5 Secrets Succeed As A B2B Product Manager

When I started working as a B2B product manager, I was overwhelmed.

There were days I questioned my career choice—had I made a massive mistake? I struggled to manage the constant demands from sales teams, pressure from leadership to increase revenue, my desire to improve product metrics, and a flood of customer complaints.

But I didn't give up.

Instead, I learned to balance customer requests with business goals.

Today, I share the five secrets that helped me turn things around.

But before that, let's understand a few other things.

What is B2B Product Management?

B2B product management is the practice of developing, launching, and managing products designed for business clients. Unlike consumer-focused product management (B2C), B2B product management requires a deep understanding of business processes, customer needs, and industry dynamics. Key responsibilities include:

• Customer Insight: Understanding the unique needs and challenges faced by business customers.
• Strategic Planning: Developing product strategies that align with business goals and deliver measurable value.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborating with sales, marketing, and development teams to ensure product success.
• Value Delivery: Ensuring products solve specific problems and meet the needs of diverse business users.

Understanding the Difference Between B2B and B2C Products

The distinction between B2B and B2C products is essential for effective product management:

• End Users: B2B products are designed for business use, focusing on functionality and ROI, while B2C products target individual consumers and emphasize user experience.
• Sales Cycles: B2B sales cycles are typically longer, with higher transaction values and multiple decision-makers involved, compared to the faster-paced B2C market.
• Focus and Metrics:
  • B2B products prioritize efficiency, integration, and return on investment.
  • B2C products prioritize user engagement, satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

Top B2B Product Examples in the Market

Leading B2B products demonstrate how business solutions drive efficiency and growth:

• Salesforce: A CRM platform that streamlines customer relationship management and sales processes for businesses.
• Slack: A communication tool that enhances team collaboration with integrations across various business applications.
• HubSpot: A comprehensive suite of marketing, sales, and service software designed to help businesses attract and retain customers.

Now, let's understand the 5 secrets you should know to succeed as a B2B Product Manager:

Secret #1: Customers and Users Are Not the Same People

In B2B, the person who decides to buy your product often isn't the same person who uses it. The decision-maker is the "customer," while the "user" is the one who uses your product daily.

Understanding this difference is crucial for the following reasons:

Different Priorities:

Customers and users have different goals and pain points. The customer focuses on cost-saving and ROI, while the user strives to complete their tasks with speed and accuracy. Knowing this difference allows you to tailor the product to each group effectively.

Better Product Development:

This knowledge ensures that product development includes feedback from both groups. That increases the chances of success.

Increased Satisfaction and Adoption:

By meeting the unique needs of both customers and users, you can boost satisfaction and adoption. This increases chances of success.

Here are a few actions that helped me internalize this:

Engage Both Groups Early: Involve both customers and users in the feedback loop during product discovery or solution validation.

Segment Your Messaging: Create different marketing materials for customers and users. For example, focus on cost savings and ROI for customers, and ease of use and efficiency for users.

Take Slack, for example. The decision-makers, usually CTOs and department heads, focus on team productivity and a good ROI. They care about security, integration capabilities, and cost.

In contrast, the users, the employees, are more concerned with ease of use. They want it to help with their daily tasks and make collaboration more effective.

If I were a PM at Slack, I'd prioritize a mix of features that address both groups' needs. I would focus on:

• Developing robust security features and seamless integrations
• Creating a user-friendly interface with channels, direct messaging, and easy file sharing to cater to users' daily requirements.

Secret #2: Sales Teams Know the Customer (Really Well)!

Sales teams are a goldmine for customer insights in B2B product management. They work closely with both customers and users, understanding their pain points, challenges, and needs better than anyone else.

Working with salespeople can be challenging, but it's crucial for B2B success. Here’s how to make collaboration easier and more effective:

Schedule Regular Meetings:

Set up regular check-ins with the sales team. Discuss customer/user feedback and pain points. Have specific and concrete goals for these meetings. Instead of asking, "Can you share user feedback and insights?" ask, "What does the user dislike about the recently launched calendar view?" A concrete goal leads to deeper insights and a better understanding of users.

