How to operate and promote industrial Internet products?

The operation of industrial Internet products is an operation with a marketing digital transformation mindset. The focus of marketing digital transformation is to build a new marketing system centered on user operations.

Products and R&D design and develop products in the hope of bringing product value to customers. The value of a product may include more convenient and time-saving operations for users, or it may be the output of objective and valuable data statistical analysis that can guide the market to respond quickly to changes.

The operation, sales, promotion and sale of products are intended to deliver to customers the greater value they may gain from using the products.

The product value of industrial Internet has three levels: the value realized by the product (the value customers get from using the product), the value delivered by marketing, and the value received by customers.

The value achieved by a product focuses on the experience of product design and product functions, which is the key work of a product manager. The value delivered by marketing and the value received by customers rely more on operations. Therefore, when it comes to realizing product value, products and operations need to communicate well and integrate perfectly in order to do better.

Regarding how the products and operations of the Industrial Internet can collaborate, I have summarized a four-step method, which I hope will be helpful to you:

1. Demand research, finding product value: The early planning stage is consistent with the product planning idea, and both must first analyze and position the product through market research, competitive product analysis, customer research, etc.
2. Competitive product analysis and product positioning: After research, it is necessary to clarify the market industry, combine competing products in the same industry with customer pain points, and clarify product positioning, the fundamental problems that the product can solve, and the core value of the product to corporate customers.
3. Product design, finding product functions: After clarifying the product positioning, due to the uniqueness of corporate customer businesses, we need to conduct corresponding process analysis based on the characteristics of different industries to facilitate product design that is more in line with needs. Product design needs to output two parts. One part is the internal product plan, which focuses on product design and operation; the other part is the external publicity plan, which focuses on the business fit and empowerment with the enterprise.
4. After the project is launched, seek product feedback: While maintaining a long-term cooperative relationship, regularly obtain optimization demands to deepen customer stickiness. At the same time, the operation and maintenance team ensures the stability of product use.

1. What are the responsibilities of an industrial Internet operations position?

Industrial Internet is the use of Internet tools by traditional industries to bring traditional industries online, while linking all participants in the industrial chain, integrating industrial chain resources, connecting the front, middle and back ends of the industry, and forming an online industrial closed-loop ecosystem.

Therefore, although Internet operations and industrial Internet operations are essentially operations, their work content and operation methods are indeed very different.

Although the operations of industrial Internet and consumer Internet differ only in terms of user groups, the different user needs and expectations of value lead to significant differences in the operational methods we use. The operators of industrial Internet are actually user operators, and they are often very familiar with the users themselves. They not only need to understand the users themselves, but also need to understand people related to the users (such as colleagues in the company) and people related to the business (upstream and downstream of the industry).

For example, in recent years, SaaS products have continued to heat up and product types have continued to increase. The ability to conduct detailed data analysis on customers and businesses has become one of the most important core competitive advantages of an industrial Internet operator.

In addition, the operation of industrial Internet also requires truly understanding your customers. Without industry expertise and depth, there is no way to optimize the traditional chain.

The essence of industrial Internet is the process of supply chain optimization, which allows resources to find the most reasonable allocation, eliminate information asymmetry, improve industry efficiency, create incremental value, and thus accelerate the development of the industrial economy.

The goal of industrial Internet product operations is to increase product sales. Channel expansion, customer maintenance (service), brand building, word-of-mouth communication, and content delivery all help products improve customer satisfaction.

How can the operators of the industrial Internet further leverage the advantages of Internet companies to expand and strengthen the platform and further integrate it with the industry?

First, let’s take a look at the three types of roles and specific work content of industrial Internet operations positions:

• Market operation (also known as business operation): The main work content is to use marketing as a means to intervene in a series of product publicity, exposure, marketing and other behaviors through costly or non-cost methods.
• Platform operation (including user operation, content operation, and community operation): The main task is to communicate with users, maintain user preferences, and obtain user feedback. Produce high-quality content based on user needs, stimulate users with similar ideas, conduct interactive communication and accumulate behavioral data.
• Business Operations (also known as BD, Sales): The main job content is to negotiate cooperation with potential customers and sell products. Business operations roles are usually more common operations positions in traditional enterprises. The value of their existence is to acquire and retain customers.

