People liked hearing the non-technical side of enterprise/B2B sales from a technical person so let's continue: another significant non-technical driver of sales is understanding that your buyer doesn't want to get fired, and ensuring buying your product is a safe choice. Engineers hear this and think "the product needs to work well." This isn't the message. I mean, yes, the product needs to work well enough but that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is that the mainstream buyer (where 95% of the market value is) is incredibly risk averse and probably not for the reasons you expect. People expect they're risk averse because these might be big important businesses that don't want to break. That's certainly a factor, but the reality is generally a lot more inward: the individual human buyer (or small group of buyers) is personally risk averse. They don't want to fuck up their own prospects. Most working people are punching the clock. They're working a 9-5 to get paid and enjoy their non-work life. Work is just a means to that end. They want to get promoted, they don't want to make mistakes, and they most certainly do not want to get fired. These types of people generally are not going to take a bet on new or uncertain solutions, technical merits notwithstanding. You know the old adage "you don't get fired for IBM?" This is where that rubber meets the road. To sell to these people (again, the vast vast majority of the market), you need to become a safe bet. And again, that's not through technical capability alone. So how do you do it? - Analyst relationships (showing up in things like Gartner reports make me throw up as an engineer but they're irrationally effective) - Trade shows (not dev conferences, sorry, but the ones where I'd be wearing slacks probably) - Whitepapers in an expected format/layout (again, puke, but they work) - Fitting into a standard category (don't make a category, become the solution for an existing category) - High touch sales and support -- the kind of obvious side so I won't get into details here. There's a graveyard of excellent software startups that failed to make an impact because they got blinded by pursuing technical excellence at the cost of realizing businesses only care to a point.