Picture it. Your team gets the big meeting with the CEO of a company right smack in the middle of your target market. This company could be an amazing reference client. The CEO spends a lot of time with your team, telling you exactly what she needs. She gladly looks at multiple iterations of the product, giving concrete, actionable feedback at every stage. You’re all set! You are on the way to benevolent world domination!

And then the product fails spectacularly.

Why? Maybe the sales team found that the product took a lot of time to use and decreased how many meetings they could schedule… decreasing their close rate and bonuses. Or maybe the the operations team was frustrated that the data requested was not important, but was labor-intensive to gather.

The CEO is generally just a consumer of summary reports – reports that require lots of data to be input by employees and managers. If the product fails to deliver significant value to the employees and managers, they won’t use the product. The CEO can try ordering all her employees to use it… but coercion is a pretty ineffective (and terrible) approach.

When developing a B2B application, make sure to map out all of the key stakeholders. Make sure you understand what value each provides, and what pains you need to solve for them to adopt your product with glee. So in our example above, if the CEO needs data from the sales team, the product needs to help the sales team close more sales too. If she needs data from the operations team, interacting with them to make sure you’re getting the right data and in a way that makes their lives easier will be critical.

At PixelEdge, we work with senior leaders to understand what top-level impact a product needs to have on the business. But we don’t stop there. Using the KISS Canvas we help them ID each key stakeholder group critical to making that impact possible. Then we determine what value the product must deliver to those stakeholders so they’ll enthusiastically use the product.

So, yes, you have to delight “the CEO.” But you need to delight a lot of other stakeholders too.