Spacelift’s Guide to Enterprise Sales: Selling Infrastructure Software to Conservative Industries
Selling infrastructure software to tech companies is one thing. Selling it to German pharmaceutical companies is another entirely. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Spacelift’s Chief Product Officer Marcin Wyszyński revealed their playbook for winning over the most conservative industries.
Meeting Conservative Industries Where They Are
When Spacelift first approached traditional enterprises, they faced a fundamental trust barrier: “If you’re a new company that says, oh, we need the keys to the kingdom, we need to manage your infrastructure, everyone is like, what? No, we don’t know you.”
Instead of fighting this skepticism, they embraced it. “We went security first,” Marcin explains. “We have a security team that is by comparison, much larger than other companies this size would have. We design things security first and we follow the security practices.”
The Three-Pillar Approach
Spacelift’s success with conservative industries rests on three core strategies:
- Foundational Security They made security their first principle: “Spacelift must be secure, stable, usable, and awesome.” As Marcin emphasizes, “If we’re not secure, we’ll take down the application. If we know that there is a leak, we’ll stop everything.”
- Network-Based Trust Building Rather than relying solely on cold outreach, they leveraged relationships: “people in our network that would trust us, that they needed such solutions. And they would trust us because they knew us as the founders personally.”
- Institutional Credibility They strategically used investor relationships: “If we could convince some of the best investors out there, people would look at our investors and consider that to be a proof of us being someone dependable.”
Adapting to Enterprise Requirements
A crucial realization was that not every enterprise could use their standard SaaS offering. “We couldn’t sign every logo on the SaaS version and there was a lot of demand for an on-prem solution,” Marcin notes. This led to their recent launch of a self-hosted version, specifically designed to meet the strict requirements of conservative industries.
The Growth Pattern
Spacelift discovered that success with conservative customers follows a specific pattern: “With every new logo that we sign, it’s getting easier.” Each conservative enterprise customer becomes proof of trustworthiness for the next one.
This approach has paid off. Today, they count both “German pharmaceutical companies, that’s like the definition of being conservative” and traditional mining companies among their customers, alongside tech-forward companies like DocuSign and Figma.
Product Development for Conservative Industries
Rather than building features based on market trends, Spacelift focuses on actual user workflows: “We’re trying to see what did people do before they open spacelift and what did they do after they closed spacelift?” This approach ensures their product evolution matches the real needs of conservative enterprises.
For B2B founders targeting conservative industries, Spacelift’s experience offers valuable lessons. Success isn’t just about having enterprise-grade security – it’s about building your entire company culture and development process around earning and maintaining trust with the most skeptical customers possible.
The key insight? Don’t try to change conservative industries’ approach to security and compliance. Instead, build your product and company to exceed their expectations. As Spacelift’s journey shows, when you can convince the most conservative customers to trust you with their infrastructure, you can win over any enterprise.