Salim Gheewalla, Founder & CEO, utilITise | Self-Healing IT.getty​Nobody negotiates the price of a Rolex or asks LV for a discount. The price is the price because the product is the product.So why does buying B2B software still feel like haggling at a bazaar?I spent over a decade selling enterprise technology at the reseller side with names like Cisco, HPE and Palo Alto, into some of the largest corporations in the country. The technology was almost always good. The buying experience was almost always broken. And in the years since, I have become convinced that the experience, not the technology, is the real reason the small and midsize market gave up on enterprise software long ago.According to Gartner, 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. Buyers have made their preference clear. The industry has been slow to listen.Here is what is broken in B2B: ​1. The Emotional ExperienceOpen almost any B2B dashboard and the first thing you feel is stress. Red banners. Flashing alerts. Tickets stacking up in a queue. The product is screaming about problems instead of demonstrating control.That is a failure of intent. Every business owner I have ever met cares about two numbers: topline revenue and bottom-line profit. Yet most B2B software connects to neither. It connects to fear. It is designed to make you feel like something is always on fire, because a product that makes you anxious feels indispensable.I think that is backward. The best software should feel like an instrument panel, not an alarm system. Calm. Quiet. In control. The measure of great operational software is not how much it shows you, but how little it needs to.Take your consumer experience for example. When was the last time you felt anxious looking at your iPhone or your Netflix account? You do not, because those products were designed to make you feel in control. B2B software should be held to the same standard.​2. The End User Is Treated As CollateralB2B software is sold to a decision-maker and shipped to an entire organization. The person who signs the contract is almost never the person who lives with the consequences.The new hire waiting three days for a laptop. The office manager fielding password resets at 11 p.m. The executive whose video call fails in the middle of a board meeting. None of them were in the room when the purchase was made, yet all of them inherit it.This is why so much of the software industry has had to invent entire departments, customer success, customer experience, onboarding specialists, to paper over the gap between what was sold and what is actually experienced. The fix is not another success team. It is designing for the whole chain from the beginning. The buyer who evaluates ROI and the hundred people who never should have to think about the software at all.Look at how many resources inside your own company exist only to manage that overlap. The success team cleaning up after the sales team. The ops person bridging the gap between the tool and the people using it. Let us be real for a moment: you are hoping AI matures fast enough to remove that friction for you. It will. The only question is whether your software vendor builds it in, or whether you are left bolting it on yourself.3. Transparency And Time To ValueWhy does a standard B2B software quote still take a week? Because in too many cases, the price is not tied to the value of the product. It is tied to what the vendor believes the buyer can afford. That is not pricing. That is negotiation theater.Two companies proved it does not have to work this way, and neither of them was a software company. Tesla took the single most friction-heavy purchase most people ever make, buying a car, and removed the dealership entirely. One price. Online. Done. Apple took enterprise hardware procurement and made it feel like buying a phone. The price is the price whether you buy one unit or ten thousand.Neither was a pricing decision. Both were design decisions. They understood that opacity is friction, and friction is what makes people walk away.​The Real OpportunityHere is what I have learned building in this space: the gap between what B2B software could feel like and what it actually feels like is the single largest unaddressed opportunity in the category.When I look at why the small and midsize market remains so underserved, it is not a technology problem. The technology exists. It is that the buying experience was built for the sales motion instead of the business. Gated pricing. Week-long quotes. Demos required just to see a number. Every one of those is a signal to the buyer that the product was not built for them.The companies that win the next decade of B2B software will not necessarily have the most features. They will have the least friction. They will publish their pricing. They will let the product explain itself. They will treat the end user as the actual customer. And they will understand that in a market where buyers research, compare and decide before they ever raise their hand, the experience is the product.The market did not lose faith in software. It lost faith in how software gets sold. That is a fixable problem. And the first companies to fix it will not have to negotiate for anything.Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?