What are the operating routines of B-side products?

It is widely circulated both among the public and online that B-end products are difficult to operate , and the operating routines of C-end products simply do not work when applied to B-end products. This is a common pain point in the industry .

Those who complain every day that B-side products are difficult to operate are facing two situations:

1. The first is that the company does not provide a budget or has a very small budget, but still wants to launch the product;
2. The second type is that they have money, but often fail to find good ideas or use one point to leverage more resources.

After analyzing the two situations, if you belong to the first situation, congratulations, it may be difficult to turn things around no matter how hard you try; and those who belong to the second situation with a budget often do not have many operational ideas, so you can focus on reading this article of mine.

1. What is the difference between the operation of B-end products and the operation of C-end products?

The difference between C-end products and B-end products lies in the different users and needs they face.

For 2C products, due to the relatively single user attributes, the main purpose is to meet the needs of users , all of whom are C-end users. The purpose of their operation is nothing more than the pirate rule of AARRR : user acquisition, increasing activity rate, improving retention , monetization and self-propagation. As for 2B products, the main purpose is to meet business needs, and indirectly meet user needs through business needs. To put it simply, it is necessary to focus on the purchasing companies and the end-user employees on the C-end. The roles they play in the product are different, so there are obvious differences in their operating purposes.

From the demand point of view. B-end products basically systematize "existing offline demands" to improve efficiency, and the number of users is controllable, and the demands are clear, definite and fixed. C-end product demand needs to be explored, and the number of users is large and the demand is scattered, so product managers are needed to refine it and judge the effectiveness and priority of the demand.

In addition, the business logic of B-end products and C-end products is also very different. The payment model of B-end products is simple but clear, and the B-end is charged directly and paid on demand. The payment models for C-end products are diverse, both forward and backward, and more consideration should be given to traffic . These differences will inevitably lead to huge differences in your subsequent operating models.

2. Before operating B-side products, it is important to be familiar with your own products

A major feature of B-side products is that they are highly professional and complex, and most people are not familiar with them or even have no idea about them. When users use our products, we as operators play more of an expert role.

Because we are aimed at corporate users, there are two types of people who need to obtain professional information from us: one is the corporate decision makers who are responsible for making decisions based on their own ideas, and the other is the technical personnel who are responsible for achieving product technology docking.

I have seen many operators who can probably roughly state a slogan and some functions of their own products, but when asked about the specific product functions, core selling points and small details, many operators cannot answer. Boss, this is a B-side product. It needs to be used by a group of people and they will pay you. If you are not even very familiar with your own product, how can you explain the product in detail and convince everyone to use your product? Therefore, before you operate this B-side product, you need to be familiar with some process details of this product:

1. Product introduction, product overview, the product's position in the company's overall product matrix and its relationship with other products, product evolution direction, and important new features of each iterative version.
3. An introduction to product backend functions such as customer service, operations, and data statistics. Such as the background query function for handling customer complaints; daily and monthly data reports and data trend charts for querying new product registrations, active products, and lost products, the data volume of key business processes or functions; business monitoring alarms, etc.

3. When operating B-end products, you need to avoid using C-end product thinking to operate B-end products

As we said at the beginning of the article, there are very few methodologies for operating B-end products in the current market, and it can be said that they are extremely scarce. On the contrary, there are a lot of books and articles on the operation of C-end products. Therefore, when many people operate B-end products, they will more or less graft the C-end operational thinking onto the B-end products. Especially when they have just launched their own B-end products, they will directly draw people from within the company to operate the B-end product. From various perspectives, these two types of products are different in many aspects, so they have different operating methods .

For example, the evaluation indicators of C-end products are relatively direct and can be quantitatively analyzed, such as the number of daily active users, monthly active users, user growth rate , and revenue-related indicators. As for to B products, due to their product form, when formulating KPI assessment indicators for the weB product team, the indicators are constructed around system construction, efficiency improvement, and work ability.

For example, when DingTalk placed an ad on Weibo last time, it used a simple roulette wheel to draw red envelopes, and after the draw, users were asked to jump directly to the DingTalk download page or app to use the red envelope.

In fact, this red envelope drawing activity is being carried out with a serious C-end operation mindset. This kind of advertising placed on a high-traffic app like Weibo may bring you a certain participation rate, but is the conversion rate of users jumping to the app or downloading the app high ? I don’t think so:

• The price of a splash screen ad with such high traffic on the first Weibo is definitely very high. If it weren’t for Alibaba ’s product, I don’t think many people would be able to afford so much money to invest in this ad. Besides, this time the ad may have only created brand exposure, but the actual traffic conversion rate is definitely very low.
• The second is that the users of DingTalk itself are corporate users. The direct decision makers behind these users may be the leader of a certain department or the CEO of the company. However, the focus of this launch is not to solve the needs of such users, but more like simply placing a splash screen ad with money.