Secondly, we analyze the characteristics of industrial Internet operation positions:

• The lighter the product, the more tool-oriented it is; the smaller the customer granularity; the lower the average order value; the shorter and more frequent the sales transactions; the lighter the delivery; and the more online and operational the customer success model is.
• The heavier the product, the more management-oriented it is; the larger the customer granularity; the higher the average order value; the longer the sales transaction cycle; the heavier the delivery; and the more offline and less consulting the customer success model is.

In the process of product design, if we can express complex logic using the simplest operations and the clearest language, it means that we have thought deeply enough and analyzed thoroughly. Industrial Internet product managers and operations serve both users and the market. The following figure shows how they collaborate:

To give the simplest example, the industrial Internet can quickly acquire a large number of users through discounts, promotions, and subsidies, but this is completely unfeasible for the B-side.

The difficulty of industrial Internet products is how to most efficiently use the "system" functions to improve the repetitive work of "people". The operation of industrial Internet is far from enough to rely solely on online maintenance. Offline operations often have better results. We carry out refined operations for key customers and try our best to maintain a hospitable relationship and provide consultative services to other customers.

Finally, let’s take a look at the transformation process of traditional enterprises and see what are the differences in the key tasks required of operations positions at different stages.

• In the early stages of a business, when a product is building from 0 to 1, operations staff need to focus more on testing the waters for a specific business scenario. Get feedback quickly to further understand the market and complete investment and trial with the lowest cost.
• In the mid-term of the business, the business gradually develops and users gradually begin to use the product. What operations need to do is to obtain more leads through various channels and means, follow up the conversion process of the leads, and quickly feedback any problems with the product to the product department for iterative optimization.
• During the business development stage, the number of users grows rapidly and the company begins to make profits. At this time, what operations need to do is to assist the product in continuously polishing product details. Because of rapid development, new demands will inevitably be exposed as the user scale increases. New demands require new product functions to meet them. When our own functions are insufficient, we need to cooperate with external parties.
• During the stable business period, sales has accumulated a large number of stable customers and has a stable and continuous source of demand. What operations need to do is to hold the ground and serve the world laid by sales. Let our customers make money happily and spread the word happily.

1. Responsibility 1: Help the product convey its core concept

Consumer Internet products satisfy “user needs”. The needs of individual users are much simpler than those of the industrial Internet. There are no complicated business processes, and specific needs only arise in specific scenarios.

Industrial Internet products meet the "business needs" of enterprises. Industrial Internet products should be designed to solve users’ “business pain points” from the very beginning. If products and users are the foundation and core of operations, then growth, revenue, and scale are the purpose and direction of operations.

Users are the core of the entire operating system. Everything revolves around user behavior and intentions. We build user portraits and even close relationships through observation and analysis of user interactions and behaviors.

Products teach operations how to use the system and how to inform users where problems occur.

Operations personnel need to understand the basic logic of product design and organize wording that users can understand.

The tool that connects products and operations can be a “demand dashboard”. The "Demand Dashboard" is used to manage project progress, product planning and operational planning. In the "Demand Dashboard", product managers need to regularly sort out existing functions and functions under development, and maintain the online version and instructions.

2. Responsibility 2: Assist products in market application

There is a saying in the industrial Internet: "No matter how good the business model is or how useful the product is, if the operation is not done well, there will be no source of power."

Before teaching the market how to promote products to users, operations must first understand who you need to operate for. The operation strategies are different for different objects.

After figuring out the target of the operation, when promoting the product, the market will feedback the real voice of users to the operation and understand the sales "stuck" points. There may be the possibility of multiple rounds of education and repeated communication through this process. It requires that products and operations work closely together to ultimately ensure that the product is accepted by the market and serves our operations targets well.

The core operational tasks of the industrial Internet are: generating links online, links generating data, data generating intelligence, and forming a data intelligent marketing operation system.

Operations need to be more focused on the promotional points of industrial Internet products. After combining the pain points of the entire market, they should seize a certain demand point and magnify it, and present their products as solutions to decision makers. Products disseminated through new media are directly aimed at the terminal. If the psychological value perceived by users after using them exceeds expectations, they will automatically begin to form a good reputation and establish a positive brand.

