When it comes to marketing and evaluating software, vendors and buyers alike still tend to overemphasize market categories like enterprise, midmarket, and SMB. In a pair of previous reports, we have argued that such revenue-based distinctions are a disservice to suppliers and users alike. Vendors end up switching from one category to another in search of prospects, while buyers’ decisions are overdetermined by their company revenue and profile, rather than by their true requirements for customer experience management (CEM) technologies and processes.

Ultimately, CEM requirements are dictated by the expectations of customers and prospects – and by a given firm’s strategy and actions to meet and exceed those expectations. What matters, then, is not the size or designation of the company (enterprise, midmarket) but the size and complexity of the CEM challenges to be addressed at any given juncture. Instead of revenue categories, buyers and sellers should ask whether a given technology is the right “fit” for their requirements, as measured by factors such as the number of integrations with other systems, the range of touchpoints to be managed, the degree of personalization, and the volume of interactions to be handled. From this perspective, both a family-owned manufacturer with 100 employees and a department or product team within a massive enterprise could have “mid-size” needs.

Competing on the basis of customer experiences seems to place an extra burden on such “mid-size” organizations. Consumer expectations do not diminish according to the size of the organization. Whether in a B2C or B2B context, consumers do not distinguish between massive enterprises and family-owned firms, nor between temporary sites for a product launch and the polished omnichannel experiences of a world wide brand. The fact that departments and midmarket firms typically have fewer resources – in terms of money, skills, people, or time – is invisible to the consumer, who simply compares the quality of one user experience against another. The competition hardly seems fair. It’s as if the high school football team had to take on the Super Bowl champions, or pre-teens to race against Usain Bolt.

On the contrary: In my latest DCG Insight Brief, I argue that mid-size organizations are in many ways better positioned than large enterprises to meet the challenges of customer experience management posed by the age of the customer. (The paper, “’Mid-size Organizations’ Hold the Keys to Customer Experience Management,” can be downloaded here. I also discuss the issues with Adobe’s Irina Guseva in this podcast.) The core characteristics of top-performing mid-size organizations keep them closer to customer needs, and the pervasive resource constraints may enforce the (preferred) approach of “growing into” CEM as they acquire experience and expertise.

Of course, this does not mean that constrained resources are requisite for CEM success! But think about how the limited real estate of a smartphone screen has forced designers to rethink – and often vastly improve – user interactions and the user experience. (For example, I analyzed this in the context of bank loan applications in this paper.) Similarly, mid-size organizations may (I stress may) be able to turn constraints into a nimble, engaged, innovative – and thus ultimately more successful – approach to customer experience management.