The Enterprise B2B Product Sales Cycle
Part one of the Enterprise B2B Product Management series
I recently did a talk discussing the difference between B2C product management and enterprise B2B product management. There were a number of reasons I felt this was an interesting topic to write about but one of the main ones was that it felt ill-served by some of the product management articles out there, and some of the classic advice doesn’t seem to hold true in the more… let’s say “complicated” world of Enterprise B2B SaaS. Since a 1 hour webinar is a bit of a commitment, I wanted to summarise some of the key themes from my talk in a few easy-to-consume posts.
What the heck is Enterprise B2B?
When I refer to “Enterprise B2B” in this context I’m really thinking of large, probably (but not exclusively) multi-national companies. I am honourably excluding Big Tech firms (FAANG and so forth) and concentrating on the type of big firms that The Innovator’s Dilemma eloquently talks about.
These companies have certain characteristics. They are big and slow, can be risk averse, have lots of internal stakeholders and politics. On the other hand, they have massive reach, lots of money and are generally prepared to sign long term deals.
