The secret to B2B product success is flexibility

As B2B companies grow out of their start-up years, product managers start to bring much-needed focus and discipline to both the organisation and its products. What I've learned over the years is successful organisations (i.e. those with large, loyal customer bases) have very flexible products that can be configured to suit the needs of their customers. I've also seen the opposite - stubborn companies with a narrow scope of what their products can and can't do, or be configured, lose business soon after the shiny sales pitch fades away.

Why?

1. Red tape: Your product may sing beautifully if the customer "just changed one thing", but established companies have set ways of working. It involves multiple departments, egos, time spent, and budgets. To change these processes can be multi-year business transformations involving external consultants, and that becomes a high-risk piece of work nobody wants to touch. 
2. Time to implement: Our customers are busy serving their customers. By requiring them to make changes, we increase the time to implement our product into their business, and create friction for our users.
3. Training: Time is invaluable, especially when customers have bigger business objectives. By configuring our solution to easily fit into theirs, we reduce training costs, overheads, and confusion on the customer end. 

Think: Who needs the deal more in terms of value vs friction? Yes some companies will find us valuable enough to change how they do things, but most? They'll just continue doing what they're doing until we reduce the barriers for them to use us. 

Now there is one pressing question - how do you make it seamlessly work for that one customer, but also prevent building custom features for that one customer (remember one small ask from a customer, one big problem)? The key is to build extensible features instead of custom features. Build it, but make it flexible enough (throw in the configuration settings, fields, checkboxes and toggles) so that it can be modified to be used somewhere else.

Lastly, remember what your ultimate goal is - revenue. When you're new and trying to win business, you need to do what's necessary to keep the lights on. Larger companies like Microsoft don't have this problem and can and will dictate how you implement and use their solutions (because the value of their products is greater than your friction to implement, so don't use them as examples on why your product or feature should work with a narrow feature-set (unless you're already making billions).