4 rules for To B operations

We have been operating private domain traffic for half a year and have encountered many pitfalls along the way. Let me share them with you.

1. Why do we operate private domain traffic on behalf of others?

1. 100 million in revenue, great potential

An investor once asked me a question: Among so many SaaS (software as a service) vendors, which one do you think is promising?

When the investor asked this question, we guessed that no one might have invested in the new WeChat for Enterprise project in the first half of the year, but everyone wanted to invest in the second half of the year, but there was no opportunity; therefore, there was a high probability that collective irrationality would occur.

For a To B (business-oriented) company, ultimately, we look at revenue; compared with Alibaba's Taobao agency operation ecosystem (which accounts for 25% of the entire e-commerce industry in China), the industrial Internetization of offline retail by WeChat for Business can be used as a tool to connect WeChat users in the future.

What are the possibilities of benchmarking e-commerce agency companies?

According to Tmall’s data, there are more than 1,000 certified small-scale operating agents and more than 80,000 “fake” ones; even for a small company like us, it is easy to achieve a revenue of 100 million, which means there is still much room for improvement.

2. Comprehensive and vertical agency operations

Looking at it from another perspective, the ideas of many current generation operating companies are mainly comprehensive and vertical.

The comprehensive type does everything, while the vertical type selects an industry to work in. We believe that the future will definitely belong to the vertical type.

For example, the water that everyone drinks is similar; but many industrial Internet or To B companies buy water, some for cancer treatment, some for electrolyte water needed by athletes, and some for purified water needed by patients; therefore, different vertical types are the future.

There is no good or bad in the current agency operations, but I personally prefer the vertical type.

Everyone has a strategy, not just in a certain link, but for the entire link or the entire platform; Tmall, JD.com, WeChat, etc., all platforms are involved. This is the development trend, and everyone is constantly crossing.

Including the upstream and downstream of the industry, after completing the agency operation, we will do supply chain, delivery, warehousing, brand marketing and positioning, and placement; the so-called "killing two birds with one stone", the development of the entire track is like this.

2. Obstacles to business expansion

1. Obstacle 1: Business expansion genetics

Many companies need genes when they start new businesses.

So, how do you grow this gene?

For example, when our company was doing new business, we were also very confused. We had been doing fission but not operation. What should we do next?

If we merge with a company in the market that is good at operations to form a joint venture, and we are only responsible for fission, attracting new customers, and signing orders with customers, is that okay?

But this made it difficult to integrate the styles of the entire team, so we ultimately decided to do it ourselves, and of course, we encountered many setbacks.

2. Obstacle 2: Dual-identity sales

Since we are an operations-driven company, we had no sales positions until May or June of this year.

Sales requires a more aggressive atmosphere and a more high-pressure rhythm, but after we completed the SOP (standard operating procedure), there was no strong sense of pressure, which resulted in a conversion rate of only 60%. If we are a little more ruthless and a little more assertive towards customers, I think the conversion rate can reach 80%.

There is nothing wrong with the process, but human nature will cause problems; now many e-commerce companies are recruiting private domain operation teams, storing users in personal accounts, and treating sales as customer service, resulting in unclear functions.

Our sales and customer service are separate. You can find customer service on Tmall or add customer service specifically, but this results in customer service not having a strong sense of ambition. Although the base salary is 2,800 and can be raised to 7,000 or even more than 10,000, they just don't have the drive.

3. Business Expansion Methodology

1. Full-case process for private domain

Standardize the processes. When you do these processes yourself in the future, just listen to more lectures and experience more other people's processes, and you will roughly know how to do it. There is nothing wrong with doing this logically. For example, when building a personal account, you also need to make choices.

For example, if I am selling food, if I am targeting family users, my persona can be an auntie or a mom who loves to cook, and the photos and content shared should be healthy, or I can share cooking tutorials; if I am targeting petty-bourgeois users, the content should focus more on lifestyle, and the photos should pay attention to the presentation.

2. Private Domain Team Configuration

Generally speaking, the people responsible for attracting new customers at the front end are event operators, with 10 sales people in the middle and user maintenance staff or community staff at the back.

But what is the key point?

When communicating with many companies, I found a very interesting phenomenon: some companies are technology-driven and have strong technical genes; some companies are operation-driven, such as our company; some companies are product-driven, such as Tencent, where product managers manage everything; some companies are sales-driven and market-driven; this is related to the company's core engine, or the market environment and competition in which it is located.

Taking P2P (person-to-person) as an example, it may be product-driven at the beginning and market-driven later; if all subsidies at the back end are the same, it may be asset-driven in the early stage and may become market-driven and sales-driven later.

At different stages, the same configuration may have different focus and voice.

3. One-to-one private chat sales skills

The standard sales speech process: there is "Version 1.0" formulated according to the links; "Version 2.0" formulated according to user psychology will be more detailed, with different sales speeches for new and old customers; "Version 3.0" is based on the previous CRM (customer management system) system, so the salesperson knows what the user portrait is like before chatting with him, which can enable better interaction.

