[starkparker]

This touches very very briefly on it, but the support load of enterprises is very different from that of small businesses.

If you're targeting small/mid-market then you want to invest a lot in docs and self-service support options, have a many-hands approach to triaging support, and implement a well-oiled, human-driven escalation process to more hands-on technical support paired with clear limits or dis/incentives for those escalations in the support contract or product terms.

The more small businesses you serve, the more people you'll be interacting with who have a low level of understanding of your product paired with a lack of time to focus on drilling into issues. You can't scale account services or customization as easily, but you still want to listen to and serve smaller customers when many of them ask for the same thing or communicate the same product deficiencies.

If you're targeting enterprise then you want that investment tilted on the account management and senior live support sides. They're more likely to need customized solutions, and support and documentation for those solutions will focus more on them than anyone else.

They're also more likely to show up with their entire department (or org) on fire and demand a senior on-site presence or similar level of sustained round-the-clock commitment, including handoffs across time zones and geos, until the fire's out.

They're both hard, but if you aren't careful and proactive in having good self-service content then you'll hit scaling issues very quickly with small businesses. Like, when an enterprise customer calls support there's a very good chance the customer calling knows what a web browser is, and a pretty good chance that they've had some onboarding on what the product itself is. Neither is nearly as likely on the small business side, and they'll all ring the phone and drain time and resources just the same. Pair that with needing more SMB logos to drive the same revenue as enterprise and your support channels will be overwhelmed if you don't have the means to helpfully deflect.

[no_wizard]

The weakness of SMB is always going to be the high touch stuff, and they’re ruthless cost cutters mostly, it’s harder to drive loyalty as easily as you can with enterprise.

It’s the mid market that I think however is more lucrative long term, because businesses with between 50 million and a billion in revenue are a bit of a sweet spot, as they are likely to have some experts but they’re also growing, which means as their business grows you can grow with them, ideally.

That said, sometimes with SMBs you snag a rocket ship that grows by 100x or more and they sudden become a very top tier customer

[doctor_eval]

I agree with you about self service. I wouldn’t even consider building a SaaS today without it being 100% self service. As much as possible, any time you spend with the customer needs to be adding value to the relationship, not repeating what you did before.

That said, another side of this is that the sales cycle is typically much, much longer in enterprise, and can take significant effort - especially if you have to go through an RFI and RFP process, internal onboarding, secops audit, etc. And there’s really no guarantee you’ll win. You could sink 6 months into it for nothing. You might just be the stalking horse for some other vendor.

An enterprise sale can easily take 6 months. So one needs to consider, how many mid- or low- tier customer could you get in that time? What is the value of that over time?

[koolba]

> They're also more likely to show up with their entire department (or org) on fire and demand a senior on-site presence or similar level of sustained round-the-clock commitment, including handoffs across time zones and geos, until the fire's out.

This is a great example of “doing things that don’t scale”.

When you’re a scrappy startup servicing a big time enterprise client, you get to a be star when shit hits the fan. Rather than getting a pre canned “we’ll get back to in $SLA_DURATION” response, you craft an answer and solution that actually addresses their issue. And you do it off hours, researching things that aren’t even directly your problem.

[nothercastle]

Yeah isn’t that the small vendor life? When you are the big fish everyone gets the f-off response but when you are small you have to help even if it’s not your fault or problem

[doctor_eval]

Yeah but kudos doesn’t pay the bills, and often doesn’t filter upwards.

Back in the 90s we got a call on Christmas Day. Went out of our way to help them. Got their SunOS box running again despite not being our thing.

Fuckers refused to pay the invoice, despite giving us a PO. What am I going to do, sue my customer?

[ethbr1]

> The more small businesses you serve, the more people you'll be interacting with who have a low level of understanding of your product paired with a lack of time to focus on drilling into issues

Even assuming the customer resource understands the technical aspects of the software, there's a time commitment on the customer side that's more difficult in SMB.

A large enterprise can assign >= 1 FTE to an important project.

At an SMB, you're usually working with someone who's wearing 5 other hats, and they're still the most responsible resource for your product on the customer side.