Author: Shira Abel Category: Startups Selling to Enterprise · Brand URL: https://hunterandbard.com/resources/blog/cant-measure-what-wins-the-enterprise-deal
For a startup selling into enterprise, what decides the deal happens where you can't measure it. Brand is the budget line you can't prove but still have to defend.
In self-serve you can watch every click, so you optimize what you can see. In a six-figure enterprise deal you can't see the part that decides it, the booth conversation, the reference call between your prospect and a past customer, so the metrics on your dashboard track the cheap, visible edge of the deal and miss the expensive middle. The thing that keeps you on the shortlist is brand, and brand is the one line you can't define the way you define a paid-search number. That doesn't mean you can't defend it. It means you defend it with leading indicators a board already trusts, not with a conversion number you had to manufacture.