Inside Azumuta’s Enterprise Sales Motion: Why Features Don’t Matter at the C-Level
Technical founders love talking about features. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Azumuta founder Batist Leman revealed why that’s exactly what’s holding them back from enterprise success.
The Technical Founder’s Trap
“We are quite technical team,” Batist admitted. “I’m an engineer myself and then the first people that joined were developers.” This technical DNA shaped their initial approach to sales: “We like to talk about features. That’s a classic, it’s not necessarily a mistake, but that’s a classic property of a startup.”
This feature-focused messaging created a clear ceiling. As Batist explained, “If you talk about features, then you can reach like your key users, your team leaders, operators, engineers. Perhaps you can get to the operation manager in factories.” But there was a problem: “It’s less relevant for the C-level types.”
The Enterprise Imperative
The limitations became clear as Azumuta grew. “Of course, if you grow as a company, you want to sell more enterprise deals, you have to reach that C-level,” Batist noted. This realization forced a fundamental shift in how they communicated their value.
Instead of leading with features, they began addressing strategic business challenges: “Now we are shifting our messaging from those features, more like about the bigger picture items,” Batist explained. Their new enterprise messaging focused on executive-level concerns:
- Strategic workforce management: “How do you get your quality under control, the quality of your workforce?”
- Demographic challenges: “How can you defend against an aging workforce?”
- Knowledge retention: “How do you manage to capture all the tacit knowledge that’s available in your operators?”
- Market agility: “The world is more volatile than ever, so there are demand spikes and so is your company and your factory ready to scale up if the demand spikes?”
- Competitive advantage: “Will your competitor move faster than you and will take the market?”
Understanding Enterprise Value
This evolution required deep understanding of where they created the most value. Azumuta discovered their sweet spot was “discrete manufacturing… companies that are building complex products that takes a long time to make.”
More specifically, they excel in situations where mistakes are costly. As Batist noted, they’re particularly valuable “when it costs a lot, when someone makes a mistake… because there is a danger for recalls, for example, or customer complaint is expensive.”
The Future Vision
The transformation wasn’t just about changing words – it was about reframing their entire value proposition. As Batist explained their evolved vision: “We think that there will always be humans in manufacturing. Even if there are lots of robots, there will always be humans doing the oversight, helping the robots.”
This perspective resonates with C-suite concerns about workforce management: “They can’t be forgotten, end up in misery. If your knowledge is in the people’s heads and they leave your company, then all the knowledge gets lost and you have to start over.”
Building the Right Team
This messaging evolution required new expertise. “In the beginning we hired… not the most expensive people. And so that was a mistake. There were junior people, just graduated, didn’t have a lot of experience. And so it was really hard.”
The breakthrough came with experienced marketing hires: “We had some great hires from HubSpot… those people are coming from HubSpot, a lot of experience in marketing, and that really changed the game completely. Since then you can clearly see it in our metrics.”
The Impact
The shift from feature-focused to strategic messaging transformed their growth trajectory: “From that point on, you really see like a dent in our graphs.” But perhaps more importantly, it positioned Azumuta to tackle larger strategic challenges in manufacturing.
For technical founders following Azumuta’s path, the lesson is clear: while features matter for technical buyers, enterprise sales require a fundamentally different conversation. Success comes not from explaining what your product does, but from addressing the strategic challenges that keep C-suite executives awake at night.
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