By chance I come across a text by Eduardo Manchón. I already considered him an insightful guy who explains everything well, even though communication is not exactly his field. I had read texts by him before, but this one hit the bullseye and it can surely be applied to CMS for newspapers and DXP for enterprises.
What Eduardo says is that in B2B, for large enterprises, selling software is not about building a brilliant product full of innovative features, because the B2B market follows different rules.
“The right path to selling is a fireworks demo where the product looks incredible; you want charts, maximum light and color, to dazzle them. Do not worry, because the person who is going to make the purchasing decision is not going to use it, so they will never have to face an empty control panel or learn how to use the product,” Manchón says.
In these cases, the product, which then turns out to be barely functional, is handled by people further down the ladder who did not take part in the decision and what matters, since everything is a complete mess, is having a great 24/7 customer support department, a good Customer Success Manager who can justify the fortune they have spent on the software.
And the magic appears when the project stabilizes, “after so much effort, nobody will want to switch to another platform”. “They are going to be your client for many years and even if you raise the price in a shameless way, they are not going to leave,” Manchón continues.
“Could you not make a good product or technology and sell it to large enterprises? Well, in theory, yes; in practice, no. […] In sales to large enterprises you want friction; friction is your friend. That kind of client not only has no problem at all with friction, but actually wants friction because it fits their world. […] It is irrelevant whether the product really helps the organization achieve its goals, because what matters is that it helps achieve the goals of the employee (petty boss or middle manager) who makes the purchasing decision, that is, helping them get promoted within their organization.”
So the startup culture that builds great software is the exact opposite of what happens in large enterprises and B2B. Many startup people have tried to enter the enterprise world because they think that is where the money is and 99% of them do badly with that approach. “Nobody wants a revolutionary feature in large enterprises; people want you to solve an existing problem they already have. That problem is often a very silly one,” Manchón continues in that regard.
Startups usually have a technical CEO, but in “the big leagues, technical reality is secondary; what matters is the ability to build an aspirational, almost religious mythology around the product”.
“That is why the people who succeed in SaaS for large enterprises are almost always those who come from that same sector as executives at those companies; people who know a specific pain and solve it, whether it is more or less something trivial, it does not matter. The point is to solve the problem by creating a compelling narrative to charge a huge amount of money and to know how to reach the people who make the decision,” Manchón concludes.
This very same thing is what happens in many media organizations, especially in large media groups. I know of a major group that chose a CMS after seeing big fireworks and they have spent years integrating the product and suffering through it. Now, after all the effort invested, they are completely captive, just as Manchón described it.
Others were going to switch to a superior product, but in their view the new product was not that good (when objectively it is) and after major resistance and a dismissal or two, they have stayed with their old software. They probably know that their CMS has plenty of room for improvement, but it is the one they understand and it works moderately well for them.
I could go on telling you about more cases, but I am going to leave it here. And I refer you once again to Eduardo’s article, because it deserves to be framed.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
