundreds of people. This means more conversations, more layers, and more stakeholders. Despite this, there is a lot you can do as a seller to anticipate and streamline the buying process – increasing the chances that a business will choose you over your comparators.
From being on both the buyer and seller side of enterprise software I’ve discovered that what seems like a lot to consider can actually effectively be broken down into 4 main elements that businesses typically look for when comparing solutions to find the right fit. These are the 4 elements you want to address on your website, elevate in your marketing, and continue to test messaging around to ensure you have the most effective narrative. They are the 4Ps of enterprise software:
Performance, Price, Profit, and Privacy.
Performance simply speaks to how well your product works. What features are included, what benefits do they offer, how well it is designed, whether it feel like something you’d enjoy using. Part of assessing performance is also discovering how well the product works in tandem with other tools within the companies existing stack – ensuring your tool is effectively adding value to the whole ecosystem and not just operating in a silo.
Price is self-explanatory too. This addresses a focus on your business model, how much the software costs, and how these costs are broken down over time.
Profit is all about ROI and the extent to which this product will cause a saving and/or improve a process. Whether that be saving time, saving cost, improving capabilities etc. Within this prospects are also interested to see how other customers have benefited from your solution. So this is where customer stories, testimonials, and showcases come into play.
Last but by certainly no means least is privacy. This is an aspect often overlooked but is becoming an increasing more important part of the procurement process for Enterprises. Centre of attention is the question ‘How safe is my data?’ Customers want to know you’re a trustworthy partner and expect to see information about how their data is stored and processed. Now more than ever, with the rise of many tools being built entirely on AI, customers are adding an extra layer of scrutiny in this area to ensure their data is not being used for training models or sold to third-party organisations without authorisation.
The whole process tends to go something like this: In the first stage, it’s often your ICP (ideal customer profile) or someone near enough to it that discovers and evaluates your solution, primarily focusing on performance and profit as they determine whether this could solve their problem. Next, this champion might request a demo to learn more and share findings with their team or manager, where performance, profit, and price become the core evaluation criteria, often in that order of importance. If all goes well and the team are keen, the third stage involves organisational approval from multiple stakeholders who each scrutinise different aspects of the offering. Finance examines price and budget alignment, security teams evaluate privacy and compliance measures, whilst legal reviews contract terms and risk factors. Another level of approval to consider here is C-suite. Whether early in the buying process or later, CEO’s are now being actively more involved in the procurement process – scrutinising products and ensuring that the tech suite across the company is more consolidated and streamlined.
How you address these 4 main elements and the channels you use to communicate your value in each one is up to you, but ensuring you’re aware of these factors and constantly improving your messaging around them is vital to increase your likelihood of appeasing all stakeholders throughout the buying process. The framework's power lies in its predictability – by systematically addressing these apprehensions before they even arise, you can better anticipate objections, prepare targeted responses, and guide prospects through their buying journey more effectively than any other comparator they may be considering.