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.
- 01The pricing page. Even when it says "contact sales." Especially then, because that tells us the floor is high and the process will be long.
- 02The 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.
- 03Reviews, 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.
- 04The documentation. Public docs get read by people who will never sit in your demo. Docs are the product's honest autobiography.
- 05The integrations page. One question: is our stack on it. Nobody reads the logos, they search the page for the one name they need.
- 06The status page. Not for the uptime number. For the incident history, and how you wrote to customers while things were on fire.
- 07Exactly one case study. The one whose customer resembles us. The other eleven may as well not exist.
- 08The 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.