The B2B Innovator’s Map - Daniel Elizalde

Go from uncertainty to impact in six concise steps.

The B2B Innovator’s Map is your practical guide to reducing uncertainty and accelerating product growth.

The B2B Innovator’s Map Is Your Practical Guide for Reducing Uncertainty and Accelerating Growth

Most new enterprise software (B2B) products fail to generate a profit. They fail not because of technical challenges, lack of funding, or market conditions. Instead, new products fail because most companies build products that don’t satisfy a market need, so customers don’t buy them.

The B2B Innovator’s Map is your practical guide to taming uncertainty and discovering opportunities to develop products your customers will be eager to buy.

By following this map, you’ll always know where you are and what your next step should be through the six stages of the B2B innovation journey to get from idea to your first ten successful customers.

For each stage, you’ll learn actionable tools and techniques to help you understand your market and your customers’ needs, with proven methodologies to verify your solution’s market potential—for customers and investors alike.

Whether you’re a B2B strategist, product manager, investor, or founder, The B2B Innovator’s Map is your accelerated guide for bringing profitable products to market.

What top B2B leaders are saying

Rob Tiffany, VP of Strategy at Ericsson
"When it comes to product leadership, Daniel is the best in the business. I’ve had the great fortune to work with him and benefited greatly from his thoughts on product innovation. Luckily, he’s put that wisdom into the book you’re holding in your hands. Needless to say, Daniel’s new book will be a constant companion as I build my next enterprise software product.”
Rob Fitzpatrick, Entrepreneur and Author of The Mom Test
“A beautifully clear and coherent guide to the murky early days of building enterprise products. Elizalde has done a wonderful job of making his hard-won wisdom available and actionable to the next generation of B2B innovators and product leaders. I very much wish I’d had this book in hand throughout my whole career.”
Tendayi Viki, Author of Pirates In The Navy
"With this book, Daniel Elizalde has crafted a much-needed guide on how to build a B2B business from scratch. Building a B2B business can be a challenging undertaking but Daniel is a world-class expert on the topic. Future B2B entrepreneurs are lucky to be able to tap into Daniel's expertise and to have this book to guide them toward their first ten customers."
Eric Simone, Co-Founder and CEO at ClearBlade, Inc.
“Fabulous real-world examples from a person who has been there, done that. Daniel Elizalde has created an excellent guide for anyone navigating the treacherous waters of building enterprise software. I wish I had this book 10 years ago, it would have saved me from lots of pain!”
David Bland, Coauthor of Testing Business Ideas
“Daniel has a unique blend of lean experimentation skills combined with both the worlds of software and hardware. He iterates through complex B2B solutions while speaking in terms that people understand.”
Miguel Morales, IoT Sales and Product Lead, Microsoft
“In today’s fast-paced world of software product innovation, where everything is possible and ‘starchitects’ hold sway, it is so easy to disregard even core tenets of innovation discipline as impractical or assumed. And yet, how much time are we spending revisiting the fundamentals on products we are pushing to scale?
This book is a fast, fun, and highly referenceable reminder that experience cannot possibly replace good strategy in early product design.”
Wayne Irwin, Vice President of Operations, Ericsson
“In The B2B Innovator’s Map, Daniel provides a wonderfully simple and easy-to-follow guide for launching new enterprise software products. If you follow the steps described in this book, you will understand the process needed to achieve the success you envisioned when you started your journey.
Daniel not only teaches the correct steps, but he also identifies the pitfalls you need to stay away from, along with examples of each.”
Bill Schmarzo, Author, Data Management Innovation at Dell Technologies
"Daniel brings a pragmatic, step-by-step, real-world-based framework for corralling innovation to not only win over those first 10 customers but to put the product development process on the proper trajectory to drive repeatability and scale."
Katie Geusz, Sr Director of Programs at Greentown Labs
"Daniel's expert insights break the complex and daunting process of B2B innovation into clear, actionable steps. Climatetech startups developing enterprise software will especially appreciate his advice for navigating complex stakeholder dynamics and his framework for investing time and effort where it matters most.”
Cesar Gamez, VP of Systems R&D, NI
"This book is a must-read for anyone working with B2B and innovative enterprise products who wants to accelerate their success. Daniel puts his many years of experience in B2B and innovation into this practical guide, which includes real-world examples of the innovation journey.
In the many years I've known Daniel, this book is by far the strongest example of his expertise made available for the world to consume."
Vishwesh (Vish) Pai, Sr. Director of Product Management at ServiceNow
"Daniel is a good friend and fantastic advisor on building products for B2B businesses. I had the great fortune to leverage his skills through a consulting project where the business benefited from his ideas on product development. The book is a great way to leverage all his experience and insights for anyone who wants to build world-class B2B products!"
Neeraj Mathur, Founder and CEO, SavingsOak
"The best lessons and insights come from people who have been in the trenches, led from the front, and have battle scars to show. Daniel Elizalde has over two decades of learnings from the school of hard knocks.
In The B2B “Innovator's Map, he distills those experiences in easy, bite-size chunks of actionable steps that are extremely beneficial for any B2B entrepreneur, leader, and practitioner.
How do you take a vision and convert it into a meaningful product that delivers incredible value to end-users? What steps must you take to drive an innovative idea into a reality that someone will be willing to pay for? The B2B Innovator’s Map provides you a clear path to discover the answers.”
Rich Mironov, CEO and "smokejumper" CPO
"Building successful technology products for enterprises (B2B) is dramatically different from consumer tech (B2C) products. Much of the popular writing on product strategy, innovation and scale-up assume simpler consumer-focused markets where our buyers are also our users; sales cycles are short; problems have a human face; and no single customer dominates our quarter’s revenue.
Daniel Elizalde is a 20-year veteran of enterprise product innovation and market success. In “The B2B Innovator’s Map,” he takes us through the strategies and complexities of understanding the pains and delivering value to not just one customer – who may have unique problems – but our first ten customers. This sets the stage for the growth and massive profitability that our companies need.
This is a book that every B2B strategist, product manager, investor and company founder needs."

About the Author

Daniel Elizalde is a Product Executive with over 20 years of experience leveraging emerging technologies to drive product innovation in industries such as climate tech, eCommerce, manufacturing, telecommunications, automotive, and semiconductors.

Daniel has held various leadership positions, including VP, Head of IoT at Ericsson, Head of Products at Stem (AI-powered energy storage company in Silicon Valley), and Instructor at Stanford University.

As a Product Innovation Coach, Daniel has trained and advised over 1,500 product professionals around the world on how to take their ideas to market. Daniel is also a mentor at Greentown Labs, the largest climate tech accelerator in the US, helping startups address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.