In addition, industrial Internet products should focus on offline promotion, and hold and participate in more offline lectures or salons, because the people who participate in these activities are usually managers or project leaders, which provides opportunities to showcase their own products.

2. How to operate industrial Internet?

Before we talk about this section, let’s think about a question first: What is operation in the era of consumer Internet? What exactly do operators do?

Product operation must be based on people, coordinating the work of offline and online people.

How do industrial Internet products operate?

Establish a user operation system that mainly relies on onlineization, including user activation, user conversion, and user value maximization.

What the operation of industrial Internet actually does is to increase customer value. Customer lifetime value determines your product costs, product pricing, and customer experience. The customer's life cycle determines your service model, including service duration, service frequency, and service form.

We know that under the industrial Internet, there is no connection without operation. When you have good products and good content, you need to operate them well through various forms and new means to allow your products and content materials to interact more with your consumers and create more connections, allowing them to use them further, and allowing them to stay, pay attention, forward, and so on. Because only after linking can commercial monetization be possible.

• Product Manager: responsible for “thinking” out the product;
• R&D testing: responsible for making the product;
• Operation: Responsible for putting the product into use.

How to use it? Of course the first priority is to understand your users. Know who your users are and what their real needs are.

Let’s talk about operations. Only after the operation is established can we talk about the online operation of the enterprise. The online operation of the enterprise can improve the operational efficiency of the enterprise and reduce the operating costs.

The ultimate goal of online enterprise operations is to achieve digitalization. Digitalization will be the basis for lean enterprise operations. Only when all of an enterprise’s businesses are transformed into digital ones can connections be formed through operations. Only with connections can a data network be formed, and only through visual analysis of the data network can products be transformed into data-based services to assist decision-making and realize the enterprise.

The core of industrial Internet is industrialization. The industrial Internet of many traditional industries is actually an industrialization upgrade, and the direction of the upgrade is to integrate digitalization and the Internet.

Therefore, the core of industrial Internet is industrialization, and industrialization involves several core elements of the industry: digital, finance, commerce, and the entire industrial chain. Industrial Internet is an extension of consumer Internet. Both are people-centric, providing services and experiences, while relying on the analysis and transformation of big data to improve operational value and corporate profits.

The consumer Internet has an instrumental mindset. The so-called instrumental thinking is to serve a group of people with common needs well, pay attention to their feedback, and meet more of their ideas. Continuously meet user needs, start from tools, build platforms, and ultimately achieve commercialization.

First, find out the possible problems of your target users, let them recognize the existence of this problem, and then your product can help them solve this problem. Then break down a certain link in the company's purchasing decision chain. Finally, continue to guide and educate.

In an enterprise, operations are the closest to users. So in the era of consumer Internet, how do operations staff and product managers divide their work?

To put it simply, everyone does their own thing and speaks for themselves.

Product managers help customers from the perspective of enhancing the functional value of the product, while operations staff provide services to customers from the perspective of user operations.

Product managers should pay more attention to how to combine service products with operation models, while operation personnel should think more about how to combine "online" and "offline". They should give priority to running the entire business process, and then design the system and add relevant tools such as the Internet.

1. Be good at operating online traffic and realizing fission value

The product design of the industrial Internet must incorporate operational ideas and should focus on solutions that combine service and operational models. One of the important tasks of a product manager for the Industrial Internet is to teach operators how to use the system.

On the industrial Internet platform, product managers should focus on understanding the business, exploring pain points and difficulties, understanding the operating model, and including operational indicators in assessments, so that they can have operational thinking at the beginning of the design.

Through product function training, operators can become familiar with product functions and answer various questions that users (customers) have when using the system. During the product function training process, operators need to understand the basic logic of product design and organize wording that users can understand. It can better help product managers convey the key points of the product to users (customers) layer by layer.

Next, let’s talk about what is operation in the era of industrial Internet? What exactly do operators need to do?

Products in the industrial Internet era are usually what we refer to as industrial Internet products. The design and implementation process of industrial Internet products often encounters the problem of unclear processes but people always want to make them clear.

