When buyers aren’t users

“Be customer obsessed” or “Wow our customers” is not an uncommonly used company value shoehorned into dozens of new hires at your glitzy startup to sell some notion of how in-touch the organization is with its users. However, it doesn’t apply to many business models and is often straight up at odds with their outreach strategy, marketing campaigns, and demand generation methodologies.

Take Slack for instance, the shining poster-child of what a successful B2B startup morphing into an enterprise service looks like. When you as an employee start working at a company, you don’t have any say in what software your company uses for internal communications. You sort of just make your account and login to whatever the onboarding instructions tell you to login to. And you use that thing and just go on with the program. If you loved Slack at your old company and really want it here, you can’t really do much about it (aside from sending out some very strongly worded emails).

Slack’s challenge is not only to constantly re-iterate to millions of disgruntled office workers that there is a better way of working than sending and reading hundreds of emails everyday, but also to convince people from IT departments, CFOs, and HR teams to switch over to this entirely new system. The model doesn’t work if Slack only succeeds at designing a highly intuitive, effortless, and “fun” experience if those users aren’t able to do anything about getting their company to adopt it. This is a massive challenge, and B2B companies often underestimate how difficult the task actually is when the user they’re designing for typically isn’t the one making the purchasing decision.

At my old company, Drift, we ran into this all the time. The design tenet for my product was to design an experience that salespeople would “fall in love with.” And we actually came pretty damn close with a desktop chat app where salespeople could chat with leads on their website. In our internal user tests and feedback sessions, the salespeople loved it. They really liked the simplicity and speed of the tool, and how focused it was on the conversation they were having with the lead instead of spewing out a hundred different Salesforce fields about the person.

But again, these salespeople weren’t the ones deciding to buy the tool. Drift was selling a collection of tools to increase lead generation and accelerate revenue through smart insights, which included a bunch of other features and services along with the chat app. The person buying Drift at a company is some VP of Marketing or Director of Sales who doesn’t actually use the product for their day-to-day job. So we had the additional task of convincing them that they should buy this thing because the salespeople on their team will really love this one specific chat tool that comes with it. As you can probably imagine, it was a hard sell.

Drift found some wins with its “champion” approach, where they successfully sold the product to companies where one specific salesperson was extremely vocal and adamant about how great the tool was. This person would help bring other salespeople on their teams onboard and would teach them best practices on how to use it. Eventually, word would get to the ear of the VP or Director making the purchasing decision and they decide to buy the tool to give it a shot. This is an extremely roundabout and risky way of going about it, but it works quite effectively to a certain scale.

As it’s hopefully evident by now, designing in this environment can be very tricky. It often may even feel like you’re creating for the wrong persona or working on the wrong features because the person buying the product doesn’t care about the fact that we just added an extremely intuitive keyboard shortcut that feels really good in the workflow. They just care about the price and how it helps their bottom line. There will be many times where you don’t have clarity on how your efforts to streamline and simplify the user experience are translating into increased revenue for the company. Sure, the actual users might be liking it, but they didn’t pull the trigger on buying it and will often treat it as a software that they’re “required” to use rather than something they willingly chose to use.

I don’t think the difference between working as a designer at a B2C company versus a B2B company was entirely obvious to me until I worked at Drift. Until then, I had worked on consumer products, where the levers you use to gain user trust and adoption are significantly different. You ask them what features they want, or work on ways to convert them from free to paid subscribers, or find a way to be less intrusive with advertising. You never have to deal with this additional layer of complexity that involves marketing and selling the product to a totally different persona and role.

The biggest learning and takeaway I’ve got here is to just be extremely aware about who you’re designing for and who’s actually buying it. Because this involves multiple teams within your B2B company coordinating and strategizing around how to most effectively market and sell this product, there will be many gaps in the collective knowledge of the team.

As the designer, you need to be aware that when you’re designing the landing page and the successive the purchasing flow, you don’t need to hammer in the benefits of the product itself. The person purchasing it is already on board with buying it, so just get them through the funnel as fast as possible. When you’re designing the onboarding for the actual users, pay a lot of attention to the micro-interactions and details to add some playful whimsy to the product; the last thing you want is for your users to be feeling a sense of dread because they have to install yet another workplace software on their machine and learn how to use it. Keep the onboarding simple and quick. Use the tool itself as much as possible to reinforce basic functionality and behavior.

For the purchaser, send biweekly or monthly summary emails about the results. Revenue generated or leads captured or minutes saved or whatever you key metric is. You’ll need these people to keep renewing the subscription for your product when it’s up, and they need to understand what the tool is doing for them. Your product can’t just be yet another disposable icon in their giant dashboard of IT-approved software. It needs to really feel impactful in its outcome, or else it won’t live long.

The user side is pretty standard. Optimize for their workflows, keep conducting user testing sessions to generate new insights, and continually ship improvements. Familiarity and adoption will organically grow if you just keep at it, so don’t set internal metrics too high here either. The people using will slowly grow to love it, but make sure not to frequently redo the layout and interface just for the sake of doing it or to make it look like the product is being worked on. Be very intentional and tactful with the updates.

B2B is a tricky space, and many designers dread it because their work quickly devolves into a bunch of acronym-filled jumble of meetings and metrics that makes their design files look like boring enterprise dashboards with no room for novelty or creativity. But these companies fill a core need in the typical software world, and you get the chance to make an impact on a user who didn’t even buy the tool they’re using (which often means they have low to no expectations from it, which are easy to exceed). They may see it as a necessity to use the product just to perform their job, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it delightful. There are always problems to solve, designs to improve, and features to add. In many ways, B2B is far more stable than a random consumer social startup that’s trying to break into a very difficult market with some new gimmicky gamification tactic that has no guarantee in its longevity.

When buyers aren’t users, your product needs to split its experience into being simple and quick for the buyer while also providing periodic feedback about its impact, but needs to be foundationally useful and continually improving for the actual users. Buyers need to be sold on its value and users need to feel like it’s delightful to use. It’s a delicate line to walk as a designer, and it can often feel like being caught in-between two worlds, but when done right, it’s often far more rewarding to work on rather than a B2C product that relies on attention, data, or advertising as its currency. It’s not impossible to solve for the world where buyers aren’t users, it just ends up being more fine-tuned and involved, requiring more thoughtful design on specific workflows and ensuring that the two different personas are experiencing the parts of the product that they care about the most.