Ready to buy — do your early customers have what it takes?

At Point Nine, we see a lot of startups every year that just closed their first large customers and therefore want to understand in detail how valuable the early traction is, hence if their pilots, prospects or the like are ready to buy.

My colleague Christoph summarized in this post already which criteria we’re looking at when we try to assess the degree of product-market-fit of an (Enterprise) SaaS company. There can be vast differences — pilots that can turn into a company-wide rollout in a few weeks after our investment or endless year-long pilots. If you work in the manufacturing industry, for example, you probably have heard of the pilot purgatory — pilots with large enterprises that don’t seem to move forward and drag along forever (“need more time”).

The four pillars after the BANT Framework

From my discussions with founders, I realized that it’s often not very easy to communicate the early traction with other stakeholders such as investors if there is not much data yet. In the last couple of months, I worked with a bunch of founders on how we can make it easier to report their early enterprise traction. The result of these discussions is a framework that covers essential questions which you need to have answers to. I think this framework does not only help you in communicating your early enterprise traction but also in reflecting if your first customers are really ready to buy. Let me start with a summary of the areas that I think are most important, and I will dive deeper into each of them afterward. Please note that this summary is far from complete, but I think it covers the most critical aspects. Here is the Google Doc if you want to use it as a template.