Selling the Process

I have been selling software for 20 years now, to all kinds of customers, both small and large. I find it interesting how each company goes about evaluating and buying software. Some companies like to issue an RFP. Invite vendors to respond and be part of their process. This is usually a very lengthy, time consuming and heavy effort, which may or may not result in a software purchase. At the other end of the spectrum, some companies will do their own due diligence, evaluate a couple of vendors in the space, sometimes do a free trial and even come to a decision without any vendor involvement. This rarely happens with enterprise companies. The majority are somewhere in the middle, they are willing to engage their own resources to do a proper evaluation and engage to the vendor for support, best practices and advise.

Companies are spending on average 29% of IT budgets on software. This also includes updates (on average every 3 years) About 40% of software purchases are driven from end user need. The teams that engage with the vendors are typically users of the proposed software or a central IT functional team. They may or may not have a lot of experience in buying software. It is my belief that any purchase is an emotional decision. If you think of the last thing you purchased, it was an emotional response that drove you to buy it. You wanted/needed it! Same with software. The customer has to believe that their lives will be better with the particular software product. It will make their life easier and more productive. A noticeable change for the better.

Nobody knows the vendor’s software solution better than the vendor, after all they are the creators of the software. So why do customers insist on driving the evaluation process of a software sale? Most software companies today are selling subscription software, where your license to use is limited by time. In order to continue using the software, as assumingly derive benefit from it, they must renew their licenses. This is completely up to the customer. They can cancel or not renew if they wish. Therefore, it is in the software vendors interest to have a happy customer so they will continue the relationship indefinitely. Gone are the days of selling a solution and running away. Same with selling shelf-ware. Customers will simply not renew. There are now dedicated teams like customer success ensuring that customers will derive benefit from their purchase and use the software as intended.

At Starburst we are committed to our customers deriving benefit from our software and solving their problems around data access. We believe in optionality, not being locked into proprietary technology or a specific environment. As the founders and most of the developers of the presto/trino OSS project work at Starburst, we are the definitive owners and own the most IP on our source technology. Our sales teams engage with several dozens of customers each quarter that are interested in our technology. It is natural to say then we know the best and most effective way to evaluate our technology. We have developed a customer centric approach of fairly and objectively evaluating whether Starburst will solve your data access challenges.

It looks something like this….

First off both parties need to mutually agree on fit. This requires discovery call(s) with the customer. Sometimes we talk to people from the company who don’t face any of the challenges we solve, or they aren’t responsible for this area, or they are just a user who is frustrated by these issues. So, it may take a couple of calls to get to the right people. The call is a mix between discovery, aka, understanding the technical issues and the associated business problem the customer is facing and educating the customer about Starburst and our solution. Also, what is useful here are some of the use cases other customers have faced and solved with Starburst. If an agreement is not reached in terms of fit, both parties walk away. No problem. Otherwise, it’s important to identify an Executive Sponsor (EB) or buyer. This is ultimately someone who either has budget or can get budget for this project. Additionally, this person likely is the owner of the business or technical pain associated with the problem Starburst is aiming to solve.

Once the EB is identified, we would engage in a use case workshop. Here the customer clearly lays out the challenges being faced, including things like, which people are involved, the current process in getting access to data, and the technologies used. We formulate a use case that either is something lacking today, aka, they cannot do it or something that does not work well (takes a lot of time and effort). In defining the use case we document what are the required capabilities for this use case to be successful. This ultimately becomes the plan to execute an evaluation of our solution. At this phase it is also useful to quantify the business value this use case has with the company.

We put together a business case and evaluation plan including clearly defined success criteria with all the inputs from this process and present it to the EB for approval to proceed with our plan. If approved, we move forward to execute the technical validation of the solution in the customer’s environment. This entails a Solution Architect from Starburst work with the customer team assigned for this evaluation. Typically, we can wrap up this part of the process in 2 weeks assuming the right resources are available during this period. Sometimes it can take a bit longer. Sometimes this is not even required. Sometimes what the customer needs to see from our software can be done simply by a demo or can be done in Starburst’s environment. In this case it will drastically shorten up the technical evaluation phase. There are even cases where the customer would like to execute their own trial evaluation on their own and only reach out to Starburst if they have questions or run into problems. Once the evaluation is complete, we present back the output and insights made during the evaluation back to the EB. At this point the EB will decide whether they are satisfied that the success criteria has been met and would like to move forward with a purchase. Then the customer’s buying process is started.

At Starburst we believe this process is fair and objective. The customer is telling us what they need to see and what criteria would be a success. At any point they can walk away from the process and have the confidence that Starburst is the right solution having thoroughly evaluated it against a real use case in their environment using our proven best practices.