Selling software nobody asked for

The product was better than the spreadsheet. That turned out to be almost irrelevant.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2022-02-11 · Ventures

The demo always went well. That was the confusing part.

You show a recruiting team a system that keeps every candidate in one place, tracks who spoke to whom, and stops the same person being contacted twice by two colleagues who do not talk. Everyone in the room nods. Someone says this is exactly our problem. You leave thinking it is done, and then nothing happens, for weeks, and eventually you learn that they are still working out of the same shared spreadsheet with the same three colour codes that only one person fully understands.

She was usually the reason. Every company had one: the person who had built the spreadsheet, maintained it for years, and could find any candidate in it faster than our search could. To her the new system was not an upgrade. It was a demotion. Whatever she knew that nobody else knew was about to become a database field that anyone could query.

I did not understand that for a long time. I kept selling features into a room where the actual objection was never going to be spoken out loud.

The teams that did switch had one thing in common, and it was not enthusiasm. Someone senior decided the switch was happening, said so, and then kept asking about it in meetings for two months. That was it. Not the feature list. Not the pricing. A person with authority being repetitive about something boring.

I think about that constantly now, running systems for businesses in Cambodia where the spreadsheet is often a paper book. The software question is easy. The question of whose competence is being quietly reorganised is the hard one, and it does not come up in the demo.

What I still cannot decide is how much of the resistance was correct. Some of those spreadsheets were genuinely better than what we were selling, for that team, in that year.