Enable’s Path to 10,000 Customers: Converting Enterprise Prospects Who Aren’t Looking for Your Solution
How do you sell a solution when your target customers don’t know they need one? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Enable CEO Andrew Butt revealed their strategy for overcoming what might be the biggest challenge in B2B software: converting prospects who aren’t actively looking for your product.
The Awareness Challenge “A lot of these companies and some of the companies we’re working with are the world’s biggest companies and even they don’t necessarily know that this type of software exists,” Andrew explains. This wasn’t just a product awareness problem – it was a category awareness challenge.
The traditional enterprise sales playbook assumes prospects are actively evaluating solutions. But Enable faced a different reality: companies managing billions in rebates through “all sorts of manual systems, home built systems, excel spreadsheets kind of limping along” didn’t know there was a better way.
Education as GTM Strategy Instead of leading with product pitches, Enable focused on education. “We are creating a lot of content. Best practice guidance on how to manage rebates, how to do better through effective rebate management,” Andrew shares. This education-first approach wasn’t just marketing – it was fundamental to creating market demand.
But they didn’t stop at content. “We’ve created more recently a community which is really putting rebate managers on the map and showing how they actually can have a huge strategic input into their business,” Andrew notes. This community-building effort elevated practitioners who were previously underserved and overlooked.
Making the Solution Accessible A key insight from Enable’s journey: when creating a category, you need to make adoption easy. “Being modern cloud software, it’s very much on demand, so we’re making it very accessible, very easy, very kind of fast time to value so the cloud principles can apply to this new space,” Andrew explains.
This focus on accessibility has been crucial. As Andrew emphasizes, “We’re creating something which is mainstream. You don’t have to be like a visionary or like a really early adopter.”
Proving Hard Dollar Impact Education alone wasn’t enough – Enable needed to demonstrate concrete value. Their business value assessment process shows prospects how they can “get a payback in maybe three or four months.” This focus on rapid ROI has been crucial in converting enterprises that weren’t actively seeking solutions.
Network Effects Drive Growth Enable’s strategy created powerful network effects. “We started focusing entirely on distributors and then it was actually through network effect that we got into the manufacturers,” Andrew reveals. This organic expansion helped them grow to over 10,000 companies on their platform.
Lessons for Category Creators Enable’s journey offers valuable insights for founders facing similar challenges:
- Focus on education before product pitches
- Build community around practitioners
- Make adoption accessible and mainstream
- Demonstrate concrete ROI quickly
- Leverage network effects for organic growth
The results speak for themselves: Enable has grown from 80 to 450 people in two and a half years, achieving 150% year-over-year growth. Their experience shows that with the right approach, you can successfully sell to enterprises even when they don’t know they need your solution.
Looking ahead, Andrew envisions Enable becoming “the standard for any B2B incentive.” By focusing on education, accessibility, and demonstrable value, they’re well on their way to achieving that vision.
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