First enterprise customers – revenue or user engagement?

Since we are seed investors in enterprise technology, I am often asked this question. The answer on the surface seems quite obvious — generate as much revenue as you can to prove that customers find value and are willing to pay. My answer is the less obvious one — focus first on user engagement and the revenue and bookings will follow.

Wait, isn’t user engagement more of a consumer metric? It is, but it is equally as important to focus on this metric in the enterprise. No matter what business you are in, you need to ensure that your ultimate customer (the end user) is happy and absolutely loves using your product. I have seen countless situations where a startup extracts initial dollars top-down from an enterprise but ultimately cannot get traction because the end users don’t love the product. Without love of product there is no user engagement, and without user engagement, there is no long-term customer.

This is especially important in the age of SaaS as switching costs are quite low for substitute solutions. This is also the reason why next to VP of Sales, I would argue a VP of Customer Happiness/Success is a crucial hire. One is for generating new revenue and the other is for expanding existing customers and reducing churn. It is also why a number of companies have been created to help understand and monitor user engagement in the enterprise to proactively determine issues before they happen (totango, gainsight, and preact — full disclosure, my fund is an investor)

What is user engagement in the enterprise? When understanding initial customer traction, we like to understand how a product/solution can/will become a daily habit for the user. It is pretty clear that the more an end user interacts with the product the more important it becomes and ultimately the more value it provides. Another important metric to optimize for would be expansion of users within an existing account. In other words, how do you sell into one user and create viral loops (sharing dashboards, etc) and expand the active user base for the product. Once again, this sounds like a consumer metric but quite an important one —the more people that use it the more it becomes part of the ingrained workflow creating more value.

The challenge sometimes is that many enterprise tech companies are designed to work in the background, invisibly to automate tasks or aggregate data to reduce noise. If your tech is seamlessly analyzing data in the background, you need to find ways to show the user how awesome your product is by either sending alerts or creating some other eye candy to remind the user that your product is working and important. I have seen a few of our portfolio companies implement some simple changes regarding this and see their usage increase significantly.

So to recap, revenue matters but the path starts with optimizing for the end user in the enterprise and focusing on engagement. Once you create happy end users who love your product, the revenue will follow.

Originally published on Medium.