So I think that spending so much money on investment is a complete waste of investors' money. It would be better to contribute some of the money to other tool products that can truly solve business problems and improve business efficiency.

4. What are the operating routines of TO B products?

This operation routine can also be said to be carried out step by step according to a link, because actually purchasing your product and using your product is a relatively rigorous link.

Initiator: The person who requests the business to purchase or use the product

This person may see your advertisement at some point or notice that you have some brand exposure on various social media , and then directly search the name of the product on the Internet, and then go to the website or app store to download it. So here you need to do what you should do.

For example, a certain data analysis tool, as a startup company that produces B-side products, most of its team members are from top domestic and foreign Internet and data companies such as LinkedIn, eBay, Microsoft, Accenture, BAT , etc. These people have very obvious fan dissemination effects and brand endorsement. These people have a lot of free publicity resources.

So we will see that anyone in this team who can write a little can write articles about data-driven operations on various platforms, and these articles are particularly popular because data operations are a very important skill in operations but a very difficult skill to master. If you can write some very professional and practical articles about this, they will definitely be very popular.

And they did so, and their professional analysis articles can often be seen in major technology media and portals, including the founder and CEO, and their popularity is very good. So this will bring a certain amount of exposure to the brand. The most important thing is to enable the target audience to see this tool through precise channels , and then discover and try this product.

We can see that this data analysis tool has done a good job in brand building on major search engines . It has very clear media reports , encyclopedia entries and official website exposure on major search engines such as Baidu and 360. This will undoubtedly alleviate users' concerns about use to a certain extent and allow the value of this product to be circulated and passed on to the next user.

Decider: The person who makes the final decision on the purchase

For B-side products, when we take over a company, it means we have acquired all the employees of the company who have the need to use the product. For decisions involving the entire enterprise, there must be someone who makes the final decision. This person is undoubtedly the company's CEO, that is, senior management.

After we influence the first ordinary user to use the product, in order to make this product actually purchased, I think you need to show your trump card, and this trump card is what makes you different from other products. Because there must be a lot of similar products that solve a certain need of an enterprise. For example, when it comes to data analysis tools, there are Baidu Statistics, Google Statistics, Umeng , Growingio, etc. So users have a lot of choices. What you need to do is to get the decision maker to take a picture of your product, so you need to highlight your core functions.

Let’s take the above data analysis as an example. When this tool was first released, it was promoting a core selling point, which is that data can be collected without any embedding. Let’s first talk about what data embedding is? Data tracking is a very troublesome problem. How can we do data analysis if we cannot capture key data? Secondly, the data collection cycle is very long, and it needs to go through layers of checkpoints from PM and technology, including demand, scheduling, testing, online launch, and verification. It would be fine if the process goes smoothly. However, if an error is made accidentally and no data is collected or wrong data is collected, all the efforts will be in vain. It is time-consuming and laborious. Based on this, point-free technology has become a new market demand.

As for this analysis tool, their approach is mainly to connect SDK or a piece of JS code to the platform. There is no need to pre-define which events or functions to collect. It automatically tracks points and collects all user behaviors (such as purchase button elements, which need to be combined with tracking technology), quickly collects data, and establishes user behavior models. For some functional points (such as purchase button elements), they still need to be combined with manual point tracking to ensure maximum data accuracy. However, this can also be attributed to its advantage, as only a small number of elements need to be buried. This is their core selling point, which immediately distinguishes the product from other similar products and directly improves the efficiency of the entire product technology team, which is what the company wants to see. Therefore, as long as this core function is demonstrated, business decision makers may be happy to pay for it.

Of course, what is said above are some routines about B-end product operations. As a B-end product, advertising is still the key, but when you have money to invest, you still have to look at the needs and pain points of the entire market, seize a certain demand point and magnify it, and present your product as the answer to corporate decision makers. The effect will definitely be different.

Including B-side products, there is a need to actively participate in offline promotion . The best way to promote offline is to combine it with activities. For example, many of today’s B-side products are designed to solve certain needs of Internet companies, and the current atmosphere of the entire Internet is that there are a lot of offline lectures and salons, so we should actively participate in various offline lectures . Because most of the people who participate in these salons are company leaders or managers, these people are actually what we call key decision makers. Therefore, being able to showcase your products in front of them is undoubtedly the biggest publicity opportunity.