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the faster a company grows. In businesses that are
struggling to keep up with experience disrupters,
their flywheels are full of friction. Experience dis-
rupters are very good at reducing that tension.
Consider Atlassian, an Australian B2B collabo-
ration software company that is a friction-fighting
superhero. It’s a large company that is growing
very fast and is very profitable, with a market cap
near $36 billion. The company’s president, Jay
Simons, serves on HubSpot’s board, and we are
one of Atlassian’s biggest customers, so I know the
business well. Simons told us that changing the
process of buying B2B software meant rethinking
how the marketing and sales departments interact
with customers, and even how the contracting
process works.
First, Atlassian’s marketing department looks
just like a B2C marketing department, focusing less
on generating new leads and more on activating
current users and multiplying the number of users
and teams within a customer. Instead of fighting
the uphill battle for senior-level evaluation of their
solution, Atlassian focuses on the ease with which
an end user can invite a colleague to a collaborative
project.
Now, most of the B2B experience disrupters do
a really nice job of marrying low-friction, B2C-
style marketing with a slightly-heavier-friction
traditional enterprise sales model. But Atlassian
doesn’t do this. What impresses me is that most of
its transactions happen without the sales team.
Salespeople negotiate the highest-sticker-price
deals — basically, the deals that generate the top
1% of value. Otherwise, sales are straightforward,
with no commissions. Just a few years ago, you’d
buy a toothbrush or a comb online, but now
people are buying multimillion-dollar pieces of
software the same way.
Atlassian also tweaked the contracting process.
Think about how the process typically works:
Potential buyers will Google something they need,
find a product on a website, and possibly check out
the company’s blog and social media and do the
same with its competitors. They’ll call the com-
pany, ask to talk to someone on the sales team, and
maybe have a great experience with a salesperson
who engages them, understands their pain, and
solution-sells them.
Trust and goodwill are built up, and the customer
is ready to buy. And then: A brutal negotiation over
the course of weeks or months ensues.
All that trust, all that goodwill, all that good-
ness — it goes down the tubes. I really don’t like
this. Jay Simons doesn’t like this, either. So what he
said was, “Basta. Enough. No more negotiations.
I’m not giving discounts to anyone. I don’t care if
it’s my sister. No discounts.” What he wants to do is
keep the goodwill between us. He doesn’t want an
adversarial relationship. So when a prospect asks
the inevitable question, “How about a discount?”
Atlassian staff are trained to explain that the software
is relatively lower cost because the company builds
discounts directly into the prices to treat every cus-
tomer equally and to take away price uncertainty.
The purchase price is online, and because they don’t
negotiate changes in prices or terms and conditions,
the contracting process is not complex — and it’s
easily automated. All these decisions eliminate fric-
tion at this stage of the sale.They Personalize the Relationship
The third adaptation is that experience disrupters
are awfully good at creating a personalized experi-
ence. Their competitors, the incumbents in the
industry, offer a more generic experience when
they’re prospecting customers. In our research
project, when we talked to the founders of experi-
ence disrupters, I was surprised at how much they
didn’t sound like tech people. The language they
used made them sound more like executives from
The Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons. The way
these companies cater to each customer makes them
less like tech companies than like ultramodern
hospitality companies.
Think about Netflix. Inside the company’s
database, there’s a fingerprint for every one of us cus-
tomers. The more we use their product, the more
shows we watch or click on or give up on 10 minutes in,
the better the company gets at personalizing its recom-
mendations to us. Netflix suggests new content based
on viewing history, but even the finest details — such
as the thumbnails that accompany each show — are
tailored to an individual user’s browsing habits.
This is one of Netflix’s real secrets of success.
Now, Netflix isn’t the only company using data
to be much more prescriptive about experience.