A Good Product Still Needs a Way Into the Business

Four questions that reveal how people buy, adopt, and come to value what you sell.

I’ve spent much of my career helping companies bring something new to market: leading sales at startups and established companies, building partnerships and go-to-market motions, and creating businesses from the ground up.

The products and markets were different. The questions I kept coming back to were remarkably similar.

How will someone buy this? Where will it fit into their work? Who is in a position to offer it? And when will the value become real enough for someone to act?

It’s easy to answer those questions in a meeting. It’s harder to answer them from the customer’s side of the table. That is where a commercial motion starts to take shape — or where its gaps become visible.

How will someone buy it?

“Our buyer is the VP of Operations” may be a useful starting point. It isn’t a buying process.

The person who feels the pain may have no budget. The person with the budget may need a technical review. A team may love the product but have no agreed way to measure its impact. And a buyer who wants to move may still be unable to get comfortable with the risk of choosing a young company.

At Elipsa, I learned how much distance there can be between a customer seeing the potential in a product and an organization being ready to commit to it. Interest is valuable. It isn’t the same as a purchase path.

To understand that path, go back through actual opportunities. Talk to the customers who bought, the prospects who stalled, and the people who ultimately said no. Ask what caused them to begin looking, who joined the conversation, which approvals mattered, what they had to prove internally, and what nearly stopped the deal.

Then trace the decisions in order. Who recognizes the problem? Who can make it a priority? Who evaluates the solution? Who signs? What evidence does each person need?

If every deal needs a different route through that maze, the issue may be deeper than sales execution. The offer, proof, packaging, or target customer may need work.

Where does it fit into their workflow?

A product can solve a real problem and still ask too much of the people expected to use it.

Maybe the customer has to export data from three systems before the product becomes useful. Maybe an insight arrives after the decision has already been made. Maybe the user likes it, but acting on the output requires another team that was never part of the sales conversation.

The quickest way to learn is to watch the work. Ask a customer to walk you through the last time the problem occurred. Where did it start? What did they open first? Who did they ask for help? What did they do with the result? Where did the process slow down?

Pay attention to the handoffs and workarounds. They often reveal more than a feature request. If someone copies a result into a spreadsheet so another team will trust it, the spreadsheet may be telling you something about how decisions actually get made.

Map the workflow before and after the product enters it. Be specific about what the customer must stop doing, start doing, or change. The goal is to find the moment where your product becomes part of a decision or action they already care about.

That may change the product roadmap. It may also change who you sell to, how you onboard, and what you promise.

Who is in a position to offer it?

Companies often treat this as a channel question: direct sales, referral partner, reseller, marketplace, or integration.

The more useful question is who already has the relationship, the timing, and the credibility to introduce the product when the need is clear.

A partner may have access to the right accounts and still have little reason to bring up your offer. It may compete with their existing services, require more explanation than their team can give, or create support work they don’t want to own. On the other hand, a specialist with a smaller audience may be the person customers trust at the exact moment a decision is being made.

I learned in building partnerships at Qlik and ClimaCell that a partner strategy only becomes real when the partner can explain the offer, see a reason to prioritize it, and know what happens after the introduction.

Start with the customer’s journey. Who do they consult before they buy? Which vendors or advisors are already in the workflow? When does the problem become visible to those people? Then talk to potential partners about their economics, incentives, and obligations. Ask them to describe a specific customer situation in which they would bring you in.

If the answer stays vague, the partnership is probably still an idea. A small joint test with a real customer will teach you more than a broad agreement signed in anticipation of one.

What are the aha moments?

An aha moment is the point when someone understands, from their own experience, why the product matters. It may happen in a demo. More often, it happens when the product shows something they could not see before, removes a frustrating step, or helps them make a decision with more confidence.

There may be several of these moments. A user sees their first useful result. A manager realizes the team can repeat it. An executive sees what the change means for cost, revenue, or risk. Each person needs a different kind of proof.

Look at customers who adopted the product well. What happened shortly before they committed? Which result did they share with a colleague? What did they say when they first understood the value? Then compare that journey with customers who never got there.

You can test what you learn. Shorten the time between sign-up and the first meaningful result. Put a real customer example earlier in the sales conversation. Change the proof of concept so it produces a decision the customer already needs to make. Measure whether those changes improve progression and adoption, not merely whether people click through a demo.

If you cannot identify the moment when value becomes clear, you may be asking customers to buy on faith.

Put the four answers together

These questions are connected.

The buying path tells you whose confidence you have to earn. The workflow tells you where the product must create value. The route to market tells you who can credibly introduce it. The aha moments tell you what proof moves each person forward.

I would start with five recent customers or serious opportunities, including at least one that did not close. Reconstruct each journey from the first sign of a problem through evaluation, decision, and use. Speak with the people involved rather than relying only on CRM notes. Write down where their accounts agree and where they don’t.

You will probably find that the company’s current pitch describes the product more clearly than the customer’s path to value. That’s useful information. It gives you a place to improve the offer, the motion, or both.

A good commercial system is built on what people actually do when they need to solve a problem, not on how we hoped they would respond to a product.

How would you answer these four questions for your own business?

Start with Levrist’s five-minute Motion Check to identify where your commercial motion may be getting stuck. For a deeper look, the full Commercial Motion Diagnostic walks through all four areas, helping you examine the customer evidence behind your answers and choose practical next steps. Both tools are free, with no email or login required.

Make moves that matter.

Levrist is an independent consultancy that helps emerging and growth-stage technology companies turn strong products into businesses that can grow with clearer commercial strategy, practical go-to-market execution, and partnerships that open doors.

If this raised a question about your own business, I’d welcome the conversation. Drop a comment or visit levrist.com to learn more and get in touch.