Heard an interesting story from a B2B founder:
Selling to enterprises now = what used to be selling to SMBs
Selling to SMBs now = what used to be selling to individuals
And a key reason? Mercury and Brex (and similar products).
To unpack this:
As more big companies issue Mercury or Brex cards to team leads and employees, those employees can try new SaaS tools for their team much more easily. The credit card is already available, and the back office work like approvals and receipt attachments is much easier now.
For SMBs, it’s a similar story, except the decision making unit is even smaller – often one individual. Again, thanks to Mercury and Brex, someone can try a new software product for their personal workflow more easily. If they like it, they often start promoting it internally, becoming an internal champion.
I’m not in B2B, so I don’t know how universally true this is. But if it is, the most fascinating part to me is the butterfly effect: who would have guessed that Mercury and Brex would meaningfully reshape how B2B software gets sold to enterprises and SMBs!