How to acquire B-side customers?

I have a knowledge planet where I receive many questions and doubts from operators in their actual work and business every day. A while ago, I received a question: What are the ideas and specific methods for B-side growth?

I think this issue is quite representative, so I wrote an article to express my views on it.

I think this question can be split into two questions:

1. How to acquire B-side customers?
2. How do To B companies increase revenue and expand scale?

1. How to acquire B-side customers?

I think there are several ways for To B companies to acquire customers (and there are many more to come):

• Content marketing;
• Baidu paid search;
• Customer/Friend Recommendations;
• Other third-party advertising;
• Sales staff;
• Official website/company public account;
• Organize summits and salon events by yourself;
• Partners;
• Sponsor industry events.

It mainly depends on which To B business you are doing, and you should combine "your product + your team's expertise" to determine the most efficient combination.

For example, our company’s To B business:

First, we sorted out the target users, namely the operation practitioners. Their demand funnel and demand frequency are from top to bottom: content, community, courses, tools, services, and channels.

Based on this user demand funnel, you can see that the further up the demand funnel you layout, the more users you cover, and the earlier you can establish connections with users, the more you can intercept the traffic from the lower demands.

The "content" at the top is the largest traffic pool and the commanding heights of industry discourse power, so we should invest in it for a long time at all costs and unwaveringly (for To B, content is the best way for To B companies to acquire customers, no doubt about it).

So we did three things:

1. Regularly publish the "case review" articles we planned on the official account;
2. Accumulate users on 20 personal accounts and establish a national operation community covering 200,000 people;
3. Host offline salons in various cities from time to time (on average, attend 2 summits with thousands of people hosted by others every month).

As a result, without establishing a marketing and sales team or placing any paid advertisements, more than 200 customers approach us every month to seek cooperation.

2. How do To B companies increase revenue and expand scale?

When a team starts a business, it is often because they have insight into unmet user needs or have accumulated some industry resources, and use them as entry points for entrepreneurship. For this single point of business, we must continue to deepen our efforts, and when the business capabilities of this "point" reach the industry-leading level, we can then expand to other "points" in the user demand chain.

In the process of expanding around the "user demand funnel", what is tested is your understanding of the competitive environment of the industrial chain in your industry.

You need to think about:

• Does the "point" you are going to attack next match the core competitiveness of your team (for example: "tools" require technical team + sales team, "traffic business" requires a strong resource-based marketing and business partner)?
• Which part must you do by yourself?
• Which link is more suitable to form an alliance with the strong players in that link of the industrial chain?
• …

Instead of blindly expanding by "deploying points", which leads to multi-line operations and doing everything, the company becomes "positioned" without any characteristics (the topic of company expansion has a lot of blood and tears if we talk about it in depth, and we can write a special article to discuss it in detail later).

Many times it’s not that there are no methods, but that we always hear about new methods on the market, and every time we rush in, we only try them out briefly, and then give up when we feel they don’t work.

The core idea is: where are your users? What do they need/want? What can my abilities support me to do?

Just choose one thing and keep working on it until you reach perfection before considering the next one.

3. Some Examples

Here are a few wild examples to help you think:

1. Sales personnel from technology outsourcing/agent operation companies acquire customers on Boss Zhipin. They put their resumes showing their past achievements in new media agency operation/technology development for other companies, and privately chat with the CEOs of small companies one by one to solicit sales.

2. Friends who have public accounts will definitely find that the most frequent messages in your background are advertisements asking you if you want to increase your followers. Some of them are caused by the plug-ins/editor you use exposing your public account ID and sending you targeted push notifications. Some of them are caused by crawlers you have written yourself that push fan-increasing advertisements in batches to accounts that update related articles.

3. If you are selling software/system, you must pay attention to: recruiting agents.

In China, there are a lot of "people with some money" or "people who make money locally by relying on connections/resources" (the lower you go, the more important it is to have personal connections). Even if you set up a subsidiary locally, you cannot compete with the connections that the agents have had in the local area for a long time.

I know a company that developed software similar to Wetool and sold it to traditional merchants through agents, with annual revenue of 20 million. Secondly, several Internet data companies I know are trying to expand their marketing by poaching marketing managers/key account sales from Huawei and financial software companies such as UFIDA and Kingdee, and then cashing in on the key customers they have accumulated in the company.

1. Speaking of investment and franchising, here's another piece of data: a company that specializes in attracting investment and franchising for offline stores has an annual revenue of 5 billion (basically you pay tens to hundreds of thousands, and you can open a store in a hands-off manner, with the brand taking care of all the processes).

In fifth- and sixth-tier cities, the mortality rate of these franchise stores is as high as 90% (the mortality rate of catering stores in Shenzhen is 50% per year, and many local self-media outlets survive by relying on advertising from newly opened businesses/old customers no longer invest). The way to attract traffic is to post tutorials or tips on how to open a coffee shop/milk tea shop/breakfast shop, how to set up a street stall/do small business and other money-making related content on centralized traffic platforms such as Baidu, Douyin/Toutiao, and then direct traffic to personal accounts or fill in mobile phone numbers to complete sales.

1. If you are a traditional enterprise, there are two channels that you can pay attention to. One is Alibaba (which has a lot of manufacturers/traders resources). Previously, a customer contacted them one by one through private messages for sales promotion.

The other is the traditional local chambers of commerce/industry associations. The presidents of these chambers of commerce/associations are key nodes of resources and connections, and some executive presidents (the ones who actually do the work) are actually relatively poor (compared to the CEOs of member companies) and they also want to make money very much, but they need to make the money in a decent way. At this time, if your product/service is relatively advanced and effective, there will be a lot of room for cooperation (such as convening a large number of entrepreneurs to attend classes).

1. For example, some micro-businesses on Taobao buy hot-selling products at their own expense, and then leave comments and pictures of the quality products below. The pictures are all watermarked with their WeChat ID/WeChat QR code.

Author: Jianfeng

Source: Operational In-depth Selection