B2B Platform Product Concepts That Frequently Show Up: Part 1
If you’re building a B2B platform, there are some usual suspects that will likely find their way into your product. It’s good to know and identify these ahead of time because they can give you a framework for discussing, understanding, and solving your problems.
Full disclosure: my product and engineering experience comes from working with two B2B platforms that facilitated trading and transacting between Buyers and Sellers. I’m not saying these concepts will always show up, but just that they do/can/might/will/haha; it, of course, depends on the product you are building.
Without further ado…
Seats, Members, Organizations, Accounts
Many B2B platforms will have one top-level entity that maps directly to a “business.” I’ve seen at least four different names that this idea will take in the Product: “Seat”, “Member”, “Organization”, or “Account”.
This top-level entity will then have many users attached to it. Many users belong to one Organization, which makes tons of sense because the software is then reflective of real life organizations. I mention this because this is often very different in B2C or C2C, where the most common case is that one account belongs to one user.
An important thing to keep in mind with One Org-> Many Users is that that you’ll have at least two different types of settings: Organization Settings and User Settings. These two things are separate and are important because they will show up in features like Customer Notifications, Reporting, and general settings that you want to sit at the top-level and thus cascade down to all users.
User Roles and Feature Flagging
At a company, employees will have various roles. In B2B Platforms, often so will your users. You’ll see this if you have to support enterprise customers who will have work streams more specialized to particular individuals or groups of individuals within the company, essentially when your users aren’t one-man-or-woman-armies.
You may also see this need come up when your platform becomes a core piece of how your customer does business. With narrowly defined work streams, and high-business-value operations, you’ve got all the evidence you need to create a set of roles and allow customers to manage them for their business.
Once you have roles set up, certain features can be redacted for certain users. This practice is often referred to as Feature Toggling/Flagging.
Two-Sides to the Platform: Buyers vs. Sellers, or, Supply vs Demand, and Marketplaces
A common B2B Platform business will be built around connecting people/organizations who want to “trade” something with each other, which typically means one of the highest-level breakdowns of users can be Buyers and Sellers. These platforms can usually, but not always, be referred to as a Marketplace).
You may even be able to talk about these two groups easily when designing features or writing product specs. This two-sided nature of the platform can bring about two-sided problems, for example, solving Supply and Demand issues while trying to build a marketplace.
C2C Marketplace Platforms like Airbnb experience these two-sided problems. It’s good to know that at the core of your product, you may need to be designing for two main cases, and can then break down the users more granularly from there!
Gated Signup
Signing up for a B2B Platform Product may not always be open to everyone (i.e. “Gated Signup”). The reasons for this are numerous, but here are a few:
- Custom Billing and Custom Contracts: Billing and contracts may be custom depending on the business size. Because you may want to bill customers differently, you’ll want to ensure that you can control the narrative entirely when selling. And also, because of billing/contract differences, you may not be able to give customers all customers the ability to self-service, which means they won’t be able to use your product anyway without first setting up contract terms.
- Competitors: Competitors may want to use your product and steal ideas from it, especially if you are entering a crowded market. In fact, your approach to solving the problem with a platform approach may actually be your unique selling proposition. Why give the keys away?
- Complexity of Use and Setup: Your product may take a significant amount of setup to get a customer live. Which means that giving anyone the ability to sign up would mean they wouldn’t be able to do much with the product. One approach some products take here is to provide a trial period demo account that includes an environment of fake data so the customer can play around. The problem with this in B2B Platforms that have integration layers is that a UI isn’t the whole product. The API is also crucial and so is getting a real end-to-end integration working.
Gating the signup may also mean that your sales cycle will include sales-led demos for prospects. This is typically very likely because almost no one will buy a product before they have seen it. And if you have blocked everyone from signing up on their own, you’re going to need to give them a guided tour.
Are you bored to tears? I’m glad you aren’t, because we haven’t even gotten to Part II (coming soon)! Thanks for stopping by.
If you’re interested in talking about product, engineering, or how bad Season 8 of Game of Thrones was, please reach out to me on LinkedIn so we can connect!
