Deepika Salwankar

MMXXVI

Field notes

3 min

04

What enterprise buyers actually read.

It is not your blog. It is a specific list of eight things, in order.

I sit on the buying side now, inside a large bank, so this list is observed rather than theorized. When a vendor enters evaluation, this is what gets opened, roughly in this order.

  1. 01
    The pricing page. Even when it says "contact sales." Especially then, because that tells us the floor is high and the process will be long.
  2. 02
    The security page. SOC 2, data residency, what touches what. If this page is thin, the evaluation may end here, before you ever hear about it.
  3. 03
    Reviews, filtered to three stars. Five-star reviews are written by champions, one-star reviews by people mid-divorce with procurement. Three stars is where someone liked the product enough to be specific about what broke.
  4. 04
    The documentation. Public docs get read by people who will never sit in your demo. Docs are the product's honest autobiography.
  5. 05
    The integrations page. One question: is our stack on it. Nobody reads the logos, they search the page for the one name they need.
  6. 06
    The status page. Not for the uptime number. For the incident history, and how you wrote to customers while things were on fire.
  7. 07
    Exactly one case study. The one whose customer resembles us. The other eleven may as well not exist.
  8. 08
    The LinkedIn of whoever emailed us. Tenure, background, whether the company's own people describe the product the way the homepage does.

The blog is not on the list. I say this with some grief, as a person who writes. Content earns attention before the evaluation and keeps the brand warm between them. During the evaluation, it is invisible.