Effective Tips For B2B Product Management
Let’s start by addressing the obvious; businesses are made up of people.
This might pose the question: “In what ways does B2B (business to business) product management and ad hoc product management differ from the B2C (business to consumer) management and development processes if the end user is a person either way?”
The keys to success as a B2B Product Manager is understanding where to walk the line between the feedback and needs of who you’re selling to and who your end users are.
Understand Both Ends of the Sales Process
Consumer softwares aims to solve a problem for a high volume of individuals. Because of this, these products will emphasize experience above features, as their success hinges on “hooking” a high amount of people making their own decisions. These individuals will have the sovereignty to continue to use your software, thus triggering your monetization engine.
Neal Taparia, who runs gaming platform Solitaired, illustrates this point well. “We focus on an experience that will get users to come back and play our solitaire games. We do this by looking at data from thousands of our users to understand what they like about our games, and build further on top of that.”
Conversely, an agile enterprise solution will be looking to sell far fewer people, as software implementations in a business setting are decisions made by relatively few people in the organization — and certainly not by each individual. These solutions will look to capitalize on relatively fewer leads with the understanding that you’ll be selling a solution at the scale of the target.
This understanding fundamentally changes how and where feedback is incorporated from, as a B2B product such as a ticketing system, or HR software, will be working lock-in-step with their Sales team to incorporate the feedback given by prospective buyers. Using tools like B2B lead generation software is a good place to start. This feedback is typically more value (or feature) oriented than B2C tools, who look to respond based on direct feedback from individual users who will adore new features through the lens of how it adds to the experience of the software.
A Merging of Philosophies
This is where classic enterprise solutions — and certainly new ones — that do not emphasize experience are starting to feel the burn. It is becoming far more frequent that new solutions within these organizations are found by non-decision makers, and are recommended up the ranks of the decision ladder to the top, thus influencing the purchasing decision.
These grass roots recommendations are winning on more of a B2C attraction than their classically stodgy B2B predecessors. Recognizing how your product can serve to attract and perhaps even service a small segment of a company without formally entering the sales process is a powerful avenue for growth, as a savvy sales team will ensure that the grass roots recommendation makes it all the way to the right person, because it hinges on perhaps the most important decision point in adopting a new software: buy-in.
Design for People
No matter the target audience whether it be a software development team or a content marketing division you must chiefly remember that your end user is always a person, which means usability should always be emphasized, monitored and measured. If you’re willing to compromise on experience with the thought that your Sales team can win on contracts, your business will pay for the price for this sooner or later. Capable design, easy to view infographics and a suite of cohesive features that solve a problem is what sets your product — and thus business-up for long-term success through buy-in.
You Can’t ‘Buy’ Buy-In
The crux of a purchasing decision (and ultimately, a second contract) in a B2B setting is ensuring buy-in. Value in the way of features is monumentally important, as it needs to solve problems for those purchasing (it needs to make their job easier and make them look better, too!) as well as the daily power user, but rolling out new software, training their staff, and establishing ongoing support channels is the most expensive aspect of a software purchase. And after all of the time, money, and energy expended in this new purchase, if it does not result in employee buy-in, then the rollout was a failure.
This is why these grass roots recommendations are starting to carry more weight, as it ensures that there will be (if there isn’t already in smaller pilot groups) employee buy-in.
Balancing Purchaser and End User Needs in Your Roadmap
Feedback Incorporation
We’ve discussed how your company will ultimately need to sell higher-ups in an organization (even if it’s convinced many more along the way). Because of this, your feature roadmap will need to respond to the feedback your Sales team receives throughout the course of their discussions. That said, this power needs to be held in check; a potential major contract that is dangling a few missing features as requirements for a sale may lead you in a direction that the remainder of your sales targets (and grass roots advocates) may not see value in.
Strategic Feature Rollout
Since it’s an expensive and laborious proposition to train your users on your software, you’ll want to plan your roadmap such that your releases are strategically infrequent and your Sales Enablement team are well attuned in order to explain (or potentially upsell) the new features. A B2C product may explain a new feature with a fun in-app animation and rely on user discovery, whereas B2B solutions or a banking application must have these changes documented, explained, and prepared to be supported.
Nuts and Bolts of Enterprise Solutions
B2C products put the power in the hands of the individual, whereas B2B products must fit into the technical and security requirements of many different types of organizations and project management types. Because of this, you’ll be placing additional emphasis on Admin controls, gmail accounts, log-in credentialing, passing security audits, and more. These items need to factor into every product feature, as a security loophole could be a costly error that you’ve certified won’t happen as part of your customer’s contract with your organization.
Summarizing the Key Takeaways
Businesses are people too, they just make decisions differently. That said, be sure to approach the end users as people from a design standpoint, as you may find that their buy-in is the biggest factor to your current (and next) sale.
Prioritize your roadmap based on sustained feedback from your Sales team, but be sure to keep an ear to the ground for product ideas as well for the above reason. Don’t let one big fish lure you to a smaller pond.
Lastly, figure to plan your releases based on the capacity for your customers to learn them and your organization’s ability to support them, and be sure to sweat the technical details when courting enterprise targets.
