Pitching Enterprises vs. Pitching Small Businesses and Freelancers

If you're designing an SaaS product that's useful to large Fortune 500 enterprises, web design freelancers and everyone in between, I have news for you: you're not. You're designing a product that will be wholeheartedly rejected by everyone.

Users vs. Buyers

In enterprises, your users are not your buyers. In small businesses, the people who use your product are the ones who are paying for it (also see Why Enterprise Software Sucks). In enterprises, you're designing to solve the problem of the buyer and not the user. In SMBs, you're user-driven and they are the ones who decide whether to pay you or go with someone else.

Different Care-abouts, Different Products

Enterprises care about:

• Control
• They want to be in control of all aspects of the solution (kind of like a benevolent dictatorship), maintaining permissions and the like.
• Confidentiality
• The data used and generated by your solution must be secured (preferably hosted internally)
• Continuity
• They need to know that you're not a fly-by-night operator who will just sell and then disappear. They need to know that you'll be there to support and upgrade your product for a long, long time.
• Customization
• Whatever you have is not good enough, customizations have to be made to bolt your solution onto their existing stack.
• CYA (cover-your-a**)
• There's a reason why "Nobody every got fired buying IBM" is an awesome pitch.
• Cornucopia of Features (I'm trying to maintain a C-alliteration here so bear with me)
• They need all sorts of features that will assure them that your product will serve their current, future real and imaginary needs.
• Sometimes, Cost
• How expensive are you that they start to care?

Small Business care about

• Cost
• Cost of the product can make all the difference between usage and rejection
• Getting things done
• Your product better be good at something that makes or saves money. It just has to earn or save more than it costs. They will not have patience for bells and whistles.
• Ease of use
• The ideal ramp-up time for your product is zero. No introductory training, no customizations. Just log in and get to work.

Users care about

• Getting things done
• Ease of use

Pick a Side

There is almost no way that you can create a product that's easy to use, packed with features, future-proof, customizable and lets you get things done from day 1. Pick a side and work from there.