One pattern I've noticed in enterprise software:
The product that wins isn't always the product buyers understand best.
It's the product buyers can explain internally.
Those are different things.
A security lead might fully understand your platform.
A compliance manager might love the workflow.
An operations team might see immediate value.
None of that guarantees a purchase.
Because eventually someone has to explain the purchase to people who weren't part of the evaluation.
Procurement.
Finance.
Legal.
An executive sponsor.
The products that move fastest often reduce the amount of explanation required.
Not because they're simpler.
Because their story survives handoffs.
The team evaluating the product is rarely the team approving the budget.
Every internal conversation introduces distortion.
Every handoff creates interpretation risk.
Many deals slow down because the product became harder to explain than the problem it solved.
Founders usually focus on product-market fit.
Far fewer think about explanation-market fit.
Can somebody who wasn't in the demo still understand why this purchase matters?
That's often where deal velocity is decided.
The handoff between evaluator and approver is one of the least visible parts of enterprise sales. Buyers spend weeks learning the product, then have to compress that understanding into a few slides, an email, or a procurement meeting. A surprising amount of deal friction appears in that translation layer.
Many teams assume a stalled deal means the value wasn't compelling. Sometimes the value was clear to the evaluator but never became clear to the people carrying the accountability for the purchase. Those are very different failure modes.
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