
Ask HN: How to pre-sell B2B software? - 6thSigma
We&#x27;re building a B2B specifically for software companies. We are a couple months away from a beta, but we&#x27;ve received advice to start pre-selling our software.<p>What&#x27;s the best way to pre-sell B2B software? We don&#x27;t have a fully functioning product yet - but we have enough of a prototype ready to get a feel for how it&#x27;s going to work.<p>Do pre-launch websites work? Should we just cold email companies? Should we wait until we are closer to an MVP to start selling?
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andydrish
Very cool. What is the product?

At this point, I wouldn't put any energy into the product. I would focus all
of your efforts on selling until you have 3 to 5 customers who have paid you.

Here are two case studies on people pre-selling B2B based software companies
before writing a line of code:

Carl sold a few grand building software for physical therapist offices:
[http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/research-validation-
profit...](http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/research-validation-profit/)

Josh - Sold $22K in sales with 73 customers. Selling CRM software.
[http://thefoundation.com/josh-story/](http://thefoundation.com/josh-story/)

What other questions do you have? Here to help.

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6thSigma
It's a real-time employee feedback service for software companies. It's kind
of like Salesforce's Work.com[1] but tailored for software development teams.
We also help gauge relative productivity of employees.

[1] [http://work.com/](http://work.com/)

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alexdevkar
If you are able to sell your product before it's ready, that is a great sign
that you've found a customer's pain point. However, selling vapor-ware can be
very hard. And you don't want to start your relationship with a customer with
delays and buggy software.

Instead of pre-selling, consider talking to customers about what you're
working on, having them take a look at the prototype and getting their
feedback. You might not get the clear signal of a buy/no buy decision, but you
will get help understanding what really matters in your product.

As always, depends on the particular business. Good luck!

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palidanx
Just my two cents, but if you know your core functionality, you can try to
meet your stakeholders and build a relationship before the sale.

For my b2b saas product, I pitched the product to local businesses just to see
how it would work. They gave some valuable feedback to change the product,
then I cold e-mailed prospects.

As much as I don't like buying templates, the cold e-mail template from
appsumo really worked well for me

[http://www.appsumo.com/sumo-email-templates/](http://www.appsumo.com/sumo-
email-templates/)

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fbliss
How about setting up a presentation/web conference? Then call and invite
people over the phone. I think you're more likely to have success than cold
email - I've got an ongoing project where we had 0 success with cold emailing,
even with very personalized approaches. Hour for hour, the more you can engage
someone via live exchange, the better.

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enricotal
[http://www.agis.co](http://www.agis.co)

