The SESO Playbook: How to Sell Enterprise Software to Family-Owned Businesses

Conventional wisdom suggests you can’t serve both enterprise customers and small businesses with the same product. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Michael Guirguis revealed how SESO defied this assumption to become a leading agricultural workforce management platform.

Understanding the Market Structure

The agricultural industry presents a unique challenge for software companies. As Michael explains: “There’s still close to 2 million farms in America, but you are seeing a ton of consolidation. So mom and pop farmers are struggling more, and you’re seeing blackrock and hedge funds and PE firms buying up more land.”

However, this consolidation hasn’t completely transformed the industry’s character. “People think, oh, so it’s now being run by these big corporate organizations. But there’s a difference between who owns the land and who actually harvests the crop and grows on the land,” Michael notes. “Even some of the biggest farms in America, like Taylor Farms and Tanamura and Antel Lippman family farms. These are all still run by the farming families.”

Building Trust at Both Ends of the Market

SESO’s approach to serving this diverse market started with extensive fieldwork. “I spent a ton of time early on just driving and flying to farms all over the country. I’ve visited hundreds of farms in the last few years,” Michael shares. This immersion revealed that despite their size differences, farms shared common challenges around labor management.

Rather than building separate solutions for different segments, SESO focused on becoming deep experts in labor compliance and workforce management. “We’re staying in our lane and we’re really just maniacally focused on everything related to labor,” Michael explains.

The Product Strategy

Instead of creating tiered products, SESO built a platform that could scale from the smallest to largest operations. “A lot of the farms that we bring in, that we work with are just bringing in one or two workers and then we have farms that are bringing in 5000 plus workers,” Michael notes. “And it’s really important to us to support not just enterprise farms and enterprise employers, but also some of the mom and pop farms that helped us get our first start.”

This approach required careful attention to both segments’ needs:

1. For small farms: Streamlined processes and compliance support
2. For large operations: Enterprise-grade features and scalability

The Sales Approach

Rather than pursuing pure growth, SESO carefully selects customers who align with their values. “We’re not just going to say yes to every farm if we don’t think that we have the same values aligned,” Michael emphasizes. This selective approach helps build trust across both segments.

The strategy has paid off. Today, SESO works with “22 of the 100 largest employers in AG” while maintaining strong relationships with small family farms.

Key Success Factors

Several factors enabled SESO to successfully serve both markets:

1. Deep Industry Understanding: By spending time with farms of all sizes, they identified common pain points that transcended scale.
2. Focus on Universal Problems: Labor compliance and workforce management challenges are similar regardless of farm size.
3. Value-Based Customer Selection: By focusing on values alignment rather than size, they built a strong reputation across segments.
4. Expert Positioning: Rather than selling technology, they position themselves as labor compliance experts who happen to build software.

Looking Ahead

SESO’s success with this dual-market approach has implications beyond agriculture. “We see a lot of these same problems in other industries, in landscaping and forestry, fisheries, truck drivers, construction,” Michael explains.

For B2B founders targeting traditional industries with diverse customer segments, SESO’s experience offers valuable lessons:

1. Don’t assume you need different products for different customer segments
2. Focus on solving fundamental problems that affect all customers
3. Build trust through expertise rather than leading with technology
4. Select customers based on values alignment rather than size

The key insight? Sometimes the best way to serve different market segments isn’t to build different products, but to solve fundamental problems so well that your solution works for everyone.