Some SaaS companies start by selling to the SMB market and evolve to sell to the enterprise at some point. Often this move is a planned strategy. And other times, it’s more accidental. Enterprise customers actually lead you there. You’re targeting small and mid-sized businesses and suddenly you notice that you have some Fortune 1,000 customers too.

The enterprise is appealing. The prestige of a big logo alone can boost your brand’s credibility and provide powerful social proof. Plus, enterprise customers usually (but not always) spend more—on support, seats, usage, etc.

Anecdotally, I think churn is also probably lower within an enterprise cohort, but I haven’t yet seen any data supporting my opinion on this one. Enterprise purchase decisions often go through committees, their sales cycle is longer and more considered and they have to do more work to make a purchase. Because of these factors, the enterprise customer is often invested in a way that SMBs simply aren’t.

As wonderful as selling into enterprise accounts is, it can pull you in a million different directions with new types of requests and requirements. It’s hard to parse what enterprise SaaS buyers want, versus what they actually require. And making decisions about how far you should go to support the enterprise can be gut-wrenching. Often, you are faced with a choice between veering off your product development roadmap to drop everything in support of an enterprise customer’s demands or losing their account (which could hit your revenue churn number in a painful way).

Let’s simplify these inherent complexities a bit.

First, what’s “Enterprise”?

When it comes to selling, “enterprise” can mean different things to different people.

I have heard companies self-describe their  $50,000 ACV, 90-day sales cycle, as an enterprise sale. And others who consider enterprise sales to be no less than $250,000+ ACV, 365+ days sales cycle.

There is no right or wrong definition.

I personally view ‘enterprise’ sales more by the characteristics of who you are selling to than the contract value or org size. If you have a complex sale that includes multiple stakeholders, a committee, and/or a procurement process, that is an enterprise sale—whether it takes 60 days or 1 year, and whether the average CV is $36K or $360K.

Enterprise selling usually means more than one decision maker, longer sales cycles and more requirements to win the deal.

So, what does the enterprise SaaS customer want?

Regardless of the definition, selling to larger companies requires fortitude and resources. There are higher expectations, more requirements, and longer sales cycles.

While no list can be complete (because, hey, this is an ever-evolving landscape), here’s the short list of what enterprise customers want:

GDPR compliance is at the top of the list right now, because if you don’t have it, your product is likely not going to even be considered.

Potentially other compliance as well (HIPAA, PCI, etc) depending upon the industry.

Meeting rigorous security requirements. Every large organization has their own requirements, so while you can generally standardize with a set of security features, there will always be an odd, one-off requirement or hoop to jump through to land an enterprise customer.

Both off-the-shelf, and custom, integration options. Enterprise customers have lots of software and they need it all to work together. They will want to know you have standard integrations with their tech stack, and they may also need custom integrations, or at least an API option, as well. They will expect you to have experts to work on the integrations with them, and won’t self-navigate through it. Expect to provide a lot of support in this regard.

Reliable uptime, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC). This hopefully goes without saying,