April Dunford

What we should be doing is giving them a way to think about the whole market and say, in the case of Help Scout, 'Look, there's shared inbox and then there's help desk software and then there's us. And I don't care who the vendor is, I'm going to put them in one of those buckets.'

Once you're the dominant player in that market, a cool move to do is to actually extend the boundaries of the category so that you can continue to grow. And most of the category creation examples we see are companies that when they were 200, 300, 400 million revenue dominating their space, then decided to move the goalposts.

The easiest way to take over a great big market is to define a segment of the market that is underserved by the market leader.

What B2B software buyers want in a sales interaction is perspectives on the market and help weighing their options. And we don't do that. We're just like, 'Here's our stuff. You figure it out, it's up to you.'

If a customer is indecisive, throwing FOMO into the mix makes it worse. So they're less likely to close the deal if you throw that in.

In a typical B2B purchase process, we've got someone in that buying team is what we would call the champion. So that person is the person who's been tasked with, hey, pick us the accounting software or pick us the CRM, you figure it out.

40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. If you scratch on that data, the majority of those aren't saying, 'Well, I'm not making a decision to buy something new because the old thing we were doing is better.' That's not true at all. In fact, the majority of those is they couldn't figure out how to make a choice confidently.

Most of the folks in B2B software, most of the time, your buyer has never purchased software like yours before. This is the first time they've done it. And their bosses come to them and said, 'Hey, figure this out. Go find us a CRM and look at all the CRMs and figure it out.'

Category creation is interesting. Like most companies, if you look at their arc, even the category creators that are successful, they did not start out as category creators. So they started out as a niche play in an existing category.

What typically happens is product's working on some stuff, sales is working on some stuff, marketing's working on some stuff. Marketing in their own little bubble comes up with positioning, they might build some stuff for the sales team, heave it over to the sales team. Sales team looks at it and says, 'I don't get what any of this stuff is. I disagree with this. This doesn't match what I see,' and they just throw it out.

What B2B software buyers want in a sales interaction is perspectives on the market and help weighing their options. And we don't do that. We're just like, 'Here's our stuff. You figure it out, it's up to you.'

There is this secondary job that the champion of the deal is, and that's how do I make a decision without getting fired? And so we got to help them accomplish that job, otherwise we don't get what we want, which is the money.