What buyers ask AI before choosing a B2B software company

Software buyers almost never ask an assistant about your company by name. They ask category questions with their own constraints attached: the best tool for a team of their size, alternatives to the product they already pay for, whether it works with Tally or Zoho, what it costs per user, and whether their data stays in India. Your name is either inside that answer or the buyer never finds out you exist.

The questions, in the words buyers use

• "best inventory software for a mid sized manufacturer in India"
• "alternatives to the tool we use now that still work with Tally"
• "does this kind of software handle GST e invoicing and e way bills"
• "how much does this software cost per user per month in India"
• "can it be hosted in India, and who inside the vendor can see our data"
• "is a paid tool worth it for a team of ten people"
• "which vendors have an implementation team in India and not only email support"
• "what happens to our data if we stop paying"

Two things are worth noticing. None of these questions contains a brand name. And they are not all asked by the same person.

The six people who ask, and what each one is checking

A software purchase above a small monthly amount is almost never one person's decision. These are the six roles that show up, and each of them asks an assistant a different question before they ever speak to you.

• The department head who feels the pain. Asks whether the tool does the specific job, in their words, not yours. "Software that can handle job work challans" rather than "manufacturing ERP".
• The IT or engineering lead. Asks about integrations, single sign on, API limits, whether there is a sandbox, and how much of the work falls on their team.
• The security or compliance reviewer. Asks where data is stored, which certifications you hold, how you handle a breach, and whether you will sign their data processing agreement.
• Finance or procurement. Asks the price, the payment terms, whether there is an annual lock in, what the renewal increase looks like, and whether you are a stable supplier.
• The legal reviewer. Asks about indemnity, the governing law, the exit clause and data return on termination.
• The end user who will be blamed if it fails. Asks whether it is actually usable, what training looks like, and whether it works on a phone with a weak connection.

One page written for "the buyer" answers none of them properly. Six pages, one per role, answer all of them and each one can be sent by the internal champion to the person who asked.

What a good answer looks like

An assistant can only repeat what it can read as text. For software that means four things on your own site.

Pricing that is visible. "Contact us for pricing" removes you from every question about cost, which is a large share of them. If you cannot publish a per seat price, publish the model: what is charged per user, what is charged once, what implementation costs and what the minimum commitment is.

Integrations named one by one. Not "integrates with your existing stack". A page or a table that names Tally, Zoho Books, SAP, Shopify, Razorpay or whatever you genuinely connect to, and says what the connection actually does.

The security and data answers in public. Where the data sits, which certifications you hold, how you handle a request under the data protection law. Procurement will ask for this anyway, so publishing it turns a slow email into a page an assistant can cite.

Who you are not for. A page that says the product is wrong for a two person team is the page an assistant trusts on everything else.

The registrations and rules that make a page checkable

Software is not a licensed trade in India, so there is no council to be registered with. What exists instead is a set of registrations and rules that a careful buyer looks up, and every one of them is a checkable fact you can put on a page.

• Your CIN and the MCA filings behind it. A procurement team pulls your company master data and your last filed financials. If your website does not name the registered entity, they are guessing which company they are contracting with.
• Your GSTIN. Needed for input credit, so it is asked for on every deal. Publishing it is normal and removes a round of email.
• Udyam registration, if you are an MSME. It changes payment terms in your favour with larger buyers and some buyers filter for it.
• The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. If you process personal data for a customer, you are a data processor and they are the data fiduciary. Say so plainly on a page, and say what you do on a deletion request.
• CERT-In's directions on incident reporting, which require certain cyber incidents to be reported within a fixed short window and logs to be retained. Buyers in regulated sectors ask how you comply.
• Government e Marketplace registration, if you want to sell to public sector buyers at all. Without it you are not in that market, and with it you are searchable inside it.
• Sector rules where they apply: RBI's requirements on data localisation for payment data, IRDAI's outsourcing guidance for insurance clients, SEBI's cloud framework for regulated intermediaries. If you sell into one of these, a page on it is one of the most valuable things you can publish, because almost no vendor writes it.

ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 are not government registrations, they are audits you pay for. Name the certificate, the scope and the date of the last report. A logo with no scope is the sort of claim a careful reviewer discounts.

What the price actually depends on

Buyers ask what software costs and almost every vendor answers with a form. You can answer with the structure even if you cannot publish a number. These are the parts a software price is usually built from.

• The per seat charge, and whether a seat is a named user, a concurrent user or anybody who logs in during a month.
• The platform or base fee, charged per company or per legal entity, which matters a great deal to a group with several GSTINs.
• Usage, counted in transactions, invoices, documents, API calls or storage, with the point at which it starts costing extra.
• One time implementation, covering configuration, data migration from the old system, and training.
• Custom development, priced by the day, for anything the product does not do today.
• The support tier, and what changes between them: response time, working hours, whether there is a named person.
• Term and commitment, the minimum number of seats, the minimum term, and the difference between paying monthly and paying for a year in advance.

Publishing that list is not the same as publishing your price. It still answers the question, and it is a page nobody else in your category has.

The questions software vendors refuse to answer in public

These are the six questions a buyer asks on the first call because they could not find the answer anywhere. Each one is a page.

