Streamlined b2b selling process for Product Management

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as you might know there's a lot of pieces out there that you can learn about you know b2c products right you can learn about okay how do you reach out to the Millennials or how do you reach out the consumers are there the millions of them are there right but how do you actually talk to enterprises if you look at the market opportunity it's about six it's going to be about six hundred sixty five billion dollars for digital transformation by 2023 right so we for for that to happen obviously there's a huge market for annual SAS kind of products that is just waiting to be taken over right there is a pieces around accounting there's pieces around optimization there's peace pieces around cloud and AI and there's so much more to the enterprise story than meets the eye so there is definitely a lot of opportunity there and you know and for the taking so definitely you know that's something that we need to pay attention to from that perspective so what I want to talk to you today was how are b2b and b2c similar right what makes them look similar but how they're significantly different from each other what an enterprise organization so you might have pieces that you sell to a regular small and medium business but how is an enterprise different and finally I kind of as we talk through it I'll talk through about the solution please how do we actually build for an enterprise b2b product right so this you know they're like a few people joined us so just wanted to understand if how many of you actually worked in a b2b kind of environment or right in kind of looking to see you know what what needs to get done there so feel free to pepper me with questions because you know we have a little bit of time and we have enough personal space here they're going to talk to talk to everybody so how is b2b and b2c similar the big thing about that is that the product really needs to solve your customers problem today right so if it doesn't solve it it really isn't useful to the customer then it's not going to work so you still have to in the b2b space you still have to understand who your user is you still have to understand what your market is you have to understand what their pain points are and you have to understand how to solve it and you need to know you know the overall peace around okay how do we deploy it and how do we look at those things right how do we actually make the user want to use this product right so those things are very similar in the b2c and b2b space right you still want the adoption from the users but what's different is in the b2b world there are a few different things that are very different right so the first piece is around reliability performance and training so if you want the users to adopt an adoption is key for any enterprise you don't want your software to become shell where you don't want it to be sitting out there and nobody is using it right because at the end of the day if nobody uses it they don't renew their license and you're not going to get anything and these user users are not necessarily always going to be tech savvy or are not looking to adopt this because they love the product they're they're looking to adopt it because the enterprise has told them that they need to actually take this product on right so you have to have to make it easy for them to adopt it which is where the reliability and the performance in the training comes in the second piece is you have to look at process variations a lot of these large companies have very different processes for different things right so say for example you're looking at one bank the way they do accounting might be very different from how a second bank does it right there might be some regulatory pieces that are exactly the same but how they operate is going to be vastly different and you need to actually build for those pieces so when you sell to one bank versus another bank you're still able to accommodate all their pieces within your product right and the last piece is you know around scalability and security security and auditability so this is the third piece around why you know b2b piece is different because your regular b2c consumers are not expecting to see this right but a large enterprise will always want to be able to handle large amounts of data be able to securely do it and make it editable so when you have you're looking at third party people coming in to o do audits on your Sox compliance or those kind of things you know they need this this level of P or it ability within the architecture itself so these are kind of the three big pieces so we have to look at you know the reliability piece building it for adoption building it for scale and building it for scope so those are the three kind of themes that I'll talk about today right so how do you make it easy for the user to adopt it right you need to make sure that there is ample training for the user you need to make this the app intuitive enough for the user to take on so as an example this is one of my actual users in the field I was out with them in in in Texas somewhere and he's trying to take a reading in the middle of the desert on an iPhone app that we created for him and the thing with him is you know you know he is used to how an iPhone works but he doesn't really necessarily know a whole lot of technology so previously before this they had they were carrying around a laptop in the field in a truck and then they were entering data there so what we did was we actually went out there we sat with them and said okay let's figure out what your process looks like let's see how we can help you make it better than how we can help you adopt a new technology so we actually went and sat with him looked through his entire process saw how much we could help him and and actually helped him save about two hours a day in the field so that not only is he having to do less you know data entry and all of those kind of things but he is also having to he's saving well company a lot of time and a lot of money from that so definitely if you're building something put it off you have to make sure that it's intuitive it's easy for them to be a trained on and it's easy to roll out to them right so that's the first piece you have to build for adoption the second piece is built for scope so there are a lot of adjacent processes so I spoke about process variations right so say for example you have you're solving one specific issue with your product but as you discover there might be adjacent issues that you need to resolve right so when we talked about the accounting piece for a bank there is you could solve for example their workflow around how accounting happens but you can also look at okay what who uses that data right how do I build analytics on top of the data so those pieces are adjacent pieces that you can actually build around you can increase your user base and you can increase you know how much license you're getting from that so you always have to build for scope so you have to make the architecture loosely coupled so that you can actually build more things around it as as as the years progress and you can penetrate deeper into the the customer base so as an example for this you know we built the software that I just showed you right on the app where it was really around data gathering in the field and they were doing that and then we realized they also need task management they need to be able to do tasks and they need to be able to go out there and actually figure out what is the list of things that they need to do in a daily on a daily basis and not just enter data and give them that ability to do that so we were able to tack on that piece and build that piece out entirely new and that actually pretty much doubled am right it improved the overall experience for the user but and the enterprise but at the same time it increased at times significantly because now we had a new base of users that we could sell to and since this was a loosely architected piece we could actually tack on more pieces on top of it and make it more widely available so that's the the second piece the last piece that I have really is around you know how do you get just to scale so a lot of you know in the b2c environment you're looking at millions and millions of users generating millions of rows of data on a daily basis on the b2b side just a thousand users could be generating a million rows a day so for example for the product that I work on we have about 1000 to 1500 users and we're looking at approximately a million rows a day coming into our systems and how do you build that to scale a sequel server kind of environment might not work so you actually have to think through how you're going to scale up to different organizations and different enterprises as you actually bring your product together and help your engineering team architected right so you always have to think through that scale piece as well so yeah so like I'm saying I mean talking about scale just making sure that you know you're able to build something that that will scale out or you know in our case you know we did we build something that scaled to a certain extent and once it got to that point or close to that point we start building out the next level of scale on that say yeah so the way to kind of solve for this really I have a lot of words yet but I think I've said most of these things anyway but building for adoption you have to think about okay the entire rollout process in terms of how do you make the end-user want to use your product so you have to think about like I said training you have to think about intuitive Ness of the product you have to think about deployment and rollouts because you know customers typically won't take especially enterprise customers and if it's a critical piece of software they won't necessarily take deployments every week or every month or every year and it's not like you can just release it on App Store and you go right they typically have internal processes internal IT that will that they'll have to go through and the processes that we have to go through for that those deployments even if you're doing it on mass or on in SAS then the second piece around like I said for builds of building on scope make sure the the architecture when when the enterprise architects are putting this architecture together they're thinking through about how do we you know make it easy for API is to access access it or build a different module that can be repurposed or reused in different places so as you build your platform out you can use like engines or formula engines or mathematical engines across the board and not have to rebuild those things over and over again and then the last thing is around scaling as I said you know you want to make sure that you don't have any performance issues for the most part right any shutdown is critical especially if you're an accounting software and you're trying to do a month end piece of thing then you you get hauled up and nobody wants to use you again so you just have to make sure that you're building for that level of scale and just uh one more thing right at the end of the day the idea is to sell the software right so you have to make sure that you're thinking about who your buyers are who your influencers are and who your users are there could be completely three different kind of folk folks in the in the company that are doing those three different things right so you have to make sure you know who those are and you have to always keep in mind that the ROI of the company that you're building the platform and the software for is kept in mind right so you always want to make sure that you're you're able to sell your software