So how to make it clear? Does it mean that the goals are clear if business indicators are equal to product goals? In fact, this is not the case. Industrial Internet products have different business indicators and assessment methods due to their different businesses. Different business goals will lead to different product goals. Therefore, we cannot simply say that when business goals are equal to product goals, our goals are clear.

And the design of the operating model is not simply a combination of online and offline.

The product design of industrial Internet advocates more efficiency-oriented thinking. The so-called efficiency-improving thinking means serving a group of people who can serve customers well, paying attention to their pain points, solving the problem of their poor professionalism in serving customers, and solving the problem of their low sales volume in serving customers. Gradually summarize and clarify the business model, so as to achieve the goal of platform-assisted business efficiency improvement.

When it comes to efficiency-enhancing thinking, let’s take a look at how operations personnel and product managers divide work in the era of industrial Internet?

In my opinion, the products and operations under the industrial Internet should be based on cooperation first and then division of labor, so as to achieve the goal of improving efficiency through reform.

2. Rationally operate offline users and improve business processes

After completing the friendly transition from product to operation, the operations staff needs to further pass the product to the marketing staff. If the product does not perform well after launch, it means that the initial market research was not done well and accurate customers were not found. It does not help product managers convey product value to customers well.

So how do you promote product marketing to users, feedback users’ real voices to operations, and understand sales bottlenecks?

First learn to combine "online" and "offline".

How to combine them can be achieved in two steps.

1. From offline to online. This process includes three important steps: preliminary research, customer service feedback, and operational feedback.
2. From online to offline. The process includes sales "stuck point analysis", product manual production and online training.

1) Preliminary research

Strictly speaking, research on industrial Internet products must be market research rather than simple user research. Product managers need to sort out business processes through industry analysis, product evaluation, data mining and other methods. The research results need to reveal the current status of business processes, bottlenecks in business processes, how the product is positioned, and what is ultimately expected to be achieved.

2) Customer service feedback

Gather user feedback, that is, feedback from people who actually use your product.

In the feedback process of some industrial Internet products, customer service acts as a docking role. After the demand feedback is received, it will be directly connected to the technical staff, which can greatly improve efficiency. But I don't recommend this approach. All feedback is gathered in the hands of the product manager, who then filters it in depth before iterating. This is the only way to continuously strengthen product managers' judgment of the business and customers. An excellent industrial Internet product manager must have very good front-line practical experience and be able to know the user's pain points at the first time.

3) Operational feedback

Manage front-line sales and telemarketing personnel, promote sales and telemarketing to guide real users. After completing the three things from offline to online, you then need to complete the three steps from online to offline, which are sales "stuck" point analysis, product manual production, and online training.

4) Sales “stuck” points

In the first chapter of this book, we mentioned that the ultimate value of industrial Internet products is to help business operators make more money, or improve efficiency and reduce costs. The products of the Industrial Internet are mainly aimed at solving the needs of “organizations” and realizing the “commercial value” of enterprises.

Therefore, companies must ultimately realize value through sales, and sales volume is directly related to the company's profits. If after the product (system) is launched, there are some scenarios and functions that are not convenient for sales and use, which are sales "stuck" points. We need to give explanations and solutions from the perspective of product design and provide friendly instructions for sales.

The solution itself is an abstraction of the product. Designing solutions means designing the product itself, which is also a process of demand analysis, business research, business diagnosis and analysis, product design, and product planning. How to express the system's language in a language that people can understand and see is also a difficulty and challenge in the design of industrial Internet products.

5) Product manual

From an operational perspective, we organize documents on how users can use system functions step by step. Before releasing a new version, the product manager discusses application scenarios and product value descriptions with the customer success and marketing departments. The marketing department upgrades sales tools, and the customer success department improves usage scenarios and customer use cases.

• Core functional points
• Key points
• Learning Video (Dynamic)
• Recorded audio instruction video based on product manual

The marketing department provides training to the sales team on new versions based on product value and application scenarios. There is no need for a complete operational demonstration (the more complex the product, the less necessary it is). Instead, the marketing department should focus on several core customer application scenarios to convey product value rather than functionality to sales representatives.

6) Online training

After completing internal customer success training, in addition to value delivery, the functional and operational aspects still need to be retained. Because they need to help customers solve operational problems.

Author: Xiao Q talks about products

Source: Xiao Q Chats About Products