Enterprise Product-Led Growth Part 2
Adoption Wins
In an earlier post I gave a case study of my experience crafting an Enterprise product offering to the needs of our corporate customers, winning hundreds of accounts and accelerating revenue growth. I’d like to talk a little more generally about Enterprise and B2B product strategy.
It’s commonly understood that the biggest adjustment that Product Managers make in working on Enterprise products is to develop empathy for a whole second set of customers: Enterprise software buyers.
Enterprise software, it has long been said, is purchased by different people than those who use it. And by focusing on the needs of purchasers, you are building empathy for the decision makers who will determine your success.
There is some wisdom here, but it’s not aging well. I have found an increasing amount of contrast between this idea and the growing “product-led growth” movement which I summarize this way: Adoption wins.
In the PLG mindset, we aim to make a great product that attracts users, rather than thinking about marketing to buyers. Users become buyers within the app, self-service, perhaps buying several upgrades and/or incremental purchases that contribute to their lifetime value.
In the old days, I think I believed that this kind of self-service customer journey was incompatible with the needs of an enterprise customer. But I don’t think I think that anymore, not after watching how corporate users adopt Zoom, Slack, Figma, AirTable, Creative Cloud, etc.
Today the table stakes for the enterprise customer journey seem to mostly overlap with a PLG journey. If we think about how products like Figma or Miro are adopted in companies, the journey seems to go like this:
1. Individual Trial
2. Individual Paid
3. 2–5 Individuals Trial & Paid
4. Individual -> Pro Account Upgrades
5. Enterprise Trial
At Step 5 your Enterprise customer is probably ready to talk to a sales rep. At that stage you should be certainly be ready to respond with empathy for their needs.
And of course within your app experience there are opportunities to address the unique needs of a user who works in a large corporation, and to address the buyer needs specifically.
For the buyer persona, I think it’s smart to think separately about how you can impact retention at contract renewal time. Let’s get into that in another post.
For now, I think a lot of Enterprise (and so many B2B) companies still have Step 1 experiences that start with “Contact Us for a Demo.” Or maybe they are doing a bunch of work on a “buyer” experience that would be better invested in “users.”
You should do both. But win users before you sell customers. There is almost nothing better than a sales pipeline full of prospects who are already paying you. And your sales people will love (love!) getting leads who have to close an enterprise deal in order to get your product off of their corporate Amex cards.