How many people were actually in your last enterprise deal?
Not on the org chart. In the decision.
Gartner puts the buying group for enterprise software above $100,000 a year at around eleven. Forrester has deals past a million running fourteen to twenty-three, and counted roughly twenty-seven interactions across that group before anyone signs anything — content read, conversations had, peer reviews, platform walkthroughs. You’re in some of them. Most of them happen without you: a Microsoft account executive in a quarterly review, an integrator scoping a migration, somebody answering a question in a channel you will never see.
Product-market fit doesn’t help you in those rooms. It’s necessary, and I’d still start there, but it stopped being sufficient the moment enterprise buying became a committee sport.
That’s what partner-market fit actually means, and it isn’t a logo slide. It’s presence in the conversations you were never going to be invited to.
[[ BOB → the concrete one: a deal won or lost inside somebody else’s meeting. Customer stays generic. ]]
So of the twenty-seven, how many are yours?