Built a working enterprise IT platform (asset management + ticketing). Have leads. Still can't close. What's the actual move here?

Posted by This_Nerve1892@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 40 comments

I’ve been working on a B2B tool for internal IT operations — specifically two areas: * IT asset tracking (who has what device, warranty tracking, movement history, audits, etc.) * Internal IT ticketing/service desk (requests, SLA tracking, routing, escalation workflows, reporting) It’s aimed at mid-to-large organizations (roughly 100+ employees) where IT operations are still heavily spreadsheet + email driven or using legacy tools. And its way cheaper and better than zoho The issue I’m running into: I can get the messaging out (cold email + LinkedIn), but I’m not getting replies or even rejections. Most outreach just goes silent. So I’m trying to figure out what’s actually broken: * Is cold outreach just ineffective for this type of IT operations software now? * Am I targeting the wrong roles (IT managers vs CIOs vs ops teams)? * Is the messaging too generic, or is this just a “trust barrier” problem for unknown vendors? * What actually gets you to respond to a cold email in this space? I’m not trying to pitch anything here — I’m specifically trying to understand what makes IT teams even open to conversations with unknown vendors today. If you’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of outreach, I’d really appreciate blunt feedback on what usually makes you ignore vs reply.

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Kumorigoe@reddit

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TheNewBBS@reddit

You honestly can't expect anything with cold emails or calls. If a marketing email makes it through my company's spam filters, I immediately add their suffix to my personal spam filter rule. I send all external calls to my voicemail if I don't outright refuse them. You're one of hundreds of people/companies trying to get me to look at your product, and unless I have a problem I'm actively trying to fix, it's simply not worth my time to look at it. I only research when I'm fixing a problem, and that's usually everything from Google searches to asking friends who work in other shops to searching this sub. Without an established brand/partner, it's going to be tough sledding. I feel like I've seen some version of this (just-big-enough ticketing and asset management) many times. It's frankly not a super difficult thing to put together; I built a basic one as the project of a senior-level college coding course, and today's cloud infrastructure has made the process even easier. A note after reading your other comments: you aren't competing against spreadsheets and ServiceNow. You're competing with 1) all the other small vendors who sell a similar version of what you're doing (Google "small business itsm") and 2) the self-hosted open source options out there. Focus way less on made-up ROI numbers and way more on the specific features that differentiate you from those direct competitors. Don't market as "mid-to-large" if your idea of that is 100+. The smallest shop I've worked is 5,000, and we considered ourselves on the small side of medium. In my head, the threshold for "large" is 10-15K. If your target demo is 100-2,000, you're looking for small to medium size businesses. As someone else mentioned: having a free/community tier with low limits for resource counts (tickets per month, inventory items, etc.) and graduated paid tiers for real usage is a solid model. Of course you want to focus on fast enterprise adoption; it's dependable income. But I'm significantly more likely to try your product if I can log in and dick around for a while to see if your basic design is worthwhile. Demos and videos are near-useless since I can't get a feel for actual the logic/workflow. Free tier can also be very useful for QA and a larger base for user feedback.

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