When going upmarket won’t work

Going upmarket is one of the most talked about strategies inside B2B companies. The reason is straightforward: enterprise customers are stickier, have higher deal sizes and better retention rates.

As B2B companies evolve, they inevitably land at the idea that landing one enterprise client is equal to landing several, if not hundreds, of SMB or Mid-Market clients.

However, they almost always rush to assume that their product will be a great fit for customers upmarket.

Just because the customer is in the same “category” does not mean they have the same level of product-market fit as your customers.

Going upmarket is almost like launching a whole other product to a whole new market. This means:

-Your product feature set needs to match their needs

-You need to spend time in product development cycles with customer feedback to improve your offering

-You need to create new messaging and positioning to compete in the new market place

-You need to create collateral, webpages, sales enablement materials, sales tools and more to communicate with the new market

-You need to create adjusted pricing tiers / models to appeal to enterprise customers

-And much more.

This full form of investment can take 6-12 months + a dedicated team focused on the effort to roll out successfully.

Expecting to be able to do the same with a landing page and a sales rep calling on larger accounts is a recipe for disaster.