Having had experience developing and launching B2B and B2C products, it made me think about the differences between these two different product categories.

#1 Product Customization

B2B products can be customized to a high degree for each enterprise client as per their needs, especially if you’re trying to provide them with a white-label solution. Eg. Adding or deleting features as per the usecases of the client organization.

Whereas B2C products cannot be customized for your 100+ or 10000+ end customer base. There might be 10 customer profiles created with taregetted functionalities for each profile, however each customer won’t get a customized product (this is different than the product being personalized for each user — this personalization then becomes a product feature in itself).

#2 Training & Support

B2B products might need a guided tour, more support and service to train the end users of the client organization. It might even entail a dedicated account manager providing in-office training and phone support/demos etc. for the client organization.

On the other hand, B2C products need to be so intuitive as to have minimum to null onscreen support. It might be complemented with a general customer support center, however a dedicated account manager for each of 10K clients is not an option.

#3 Onboarding

B2B products might need to be deployed as its own mini-project for each enterprise client. This would include support, training sessions, in-premise launch events, data migration from the client organization, customizing the product as per the data and use-cases of the client organization etc.

B2C products on the other hand do not require dedicated hand-holding. The user can go to the website, download a mobile app, create an account and start using the product without your company having to get involved directly.

#4 Sales cycle

B2B products have a long sales cycle. It may be months or years depending on if you’re competing against other giants in the industry, trying to penetrate a new market or disrupting a domain completely (in which case it’s more important to educate the customer before trying to sell the product). This long sales cycle also ties in with understanding the client organizations needs and most probably customizing the product for that client.

B2C products get (or ideally should) adopted as per the user demand and customer traction. Once the product is in production and out there in the world, it can be accessed and used by any customer.

#5 Personas and Users

In a B2B scenario, the person who buys the product is different than the users who actually use it. Hence there is a Buyer persona and a User persona. Selling the product to the buyer, but understanding/creating/customizing the product for the end user adds complexities to the B2B product journey.

Whereas in a B2C scenario, the person who buys the product is usually the one using it as well. There will be multiple personas for these end users (based on behavior, demographics, level of usage etc.), but there is usually no difference between the “Buyer” and “User”.

#6 High switching costs

In a B2B setting, since the entire or a large portion of the organization of the B2B client probably uses your product, any change in the workflow/process/enhancements requires a huge training effort for the users of the client organization. Similarly if the client organization is already using a competitors product, the cost to switch from your competitor to your product is going to be large/complicated and the sales cycle is going to be longer than usual.

Even though B2C switching costs are quite high as well (e.g. encouraging users to switch from Uber to Lyft), they’re at a end-user level. Whereas a B2B switching cost is at a client organization level — if the client org decides to replace Facebook workplace with Slack enterprise, all the employees of this organization have no choice but to adapt to the change.