By Atul Arora, MD, Equipped.AI
For companies or startups looking to sell a new software product targeting businesses or enterprise buyers, there are only two possible routes for success: they either need to convince the actual buyers and clearly build a business case for switching over to their new software, or they need to win the end-users on their side.
The dichotomy between these two alternate paths becomes clear once we acknowledge that enterprise software buyers are often not the end-users of the software, and end-users themselves often have little say in making the purchase decisions, except in the case of highly technical or niche software.
The game then boils down to either building a watertight case for the CIO, CTO, or CFO, choosing their new software with clear and convincing business advantages over the incumbent, software, or designing a product that is so loved by the end-users that the latter force its, purchase and organization-wide adoption.
Now, regardless of the innumerable tools and frameworks in existence for establishing the value, or proposition of a new software product or tool, most product managers and marketers actually, struggle to build a convincing value framework for the new software. This is one reason why, enterprise software sales cycles can be exceptionally long, and sales pitches tend to, over-emphasize features and benefits over the ROI. Of course, this, approach still works when selling to CXOs or buying committees in large enterprises, only that perfecting it is harder than what most companies imagine.
The other approach calls for designing your product entirely around the users and making it so much more useful and frictionless that the end-users end up becoming the decision influencers of consequence, leaving the actual decision-makers with no choice but to pay heed. Recall how Apple’s iPhone snatched the enterprise mobility market from the incumbent Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry within a few years of its launch. The smartphone was just so powerful and yet frictionless that CEOs and other senior executives started buying it and then pressurizing the CIOs or IT heads to make their enterprise email work on it. Once the top leadership had been won, it didn’t take long for the iPhone to be widely accepted as the Blackberry alternative.
The iPhone’s enterprise victory was also behind two of the biggest and interrelated trends of the last decade – the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) movement and the consumerization of IT. Under BYOD, enterprise IT heads for the first time allowed employees to bring a computer or mobile device that they were happy to work on. The consumerization of IT funneled the same principle into the software market and made it easier for enterprise acceptance of software designed exclusively around users’ needs.
Video conferencing software Zoom is perhaps the best case study of how the second route or the approach plays out in the market. While Zoom is near-synonymous with video calls or conferences today, it was already growing much faster than rival ‘enterprise’ video conferencing products from much larger competitors, including WebEx from Cisco, GoTo Meeting, and Skype from Microsoft, long before Covid happened. Similar stories abound in the modern tech industry – Slack, BaseCamp, Google Docs, Dropbox, MailChimp and Shopify have all taken on much larger and incumbent competitors and succeeded entirely because of the preference and endorsements from the end-users.
There are a handful of lessons to be learned here, but the fundamental takeaway is that while designing a new software product, prioritizing user experience (UX) even at the cost of extra features or bells and whistles will determine if the second path to market success is feasible for the product. Designing a great UX will determine if the end-users love your product so much that they are willing to choose it over all other options and alternatives available.
Of course, sometimes the alternatives are much simpler – one reason why the $10 Trillion construction industry has struggled to adopt modern software tools is that their workers are always used to and are comfortable with paper drawings, and the switch from paper to a digital screen appears far too daunting.
In other cases, people have become used to the way a particular app does its work and find it hard to switch to a better, more powerful software – simply because in their minds the effort required to learn and use the new software far exceeds the perceived value, or they are convinced that their existing tools are enough to get the job done. In such cases, the importance of getting the UX right for the newly pitched software is self-evident.
So how does one get the UX right? There are several constituents of UX, but the key consideration is always friction. An important question to ask yourself is how easy and painless it is to install and use your software to get the job done as compared to alternatives.
Zoom’s mission statement, ‘Make video communications frictionless’ firmly underlines the centrality of friction to all UX considerations, and by extension to your software’s market adoption and success. Friction can be found at every stage of the software’s usage – an application that takes a lot of time to boot up or needs a complicated login process will create avoidable friction for the end users.
Related UX considerations include the learning curve of your software vis-a-vis its key competitors, and whether using your software is emotionally rewarding – a fun-to-use software or one that is aesthetically pleasing has a huge leg up over the alternatives.
The only type of software for which this approach will possibly be hard to crack is a niche, an industry-focused application that needs users to undergo some training before they can use it effectively. However, even in such cases, adequate attention to refining and enhancing the UX as compared to rival or incumbent applications will make the task of convincing enterprise buyers much easier.
