B-side operations: What are the operating methods for different products?

What are the operating methods for products at different stages?

1. How to understand TO B products?

A friend on the Internet asked: front-end products are both To c and back-end products are both To b. Is this concept division correct?

Obviously, it cannot be divided so simply. If we only understand it from the form of products and services, there will be certain deviations.

For example:

1. When a computer is sold to an individual, it is a To C product, but when it is sold to a school or a business, it is a To B product.
2. SaaS software is now generally presented in PC+APP mode. The background used by enterprise managers belongs to the back end and is To B, while the APP used by enterprise employees belongs to the front end, but it is still part of the enterprise product and is still in the To B category.

Therefore, To C is based on the consumer market and provides products or services to individuals and families. To B is based on the enterprise market and provides products or services to enterprises or organizations. The key to understanding the difference between To B and To C lies in understanding market behavior and sales targets, rather than the products or services themselves.

2. To B product life cycle

Like ordinary products, To B products will also go through a process from entering the market to finally exiting the market. Usually, after research and development, trial sales, and formal entry into the market, it means that the product is born, and then goes through the growth stage, maturity stage, and decline stage until it finally exits the market and ends its entire life cycle. So, for operations, different issues need to be considered at different stages, so the operational strategies will naturally be different.

3. Operational strategies at different stages

1. Product development stage - competitive product research

What kind of competitive environment will the products developed by the team face, what competitors already exist, their advantages and disadvantages, operating methods, and sales mechanisms? The operation team needs to issue a complete market feasibility research report analysis and discuss these research results with the entire team. This is of great significance for polishing the core functions of the product and formulating the direction and strategy for going to market.

Competitive product research content

Through this report, we can basically answer the 5W1H questions:

• Who, who are we? What is product positioning?
• What, what advantages and characteristics do our products have?
• Where, what is the position of our products in the market? Where are our customers?
• When is the right time for our product to be launched into the market?
• Why, why should customers choose our products? What value can we provide?
• How, through what methods and channels to reach customers? That is, how to formulate operational strategies?

2. Trial sales phase: acquiring seed users

General operators think that if they have a budget, they can put a small advertisement on CCTV, book a subway car, set up a brand zone on Baidu, sign a few big Vs , and then, boom, the number of users will exceed 10 million. However, as a startup company operating To B, you may not have tens of millions of advertising fees at your disposal, nor so many channels for you to invest. During the trial sales phase, we basically adopted a small-scale online and offline promotion strategy:

The seed users you acquire in the early stage are your best product experiencers. They chat with users, provide door-to-door training and answer questions for all employees, and provide support and answers online 24/7. These are what operations personnel must do carefully and constantly record and feed back to the team. In the early stages, they must constantly verify whether the core functions of the product are attractive and valuable, and what the conversion rate is.

3. Growth stage - large-scale promotion

After the product has been improved through trial sales, it can begin to enter the market. Usually, operations need to start from four aspects: online, offline, content and channels.

Online: Increase advertising investment , such as SEM on channels such as Baidu, Sogou , and 360. This channel continuously optimizes keywords and advertising display formats. Later data found that the customers of this channel are the most accurate, and the first batch of paying users were converted through this channel.

Offline: Exhibitions or salons are basically arranged 1-2 times every quarter. Exhibitions are usually sponsored in the form of speeches + demonstrations. At the same time, the booths set up some interactive activities such as gifts for attention and registration, and give VIP discount coupons to customers who participate in conference marketing . Industry exhibitions usually gather manufacturers in the circle, so they are conducive to learning and communication within the industry.

Content: Practical experience sharing by HRDs of famous companies. We will establish a community of about 500 people in each issue, bring these people together, do some Q&A within the circle, and share practical information . Slowly, the brand's popularity will gradually increase within the circle. We will also carry out some marketing activities for the community, such as registration gifts, sharing gifts, and recommendation gifts.

Channel: Give agents 20-50% of the channel share. This high incentive method can effectively drive agents to tap KA customers.

Because the cost of building a telemarketing team is too high, the team chooses to cooperate with a third party and use new tools to improve operational efficiency. A large amount of customer data is obtained through web crawler technology based on customer portraits. After the telemarketing team obtains potential customers, the sales team immediately conducts intensive visits, sometimes visiting up to 5-6 customers, and also converts a certain number of paying users.

Data tracking and analysis should be conducted for each channel’s advertising or activities, such as the analysis of SEM channels:

Similarly, other EDM, WeChat , micro-courses, accounts and other channels should also be tracked and analyzed according to their nature, using data to illustrate which method is most efficient and continuously optimize strategies. Then, from the perspective of overall operational efficiency, the cost of acquiring a single customer is also the main focus of operations: how to increase the value of the user's entire life cycle and how to reduce CAC (user acquisition cost).

Overall operational efficiency analysis

4. Product maturity stage - increasing revenue and contract renewal

As for why customers renew their contracts, for example, in the projects of the well-known company I worked for before, quite a number of customers renewed their contracts or signed contracts of more than one year for this reason. Customers will think that yours is a project of a big brand, with abundant funds and strong R&D capabilities, and that your products will definitely get better and better, so their confidence will naturally increase.

So, what if it is not a project for a well-known enterprise? While developing small business customers, more attention is paid to developing cooperative projects with large enterprises. This naturally solves the problem of brand endorsement, and while boosting the confidence of small business customers, it can also bring a lot of new traffic .

Once the issue of brand endorsement is resolved, user experience becomes crucial. Generally speaking, once all employees of an enterprise customer use the product, their stickiness will be very high because the switching cost is too high. Some customers will even use a system for decades. Therefore, the quality of after-sales service such as improving product functions, enhancing user experience , and responding attentively to every request of the customer is directly related to the customer renewal rate.

Regarding customer renewal rates, you can also use a customer grading system to manage them. For details, please refer to the previous article "B-side operations: How to design a customer grading system to achieve refined operations? 》

5. Product decline stage - looking for new growth points

Before a product enters its decline phase, it should look for new growth points to extend the product life cycle, such as innovating product models, developing other tool products, etc. to meet the company's new needs. Some companies will also consider ways to deal with the situation, such as shifting key businesses. If a company does not begin to change before the recession, it will face the risk of recession when new alternatives emerge.