• What does it really cost for our size, including implementation?
• How do we get our data out if we leave? In what format, how long it takes, whether you charge for it, and how long you keep it after the contract ends.
• Is the feature in the demo live today, or on the roadmap? A page that separates shipped from planned is unusual enough to be memorable.
• What was your uptime last quarter, and where can we see it? A status page with history is the answer. A promise in a slide is not.
• How long does implementation actually take, and what goes wrong? The honest version, with the two or three things that delay it, almost always being data quality in the old system.
• Who else like us uses it? If you cannot name customers, describe them by category precisely enough to be useful: turnover band, number of locations, which module they run.

A worked example

Here is the shape of the problem for warehouse management software sold to mid sized Indian distributors. Their site has a features page, a customer logo strip and a demo form. An assistant asked "warehouse software for a distributor with three warehouses that works with Tally" has nothing to quote, so it names three larger vendors whose documentation is public.

They publish five pages over three weeks. One on pricing, stating the per warehouse base fee, the per user charge, the implementation range and the minimum term. One on the Tally integration, saying which vouchers sync, in which direction, how often, and what does not sync. One on data location and their processor role under the data protection law. One on implementation, saying what happens in each week and that stock data cleanup is the usual cause of delay. One titled "when our software is the wrong choice", naming single location businesses and companies that need manufacturing planning.

They also fill in their G2 and Techjockey profiles, which had been empty for two years. The change that matters is not the total word count. It is that an assistant asked the Tally question now has a sentence it can repeat with a source attached, and the integration page is the page it reaches for.

Where you are probably missing

Software buyers are the one group with well established third party sources, and most vendors have stale profiles on them. The following eight are the ones that come up for Indian B2B software: G2, Capterra, GetApp, TrustRadius, Software Advice, Gartner Peer Insights, and the two Indian ones that matter for local buyers, SoftwareSuggest and Techjockey. An empty profile with no feature list and three old reviews is worse than none, because the assistant reads it as the summary of you.

Also check whether your documentation is behind a login. Docs are the most quotable pages a software company owns, and putting them behind a sign in hides them from the only reader you are trying to reach here. The same applies to a changelog, an API reference and a status page.

What this does not cover

This page is about being found and being quotable. It does not fix a product that does not do the job, and it will not help you win a question you genuinely lose. If the question is "cheapest free tool for a two person team" and you sell a licence with an implementation fee, the right outcome is not to appear.

It also cannot move an enterprise deal on its own. Large purchases are still decided by a security review, a reference call and a commercial negotiation, and being named by an assistant only gets you into the room. And nobody can promise you a position in an assistant's answer. The assistants change what they read and how they weigh it without announcing it, so anything sold as a guaranteed placement is being sold by somebody who does not control the outcome.

Finally, this will not work for a product with no public proof anywhere. If every customer is under a non disclosure agreement, every review site profile is empty and the docs are private, there is nothing for an assistant to read except your own claims, and one source is not enough.

Common questions

Will publishing our pricing let competitors undercut us?

Competitors already know your pricing. They hear it from the deals they win against you. The people your silence actually keeps out are buyers who will not start a conversation without a number, and buyers whose assistant answered their cost question using a competitor's published page. If you cannot publish a figure, publish the model and the minimum, which is enough for a buyer to self qualify.

We are a small vendor. Can we appear next to large ones?

On a broad question, usually not, and chasing it wastes effort. On a narrow question with a constraint attached, often yes, because the large vendor has not written the page about job work challans for a three warehouse distributor and you can. Narrow questions are smaller in volume and much higher in intent.

Do review site profiles matter if we have very few reviews?

The profile matters even with few reviews, because the structured fields are read: the category, the feature list, the pricing field, the industries and the company size served. An accurate profile with three reviews is more useful to an assistant than an empty profile with none. Get the fields right first, then ask for reviews.

Should we publish a comparison page against a named competitor?

Yes, if you can write it accurately, including where they are better. An honest comparison is quotable and a one sided one is not, and describing a competitor wrongly is a real legal and reputational risk. Say what each product is best at and who should pick which.

How long before any of this shows up in an answer?

Longer than a search ranking and with more variation between readings. The honest answer is that it depends on whether the page gets crawled, whether anything else links to it, and how contested the question is. Measure direction across several readings rather than reading meaning into one, and expect the narrow questions to move before the broad ones.

Our product is in a category the assistants describe wrongly. What then?

Write the category definition page yourself. If assistants keep confusing your category with a neighbouring one, the page that explains the difference, names the products in each, and says which buyer needs which is both genuinely useful and the page most likely to be cited, because nobody else has bothered.

What to do first

Five pages, in this order: pricing with the model stated and a date on it, one page per major integration, one honest alternatives page that names the products buyers compare you with, one page answering the security and data location question, and one page on the specific job you do best. Then take your documentation out from behind the login and claim the directory profiles. That is a fortnight of work, not a quarter.

Before you write anything, spend one hour asking the eight questions at the top of this page to two assistants without naming your company, and write down which vendors and which pages came back. That list tells you which of the five pages to write first.