Create Feedback Loops:

Establish a feedback channel for sales teams to relay insights to the product team. Make it simple, like a Slack channel or an email alias for "new ideas."

Be Transparent:

Keep the sales team in the loop about how you use their insights and regularly share your roadmap.

Secret #3: Get Creative While Running Experiments

Running experiments in B2B product management can be challenging due to a smaller user base compared to B2C products. It's essential to get creative with your testing approach to ensure product success.

Get More Qualitative Feedback:

Use customer interviews, surveys, and user tests to gather insights. Engage with sales and customer support teams to access feedback only they are privy to.

Controlled Rollouts:

If you can't conduct A/B tests to validate solutions, consider small rollouts. Release new features to a limited group of users and gather data on their performance. This approach helps determine if the solution meets your intended value.

Internal Testing:

Conduct internal tests with teams such as sales, account management, and customer support. These tests can help identify issues before real users interact with the product.

When I was working at a B2B SaaS company, I faced challenges in testing assumptions or validating solutions. Here's how I managed it:

• Identify Friendly Customers: I conducted user interviews to validate problems and their size. I identified around ten customers willing to provide feedback. Before investing resources, I shared ideas with them to validate the problem's significance.
• Cross-Functional Brainstorming: I gathered customer-facing teams to brainstorm solutions after finding the right problems. Their understanding of customers made their ideas invaluable.
• Internal Testing: Once we developed a solution, I tested it internally with Sales and Customer Success teams. Their proximity to customers allowed them to validate the solution's effectiveness.

This systematic approach ensured our solutions were well-aligned with customer needs before launch, increasing success chances.

Secret #4: Embrace the Slow Pace in B2B Product Management

Almost everything in B2B moves slowly (especially when compared to B2C.)

Research, testing, development, and releasing products take a very long time. As a result, getting meaningful customer feedback also takes a very long time. And when you don't know (soon enough) if your product was a success, you can't do much to improve it. And this is FRUSTRATINGGGGG! 

But that is not an excuse!

Over the years, I've learned to work with the system, not against it.

Customer feedback: 

Problem: a limited number of customers and restricted access to them make it difficult to to do discovery and validate solutions

Solution: Don't wait for a trigger (like churn, bug, annual planning) to talk to customers. 

Instead, be proactive, take initiative, and set up regular touch points with them. I identify friendly customers. I build relationships with them by staying in touch all year. Through these relationships, I learn about their needs, problems, and strategies. I also learn their views of the competition, market, industry, and much more.

By doing this, I reduce the time-to-learn about my customers and users.

Measuring success:

Problem: With less data and fewer customers, it takes too long to learn if the solution was a success.

Solution: Use internal teams, customer calls, and whatever data you have.

Even if you have limited usage data, analyse it regularly. Look for trends. What features do users use? Which ones don't they use?

After launches, work customer support (CS) teams to analyze tickets. Read them manually if you must. Find out what CS is hearing on support calls. Find the biggest pain points. It takes time, but it will unlock insights.

Sometimes, the best (quickest) measures of success can be found internally.

Patience:

Problem: Many PMs like speed. They like doing new things very very quickly. It makes them feel achieved and accomplished. Similarly, many PMs dislike doing intangible things, like user interviews, market research, relationship building, and long-term planning.

Solution: The need for speed is, in general, a very wrong way of looking at one's success as a PM (even in B2C)

It's better to create impactful products than to create more of them. And to do that, you need patience.

As a PM, your time is better spent finding the right problems, doing discovery, and researching. These tasks have no tangible output, and you might dislike them (I know I did.) But, they are more important than everything else you do as a PM.

The simple (actually not that simple) solution is to be patient. Train your mind to focus on impact and long-term value. When you start to think that way, you'll know that short-term gains or more number of launches are rarely the best approach.

