#50 - What's It Like Working On A B2B SAAS Product?
User ≠ Buyer
Looking around in B2B, the user will often not be the one responsible for buying it. When we did story mapping and personas, it really helped us to consider the key players in the buying process. IT, for example, are thinking about security, our ability to integrate with market leaders and the fact that their careers are on the line - if you can’t get them to sign-off, good look getting your product out.
The good thing is that a lot these risks can be validated upfront. Whilst B2B typically has higher LTV, most on-premise software has moved to the cloud so I would say that advantage is going away so I would say that the best resilience is having a good product.
Another gem I will drop is that when you’re doing B2B with big clients they will often try and strong-arm you into building everything for them. They are used to being given a white-glove approach from Sales and Account Managers. This is very risky overall because as I explained to my colleague, the LTV of a number of long-tail customers can the bigger than one fat client. This provides context for prioritisation decisions
QUICK QUESTION
I slyly want to know if you would like me to share some of the ways we design and build empathetic products.
Drop me a reply. I really want to know if it will help you and don’t want to trash the newsletter if you think it will add even more pictures (which you may not want)
Let's Build Great Products
How Top Customer Support Teams Measure Performance
Helping customers achieve more through the product, and the goal is to maximise the LTV of that customer. Teams who track their sales and after sales really well know how much they can expect a customer to spend with them.
Note: I will say, that this is something teams understand after a while and it can take years to really get a benchmark. If you are growing, this is something you should consider doing.
Sunday Reads
Helpful Tool(s)
Roadmap Prioritization from Product Feedback
This is another feature used by really big teams. We get feature requests everyday and one of the most important things you can do is make your users feel heard.
You know how I feel about community. This just makes it easy to have a pool of engaged users that you can tap into at any time.