7 Questions To Ask Team Making Enterprise Software

If your company is building a software product for enterprises, you have to be aware that it will have a different maturation path than a consumer product.

The nuances between the two require attention from the moment you begin. If you don’t take the time to address them, you’ll quickly see issues piling up as you begin the sales cycle.

Oftentimes, that will mean your product needs certain features before a company will even consider using it.

But by that point, you’re on a reactive path, trying to add the necessary functions and keep the hopes of making a sale alive. So, it’s important you understand what characteristics enterprises are looking for and how those differ from consumer products.

You can save yourself lots of headaches and hassle if you begin answering a few common customer questions ahead of time, adding the necessary features to your product roadmap.

Here’s what you’ll need to address before pitching prospective customers:

1. Does it work?

This may seem obvious, but all the other questions are moot if your product doesn’t do what it needs to. You have to build the functionality and develop a backend service as well as frontend applications, such as an iOS, Android, and web apps. Only once you have the functionality ready to show to the customer can you have a real discussion about their needs.

2. Is it secure?

Let’s say an enterprise is interested in deploying your app.

One of the first conversations you’ll have will be about privacy and security because, without the right security in place, your product won’t be seriously considered.

Identifying and fixing issues ahead of time makes your product more secure and more attractive to customers.

You’ll need to show them that your product is secure, which means performing security checks, vulnerability assessments, and penetration tests of your system. They’ll also need evidence of the work you’ve done, so be prepared to share reports from your security-related work.

As a reference, here’s how AWS and Google talk about their security to give customers and investors confidence in their platforms.

3. Is it fast?

Enterprises working on critical business applications need your product to be fast — and they need it to work at scale. They’ll have performance requirements, and in order to get their business, your product will have to meet and exceed these requirements.

Customers will often ask:

• How many requests per second can your app handle?
• What is the average latency for requests?
• How many requests can I send at the same time if I choose to automate features through your API?

These should get you thinking about the importance of your APIs, because both the apps and the APIs are your product. You won’t find many companies willing to pay for a slow or unresponsive system.

Your customers will also ask you to provide service level agreements (SLAs). These are legally codified obligations that carry a monetary penalty if you miss them. A few examples include guaranteed uptime of 99.5% or transaction throughput of 1000 requests per second.

4. Does it work with other systems?

Enterprises rarely work with a single vendor. Instead, they try to get the best software for any given function, which means they usually have a number of existing systems.

Once they’ve determined that your product is right for their needs, they’ll ask if your product can interoperate with their current systems. They’ll want single sign-on (SSO) integration, as well as integration with their existing systems — Salesforce, Jira, ERP systems, HR and payroll systems, and any legacy systems they may still be using.

You have to be able to deliver those integrations.

Let’s look at Slack as an example.

They have integrations with Jira, Github, Google Drive, Zoom, Twitter, Dropbox, Trello, and many other apps which are platforms in themselves. But integrations, especially with legacy applications without well-defined APIs, could get very messy and involve custom work. You’ll want to consider having a professional services team or outsourcing the work.

At this point, your offering is no longer a product, but a platform.

It operates with other platforms via APIs. The more defined interfaces you have, the easier those integrations become. That means you want to proactively build plugins to popular enterprise apps in order to make sure they work together seamlessly.

5. Is it easy to operate?

You probably started building your app with one type of user in mind.

But there’s another user — your customer’s operator. They’re the ones who have to install, upgrade, and maintain your application for the customer. And they have very different requirements. They want their workflows to be completed in an easy and deterministic way.

That could mean adding users, creating groups, upgrading your product or integrating it with another application. They’re less concerned with cool UIs — they just want to get their work done quickly and efficiently.

Another type of user is your internal operations and support team.

You’ll find this team wants tools that can help them investigate and fix customer issues faster. So, you’ll likely need to add certain operational features to your product, such as enhanced logging, monitoring, troubleshooting methods, code instrumentation, and more capabilities for capturing usage metrics.

6. Is it compliant?

If you’re working within regulated industries, such as healthcare, finance, or government, you’ll have to be compliant with certain regulations like HIPAA, PCI, or ISO. If you’re working with European customers, you’ll also have to be GDPR compliant.

To be clear, these are not optional items. Your product will need to work within these regulations if you want to be considered a viable vendor.

7. Where is my data stored?

Unlike consumers, enterprises have a choice about where their data is stored — and they’re very conscious about it.

A few years ago, many companies were wary of storing their data on the cloud. And although they’ve opened up to the idea, some may ask for the application to be hosted in their data center. They’ll have strict requirements on how data is stored, transferred, and accessed. They’ll want to know what happens if there’s a breach, what type of encryption is used to protect data, and how those encryption keys are managed.

It’s not a topic you can avoid if you want to gain their business.

You need to have answers to these questions (or necessary product features) to ensure a customer’s data is secured.

If you consider the features within these questions, nothing requires new functionality.

So they don’t directly correspond to revenue and are not always priced. However, they’re part of the vendor selection and regular evaluation process for your prospective customer — hence, revenue impacting.

Without these features, you probably won’t have a signed contract.

Although I’ve written these questions serially in this piece, this is not a step-by-step guide. Rather, you should be proactively and shrewdly adding features in these different areas in order to build a viable product.

Enterprises will demand all these requirements at the same time, so it’s up to you to plan the work and make progress on every front to satisfy your customers.

Thanks for reading!

Want to learn more? Get in touch with the Chronicled team here.