You may have noticed that there was no “Wednesday wisdom” post this week; I was enjoying the day off with my family. But to wrap up this week I wanted to share briefly about two things I’ve encountered this week that you might want to check out as well.

First is a podcast episode from Inside Intercom. It’s their recent interview with Doug Landis, currently a growth partner at Emergence Capital and formerly with Box and Salesforce among other places. He spoke about his experience and passion helping business-to-business (B2B) enterprise software companies develop sales effectiveness by focusing on storytelling in sales; since I work on a B2B SaaS platform solution I found this interview very interesting. One of the insights he shared that I found compelling was the notion that sales ‘pitch decks’ should focus not on telling the prospects about what our company does but instead on the kinds of problems we’ve seen companies use our solution to solve. Focusing on the client impact of our solution and sharing this in terms of concrete stories is not only effective in selling he argues but also crucial in marketing, setting vision for the product development team, and keeping the company focused in the right place. He also spoke about the preeminent role of ‘client success’ in driving sales since the best ‘sales people’ are currently delighted clients. I’ll be thinking more about how to apply his thoughts in the coming weeks.

The second thing I want to share is an article I found on Mind the Product which you can find here: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2018/06/why-product-management-for-b2b-needs-to-be-different-from-b2c/ . This piece also focuses on B2B products and highlights some of the challenges to building and selling enterprise software versus consumer solutions (B2C or business-to-consumer). There is a lot packed into this article – including the need to focus on providing value and not just ‘user experience’ and the separation between buyers and users in enterprise software that make it different from B2C solutions – that I have bumped into and want to think more deeply about.

If you don’t work on software development, marketing, or sales then these two pieces might not have as much interest for you as they do for me. But I’m glad I ran across them both this week and look forward to seeing how these insights can be applied in my work. That will take some thinking and conversations with my team of course because in truth it’s not that simple.

note: Image comes from this article: https://searchengineland.com/creating-b2b-b2c-overlap-strategy-285500