Most B2B companies can't sell to target customers of all sizes (the exception to the rule being companies like Intercom and Hubspot). The reason behind it is simply how the sales are organized in the company. If you do want to target customers of any size, make sure your sales is aligned to the size of the target customer and you're using proper firmographic segmentation.
If your product/service can serve a wide customer base and you have different sales arguments that resonate with customers of different sizes, then this Playbook is for you.
You can also benefit from this Playbook if you have two call-to-actions on your website: the free trial button and the "Talk to sales" button. This usually means you're not taking charge of how the sales process should be organized.
The usual reason a company stops serving smaller customers is that the customer acquisition cost (CAC) becomes prohibitively high. B2B companies like Dropbox, InVision, and Slack have embraced both the small and large companies because end-users can drive adoption inside a company. After all, isn't it much easier to do sales when you have grassroots users inside the organization already?
Here are a couple of things to consider when personalizing your website for small and large companies. However, the best first-hand knowledge can be obtained through talking to your salesforce. They know what sales arguments best work for different customers, so make sure to involve them as well in this personalization.
When the company visitor lands on your page, they want to immediately understand if you can solve their need. If it looks like you're only serving startups, an enterprise customer will never proceed much further with your site because of the inherent risk of using small vendors. Vice versa, if startup visitors see you're only serving enterprise customers, they are like to pivot away from your site fast because they need affordable pricing, good contract terms, and ease-of-getting-started.
Based on the logos on a website, it's easy to make fairly quick judgments about whether the company serves customers that look like them. If you're a startup visiting a site, you're turned off if you see company logos like Uber and SAP on a site, because it's 99% likely that you're too small for them to serve you.
Customer logos on a website should always be personalized using logos of similar-sized companies from the same industry as the website visitor. This answers the question "is this relevant for my company?"
The most important information a reference can provide is how you helped a similar customer succeed. A reference from a company 100x the size of the visitor doesn't help the visitor much in deciding whether or not they should go forward with your offering.
To make a decision, companies usually want to understand whether you can serve them at their current stage and the next stage when they grow, which means you have some wiggle room when it comes to picking references. Picking slightly larger references is beneficial also because they might have better brand recognition which helps in the decision-making process as well.
The should always be only one type of call-to-action on a page to avoid confusing the visitor. Tell the visitor clearly what action you want them to take. Some sales are complex and it makes sense to talk to the salesperson at the company, but some products could very well be self-service.
Startups appreciate that they can tinker with a product before making a purchase decision so a call-to-action like "Get started now" or "Start free 14-day trial" is highly recommended. Having a self-service route takes a little bit of development effort if you don't already have it set up, but customers are increasingly starting to expect self-service even in B2B.
Enterprise companies rather not waste time trialing a product but rather talk to a salesperson who can explain in 20 minutes the complexities that should be accounted for when considering a purchase. Different vendors operate differently and have different contract terms so discussing those with a salesperson is much better than being surprised after paying 100k for a yearly subscription.
If a startup can't see pricing upfront, they're like to turn away from your site. Similarly, a large customer can get a sense that you're only serving large customers if you don't have a pricing page at all.
To personalize pricing, you can either hide the pricing page from visitors that are from large companies or you can personalize the pricing page to remove your cheapest plans.
Highlighting an important integration is very beneficial when selling to larger companies that are looking to make decisions based on their current technology stack and processes. Highlighting advanced levels of support and availability can also be what large enterprises are looking for when deciding whether to engage in a conversation with sales.
Startups on the other hand might be more excited to see promotions and accelerator collaboration programs.
Using firmographic segmentation is the simplest way to personalize based on company size. However, different countries have a different understanding of what is "large" and "small" company so sometimes it can make sense to couple firmographic data with geolocation.