What are the key differences between enterprise PMM and mid-market?

Enterprise Product marketers really need to be able to understand the long, and complex sales cycles that Enterprise deals take. In addition, they need to understand all the additional nuances that come with large companies. Larger companies are generally public, and have to adhere to many more regulations and complex company policies to protect themselves, their customers and shareholders, and their own employees. Because of this, they’ll demand more features, and understanding of how your company handles their data, and what happens when your software gets installed at their company. 

Therefore, Enterprise Product marketers not only need to understand the core product features, they need to understand the underlying infrastructure of their product, the admin capabilities of how their software is managed, and how their product adhere to specific regulations and policies that are important to Enterprise companies. There are also concerns around adoption and onboarding, you are probably dealing with many users, and core buyer is going to involve someone in IT, or even the CIO that’ll want to understand how the product will be adopted and their overall investment in your software.

MidMarket Product marketing also needs to worry about these types of admin, governance and management capabilities, but not to the scale that enterprises do. Adoption is not as much of an issue as the company is much smaller, nor is maintenance, but there will definitely be concerns around pricing and they have less budget. Mid Market product marketing should emphasize around core features, ability to scale with the mid market company as they grow, and willingness to provide a price that’s more of a fit for Mid Market budget.

One of the key areas of differentiation is the buying group involved with a larger organization which typically lengthens the sales cycle. It’s critical to understand who are the key players in your buying group at an enterprise level organization. You’ll likely need to build business impact messaging and content for executives/c-suite in addition to the economic buyer and end user as enterprise sales motions typically require senior leadership review and input.

Enterprises also usually require more steps during the sales process, for example sometimes they require a Proof of Concept (PoC) or they cannot move forward with a vendor unless there is a Master Services Agreement (MSA) in place. Oftentimes, they have some type of legal or procurement step that requires additional time and process.

Larger enterprises also must adhere to compliance standards and regulations. Most likely it will involve folks from the IT organization, therefore it’s best to have an understanding on how your product manages data security and privacy, integrates with their existing tech stack, administration, etc.

What's defined as "enterprise" and "mid-market" differs in many companies. Generally, sales leadership works with the executive team to segment which size customers they go after such as small businesses (say, under 150 employees), medium-sized (say, 150 to 2,500), and enterprise (say, 2,500 and up).

As you know if you've worked in differently sized companies, how those companies operate — from 150 employees to 10,000 employees — really evolves.

For example, in a medium-sized, 700-person company an SDR might still have the freedom to sign up for a scheduling-automation tool as along as it's free. Yet, in a 10,000 person company, that SDR might be blocked by IT from using non-approved tools because larger companies often think more about security and software sprawl.

Therefore, how you do product marketing must evolve, whether you're working for a vendor targeting 150-person company SDRs or 10,000-person company IT people.

One key, day-to-day difference in doing Enterprise PMM work over mid-market is that you have more internal stakeholders to consider (not just the SDRs, but also their bosses and IT) and you need to spend more time educating and arming your sales and CS teams to work with all of these stakeholders.