Secret #5: Revenue will always be a priority (and that is fine!)

Most B2B businesses use revenue as their North Star Metric. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes life challenging for a PM.

Not every feature you build, or bug you fix, will boost revenue. That makes prioritisation very hard.

This was frustrating for me, at first. Tasks with a "high revenue impact" kept winning the prioritization race. But...

Then I changed things—I built systems and processes to help me create a more balanced roadmap.

Revenue alignment: 

It is essential to translate the impact of non-revenue tasks into revenue figures.

Develop methods to do this translation. Speaking from experience, these methods will not be scientific. They will have many assumptions baked in. And that is fine—as long as everyone (especially leaders) agrees with the translation method and logic—it is all good.

Building these translation layers is not easy, but it is doable. It takes some time to iterate and get it right. But once done, it makes a B2B PM's life much much much easier.

Here are a few examples to put this into perspective:

1. Fixing bugs or reducing load times may not boost revenue right away. But, it will improve user experience. This boosts retention rates, leading to higher revenue. 
2. Automating customer support might not boost revenue. But, it will make agents more efficient. That will enable them to resolve more issues in the same time. This will boost customer satisfaction, which will increase retention.
3. An internal tool for sales teams to access sales intelligence data won't increase revenue. But, sales team will save man-hours, and will then use the extra hours to sell more.

You will not be able to do this for all the items on the roadmap. So, identify recurring themes, and do it only for those themes. For example, if you fix technical issues (like load times, API success rates, etc.) often or work on automating internal systems, build your translation methods for those themes only.

When I used to work on ads, most of our initiatives directly impacted the ad CTR (click-through rates). An increase in CTR does not directly increase revenue. So, we made a simple model:

1. An x% increase in CTR led to a Y% percentage increase in Ad performance. Ad performance was measured in terms of CPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead), and ROAS (return on ad spend)
2. Based on past data, we identified that every Y% increase in ad performance led to AB% increase in revenue. This increased revenue came in the form of either higher customer retention rate (i.e. more customers are buying ads) or higher ad spend per customer (i.e. same customers are buying more ads)

So at the end of this exercise, we knew that X% increase in CTR led to AB% increase in revenue.  

Define concrete product metrics.

Create product metrics that objectively measure the non-revenue value you're creating for customers.

Identify metrics that measure "value to the customer." Regularly track and share them with relevant teams and leaders. Having a list of critical customer-value metrics helps everyone focused on delivering value.

Roadmap Buckets:

Create distinct roadmap buckets like innovation, competitive catch-up, enhancements, etc. Allocate different percentages of resources to each bucket based on strategic focus.

Roadmap buckets make a balanced roadmap, with required focus on both long-term and short-term value. Creating these buckets will take time and effort—you will iterate, and then get your peers, leaders, and other teams to buy into the concept. But once everyone aligns, the prioritisation process will not only be smoother, but it will also be more innovative and impactful.

Let’s see this with an example. Say you’ve allocated 40% of resources to the “innovation” bucket, because that is the strategic focus. But, in a certain planning cycle, you only have work worth 15%. That will force the team to think of new ideas. The team might end up unlocking opportunities that they would have otherwise not discovered.

(The other outcome could also be that you decide to redo the resource allocation and only allocate 15% to innovation. That is fine too. The point is that when you do this tradeoff intentionally, you make better decisions)

Being flexible

Maintain flexibility in your approach.

Flexibility is critical when managing a product with varying demands, multiple teams, and strong opinions. Be open to adjust your methods as you learn from your failures and wins. For example, if roadmap buckets don't work, don't use them. If internal testing with CS works well, double down on it, and so on.

This adaptability ensures you can respond effectively to customer needs and business goals.

That is it—the five secrets I uncovered the hard way. But once I did, they helped me go from a struggling PM to a top-notch B2B PM.