How We Sold Enterprise by Finding People Who Already Thought Like Us
At Viva Labs, we built a white-label smart home platform. Our customers were enterprises, but the product they sold was consumer-facing. This put us in a weird spot: being evaluated by procurement teams while building something for people's living rooms.
We discovered something counterintuitive about enterprise sales. The deals we won weren't won by better feature lists or pricing. They were won because we found the right person inside the customer's organization—someone who already thought the way we did.
The Get-It-Home Strategy
Our strategy was simple: get people to take the product home as fast as possible. Way before feature comparisons. Way before spreadsheets. Way before the formal RFI.
If someone on the customer side was living with our product in their house, the formal evaluation almost didn't matter. The conviction was already there. By the time procurement showed up, the person across the table had already decided—not because of our documentation, but because something about the product felt right when they actually used it.
Enterprise decisions look rational on paper. In practice, they're full of moments like that.
Finding vs. Cultivating Champions
The temptation in enterprise sales is to think of champions as something you cultivate. You identify a stakeholder, build the relationship, give them materials, hope they go to bat for you. That's account management. It works, but it's slow and fragile.
The real shortcut is finding the person who already thinks the way you do.
Every product embodies a philosophy. Ours was simplicity. Our setup process was designed for busy humans, not enthusiastic tinkerers. We used to say you could get your grandma to set it up. That was a deliberate choice. We could have built admin-first onboarding that smart home tinkerers would have loved. Instead, we built something warm and simple.
Somewhere inside every customer organization, there's a person who shares your philosophy. They've been frustrated by the same things you've been frustrated by. They've argued for the same approach and been outvoted by the enterprise machinery around them.
When they see your product, they don't think "this is cool." They think "finally, someone built it the way it should be."
That person doesn't need to be sold. They need to be found.
What Real Champions Look Like
We've had deals where procurement played hardball and our champions just sat there, rolling their eyes, smiling at us. "Don't worry, I've got this." That's what a real champion looks like. They're not neutral evaluators anymore. They're on your side of the table emotionally.
Nobody becomes a champion because you're cheaper. Nobody stakes their internal reputation on your SOC 2 compliance. Champions are emotional. They've had an aha moment that separates your product from everything else they've evaluated.Those moments are almost always the simple, human, consumer-grade ones. And they're exactly the moments that get eroded first when enterprise requirements start piling up.
The Central Tension
Here's the hard part: in enterprise, you're building for a very specific person and for everyone at the same time.
The champion is specific. They share your worldview. They respond to the philosophy your product embodies.
But the product has to survive procurement, pass security audits, integrate with existing systems, and work for thousands of users who will never feel the way your champion feels.
Lean too far toward the champion and you build something niche that doesn't survive procurement. Lean too far toward everyone and you build something generic that nobody falls in love with.
We felt this constantly. Every enterprise customer brought stakeholders who wanted to shape the product. Each request was reasonable on its own. Taken together, they would have killed the thing that made our champions champion us in the first place.
Protecting the Relationship
The champion relationship is a two-way street. If your champion has gone to bat for you internally and something goes sideways—a misunderstanding in a negotiation, or they feel caught off guard—the damage isn't necessarily to the deal. It's to the relationship.
You might still close. But the person who used to roll their eyes at procurement on your behalf now feels let down. That's much harder to repair than a contract clause.
The same applies to the product. The moment you dilute it into something safe and generic, you lose the signal that attracted them. They found you because your product felt like it was built by someone who thinks the way they do. If you sand down every edge to satisfy every stakeholder, that recognition disappears.
The Takeaway
The compliance stuff still has to be there. You still need to win the RFI. The champion doesn't replace the checklist.
But the champion is why you survive the parts where the checklist is a tie. And in enterprise, most deals are ties on paper.
Product-market fit tells you whether the market wants what you've built. Product-person fit tells you whether someone inside the customer will fight for it. In enterprise, you need both. But the second one comes first.
Read the full post: https://holenventures.substack.com/p/product-person-fit
