Prepared tackled the slow GovTech market by providing its initial product for free. This strategy bypassed cumbersome procurement, built a large user base, and established the credibility needed to overcome the authority of entrenched, larger competitors.

While incumbents sell roadmaps, startups can collapse enterprise sales cycles by demonstrating a fully functional product that is provably better *today*. Showing a live, superior solution turns a year-long procurement process into a 60-day sprint for motivated buyers.

A maps feature with 3x user engagement was repeatedly ignored by Nextdoor's leadership. It was only prioritized after the product team translated that engagement into concrete financial terms: millions of dollars in potential sponsorship and advertising revenue. This demonstrates that financial impact outweighs user metrics for executive buy-in.

Real estate owners were skeptical of new tech. Instead of focusing on operational cost savings, Metropolis's go-to-market strategy centered on proving they could capture more revenue by eliminating leakage (e.g., when gates are up), which directly increased the underlying value of the real estate asset.

The key to accelerating from $1M to $10M in revenue was evolving the sales narrative. They moved from discussing technical details with CTOs to explaining business impact, like compliance and audit readiness, to non-technical buyers like Chief Compliance Officers and CFOs.

Enterprise leaders aren't motivated by solving small, specific problems. Founders succeed by "vision casting"—selling a future state or opportunity that gives the buyer a competitive edge ("alpha"). This excites them enough to champion a deal internally.

Buildots' growth inflection happened when they stopped selling a data platform and started selling proactive risk alerts. The pitch changed from "Here's data to help you" to "If you don't fix this now, your project will fail." This simplified the value proposition and created urgency.

In government, digital services are often viewed as IT projects delivered by contractors. A CPO's primary challenge is instilling a culture of product thinking: focusing on customer value, business outcomes, user research, and KPIs, often starting from a point of zero.

Briq accelerates enterprise sales by focusing on a small, specific pain point and securing an initial payment, however small. This 'land and expand' approach, centered on tangible micro-value, builds commitment and opens the door for larger deals, collapsing sales cycles.