Enterprise Offering - my early prospects want to help build my product but can't necessarily get budget to buy. Do I have a problem?
I'm building a service offering that will eventually be productized. Prospects love the vision and I've had multiple people tell me they will be early customers and help contribute to building it out. But they aren't necessarily able to get budget. Is this a big problem?
Ask some of these questions to get an answer:
Is it not on the budget for this cycle (Year / Quarter)? Or is it not going to be on their budget until much later? Or never?
If it is never, then this is a nice to have (Covid has shrunk budgets to the ones which solve the biggest pain and have highest ROI). If you can afford to build it for X time and then get them to pay for it later, then it is worth it.
Is it not on their budget because there are other more important things to budget for?
If yes, then are you willing to build it and wait for their budget to open up?
Is this (offering you are creating) something they can prioritize over other items on the budget?
If no, then you have a prioritization problem, and you need to message your solution to their pain points better.
What is the budget threshold?
If it is low, are they willing to put it in the next year?
Are they willing to sign a payment on delivery? If that is the case they have not financial commitment until you deliver.
If they are not, then this is nice to have. Meaning it is going to be a hard sell everytime.
Yes - great points all around and I completely agree. My customer said they just furloughed 40 people out of a 200 person company so I think a lot of it is Covid related. I think normally this would not be a problem to get budget. So I think best bet for now is: If you can afford to build it for X time and then get them to pay for it later, then it is worth it. The answer is yes, my upfront cost is minimized - just need to be patient : )
I think that's super risky to be on the wrong path.
You need to extract some pay even if it's way under what you think it should be or they are just a user not a customer and would probably stay that way forever, at least that's how you should look at it.
You need to also dig a bit into company internals, who has the budget and/or approval powers, which dep use vs pay for such things.. they could be different which is what makes ent. hard, you are talking to the users but not the buyers/payers... that's common for the users to only offer what they can do and not deal with the finance guys... The finance guys wouldn't separate wasting their human resources from their financial resources as much... (re: help build my product)