The Aditude Strategy: Building Deep Trust in Enterprise Sales Through Technical Leadership
Most enterprise SaaS companies gate their technology behind trials and demos. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Aditude CEO Jared Siegal revealed how giving away their technology for free became their most powerful sales tool.
The Technical Foundation
“By the time we kind of converted from a hourly type of business model, mostly a SaaS business model, we had already built out a lot of tech,” Jared explained. This wasn’t accidental – it was a deliberate strategy to build credibility before asking for subscription revenue.
The Free Technology Approach
Instead of trying to monetize their technology immediately, Aditude took a longer view: “We’re offering our tech for free for upwards of maybe twelve months and continuing to charge by the hour for all of the support and maintenance of that tech.” This approach created a unique dynamic where clients could experience the value before committing to a subscription.
Building Dependencies Through Value
The strategy worked because “a lot of our publishers were already fully reliant on our technology.” By the time Aditude transitioned to a SaaS model, their technology had become integral to their clients’ operations. This created natural leverage for the eventual conversion to paid subscriptions.
The Trust-Based Transition
When it came time to monetize, Aditude positioned the change as an investment in client success. “I’m using this money to continue to hire more developers, to build out better products so they can make more money,” Jared explained. The proof was in their execution: “Nearly every day we’re releasing more and more updates to what eventually became our main product, the cloud wrapper.”
The Enterprise Trust Factor
For enterprise publishers doing “hundreds of millions, if not billions of impressions a month,” trust isn’t just about relationships – it’s about reliability. As Jared notes, “Every time we sign a new client, that’s another giant set of families that we’re responsible for. I don’t take that lightly.”
Community-Based Technical Leadership
This technical credibility extends into their community engagement. “There’s a tremendous amount of slack communities,” Jared shared. Their approach? “I never actually pitch act. I will, in fact, sometimes go out of my way to answer questions that make it so they don’t need to use us.”
The Results
The depth of trust this approach has built is remarkable. “We become very ingrained with these clients day to day businesses and we become almost members of their team as well,” Jared explained. Some publishers have even written Aditude into their wills – perhaps the ultimate testament to trust in enterprise relationships.
The Broader Strategy
This technical leadership approach is part of Aditude’s larger philosophy to “be the nice company in the space, right. Not a company that’s just out for yourself. Be a company that is trying to protect and fight for the publishers and make money that way.”
For B2B founders, particularly those selling technical solutions to enterprise clients, Aditude’s approach offers an interesting template: build technical credibility before asking for money, demonstrate value through free access, and position monetization as an investment in shared success.
As Jared puts it, the key is to look at clients as “part of our family. Right. Part of our business. And it’s something that we don’t take lightly.” When you combine this mindset with genuine technical excellence, you create the kind of trust that enterprise sales teams dream of.