Should you approach product building with a B2B enterprise mindset, or a consumer-first B2C approach?
Experts
Enterprise products win through deep customer relationships, solving complex workflows, and building for the buyer. Revenue predictability and customer success drive growth.
Consumer products win through delightful UX, viral loops, and mass adoption. Build for the end user first, monetize later. Speed and simplicity beat feature depth.
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)
If you truly build a self-serve product, you can either never have a sales team or Slack defer it or Canva really defer it. Canva didn't really build a sales team until they were well north of 500 million in revenue because it's epic self-serve. Slack started all self-serve, and by the time they went public, the majority of their revenue was enterprise sales.
Going to annual contracts on a spreadsheet looks great. On a spreadsheet, it looks great. You know what's better? Letting customers pay what they want to pay. If it's you or me buying for ourselves, Lenny, we're still going to put it on a credit card, aren't we? If it's our own personal... And we want to pay monthly, usually, we don't know.
The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna
Marketing and sales have done an incredible job over the last couple of decades of coming up with these stories and elaborate playbooks of how to attract enterprise buyers and how to sell them this product. Product literally only obsesses after contract is closed and there's usage that starts materialize after contract close.
It's great when you start having sales team and you're surfacing this organic demand. That's beautiful and power to you. Just it doesn't last very long just because end user fundamentally does not equal enterprise buyer and that organic demand ends up plateauing very shortly because you cannot just make enterprise buyers happen from your users.
The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab)
The company need to meet certain size, but they also need to show interest. And how marketing team historically gauge interest is how much they interact with your marketing campaigns. Do they open an email? Do they read three white papers? Do they go to this webinar? That's how they gauge interest. And for each positive action you did as a buyer, they add some points to you.
Yeah, so GitLab, we are a developer platform, DevOps platform, basically engineer teams, developer teams. They use this product to manage their entire DevOps process, from storing their code, kind of managing the version control, releasing CSAD, like security scan, all of that. It's an all in one platform for that team.
Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market
Well, and here's the thing. The reason they build a sales team eventually is they need to get enterprise deals. And obviously you need a sales team to get enterprise deals. And one of the mistakes you could make is hiring an enterprise salesperson when you're trying to cross the chasm.
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The ultimate guide to founder-led sales | Jen Abel (co-founder of JJELLYFISH)
Yes, I can get people very excited by this. Once you are in, you are in. Once you are in, you are now a preferred vendor. You now have the ability to cross over into other business units. You are now the reason that, hey, if your competitor comes in, well, you got there first. So what do you think procurement's going to say?
So I've been talking a lot about enterprise sales, which is I would say anywhere north of 500 to a thousand employees. Just mental model. I'm talking about enterprise sales specifically because there's so much nuance involved in it, because the user and the buyer are very different, right? As you go down market, let's talk about small business for a second.
The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon
This is the client who's really looking for that vendor to have their back and to assure them that they're going to see the benefits that are being projected and promised through the sale.
The other thing you've got to do though is establish some safety net options. There are lots of different shapes and forms.
How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)
But really my forte is selling. I love to sell. I love to talk to customers. I love to train salespeople. I've been a VP of sales and CRO in a couple different places. Then for the last five years I've been building a community for salespeople that's called Bravado. Bravado is a network of about 300,000 B2B tech sales.
Let's start here, which is cold call, cold email response rates have never been lower. Never been lower. I think you're seeing this across every sales team. Again, if you're listening to this and you have a sales team, you know what I'm saying is true. Top of funnel pipeline is drying fast faster than our planet's drying up in fact.
Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)
Today my guest is Albert Cheng. Albert is known as one of the top consumer growth minds in the world. He led growth and monetization at three of the most successful and beloved consumer products in the world, Duolingo, Grammarly, and now Chess.com. Earlier in his career at YouTube, he worked on streaming and gaming features used by over 20 million people.
Yeah, exactly right. In my experience, the typical win rate, and I hate to use that term for experiments, is often something like 30 to 50%.
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
Dropbox is massively viral. When I think also about Miro or Figma, those also are very viral products. Those have a kind of the DNA of product led. And initially I think when you have scale, you're getting a lot of signal on what is resonating with the user. Initially, you also don't have ... It takes a while to build out the features for enterprise.
One of the most common pitfalls I'd say is not having, and I've alluded to this, not having a sense of the big picture from the start and not being strategic about what your go-to market strategy is going to be. Also, what is your pricing and packaging going to look like?
The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
Looking back at Foursquare, do you think there was a path to building a massive consumer app type business or is that just never going to work out? I know they went in direction of B2B data business. I guess was there a path or was it just like, "No. That was never going to work out?
Maybe one last question along these lines, people look at Slack as maybe the first major product-led growth success story and they always look at Slack of like, "Oh, we just want to grow Slack.
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO at Confluent)
And so I learned a lot in my time at Atlassian. When I went to Metromile, I'm like, "Well, I've never built a consumer product before." I can say that I've actually built a product that's touched many millions of people because Jira has, so I felt pretty good about that, but I'd never built one that I could say, "Yep, a consumer, your average consumer can use this thing.
Wow, that was an awesome story and an awesome perspective. It's similar to the advice I always give PMs of people always wondering, "Should I go deep on a specific subject?
Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Zero)
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So I got introduced to Tim Westergren, who was the founder of Savage Beast. Savage Beast was like a seven or eight full-time employees at that point. They made a music recommendation engine that they licensed to other companies to put in consumer products. So Savage Beast's customers were Best Buy, who put it in kiosks, and AOL, who used it on the AOL Music website.
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO)
Yeah. So, when I was at Glassdoor in the CPO role, I had the opportunity to lead design for the first time. So, coming into Calendly, I had led both product and design as well as research. And so, I think it made sense given I'd already done it once to keep that structure coming into Calendly.
Yeah, yeah. So, we have a core team who's really responsible for the core end to-end user experience. In many ways, they're both doing feature development and then they're also doing growth work. So, they're thinking about how do we build new features and functionalities to help our core personas, which is typically folks who are in sales, recruiting and customer success.
The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart)
Artificial intelligence is important as much as human intelligence. If you're not humanly intelligent, you're not going to be artificially intelligent or AI really help your company a lot.
The end user. So if you have... I'll give you an example of. On the consumer side, we need to collect more delivery fee. What does that really mean for those other two? On the restaurant side, hey, we need to get more commissions because profitability is a goal. On the delivery partner side, it means pay them less or optimize a little bit more.
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The consumerization of B2B is real. Our enterprise product's biggest growth driver was making it feel like a consumer app.