Building a script library and a question library will be more convenient and faster. Compared with offline, we have always had this logic: to open an offline store, we used to need 10 sales people, but now we only need 5 sales people plus one online operation to achieve the same performance as before.

In the past, training 10 sales people would require two weeks of off-the-job training, and some companies would even need more than a month. If corporate WeChat is asynchronous, if the customer is not familiar with the product, he or she will not be able to answer the question, and the customer may be lost.

However, online operations can search for answers online, which is convenient for batch copying and sales. This is why many offline retail companies like to use WeChat for Business very much. On the one hand, it is because of the epidemic and there are no offline processes. On the other hand, resignation inheritance is a killer, and talent replication is faster.

As soon as the user comes in, we know how to place an order with the sales talk; through the first greeting, how to stimulate his interest, and how to build trust, our order placement rate for those who add them on the same day can reach 20%; another advantage of WeChat for Business is that it has the company logo, so at least the customer believes that you are not a scammer.

After building trust, interact more with customers, subtly ask about their needs, and see what they have bought; associate the items they have posted about their purchases to find out what combination will work best, complete the sale, and at the same time pull these users into the subsequent associations.

4. Private Domain User Tag System

Through the above methods, the labeling system can be better established.

The operation method just mentioned can greatly increase the repurchase rate; but many of the previous SOPs are processes. To be truly responsible for their execution and promotion, there must be a very strong team that constantly replicates them before they can be executed.

Otherwise, no matter how good or detailed the SOP is, the effect is only 60 points. If you want to go from 60 points to 90 points, you need to constantly emphasize it in the middle; like the sales schedule, how to hold morning meetings, how to submit orders every hour, how to hold review meetings, how to "force" everyone to work overtime, and how to set up a punishment mechanism.

But as far as I know, many Internet companies with a relatively relaxed and free atmosphere do not have these mechanisms, including our company; therefore, in order to extend a new culture, the entire set of mechanisms is very important.

Because when you experience other people's routines, it is easy to learn them, but the underlying organizational structure and team management methods are invisible; therefore, the key to determining victory or defeat lies in the ability to control the refined operation of the entire operation process.

SOP can be made very detailed and can quickly increase tension, because many times management is too loose and it is difficult to get things done.

We define sales as warriors and operations as mages. Sales is in the front, working closely with customers one-on-one to push the entire process forward. After attracting new customers, operations continuously iterates traffic planning and provides on-the-fly support. Everything that can be standardized will be standardized.

Because after standardization, many things can be reused, and a lot of information in any industry has an island effect; just like moving the American model to China and moving the Chinese industry to Southeast Asia, it is all because of these models and routines, and then continuing to expand.

5. Private Domain Traffic GMV Structure

In addition to the traditional teaching method, a better way for organizations to share and communicate is to brainstorm together; what is the industry gameplay, what can be applied to my industry, how to attract new customers, what positions the official account has, how to design coupons for offline stores, etc.

There is also a threshold for online distribution fission. Using this method can better improve the user fission rate and stimulate their offline users.

You can create a ranking list with an incentive mechanism. As long as users are scanned in, multiple people can get rewards. Previously, maybe only one or two thousand people were scanned in each week, but after the incentive, 30,000 or even 50,000 people can be scanned in.

By sorting out these processes, we can better increase traffic and then continue the sales discussion.

The same is true for community operation. Many people just wait until they are free to take care of customers after they join the group. However, we strictly define the purpose of creating a group before we create it. For example, after adding paid customers to the group, we associate different sales scripts with them. For non-paying users, we guide them to try to lower their average order value, or sell out their products in the group in seconds to create a sense of urgency and increase the average order value.

Users know what the group is for the moment they join the group, instead of having to wait until they join to be told the purpose of the group. Different groups have different positioning.

The same goes for check-in groups. We organize check-ins based on the users. For example, for a product from P&G, as long as you check in for 14 days, you can get something as a gift.

Why punch in? What to do on the first day? What to do the next day? Where is the implant conversion?

If you embed the product at the very beginning, users will think you are advertising; but after they have established trust with you and know the effectiveness of your product, you can then propose group buying at an appropriate time.

Why do short-selling institutions set up so many groups and use the same rhetoric? It is because some internet trolls are necessary.

Because once you scale up, you will need these robots for batch conversions; without these things, you won’t be able to achieve the herd effect.

When we calculate the GMV structure of private domain traffic, as long as we see a QR code, we will send it to the group to experience how others do the front-end, mid-end, and back-end; there will always be someone who does a better job than you in a certain link, so we will learn from the strengths of all parties.

The measurement process, such as the number of users of the package and the conversion rate of the community, are all standardized routines. You just need to follow this idea; but more about the core, even if we have seen how others do it, we still need to go through the process ourselves.

4. Private Domain Traffic Experience

1. Screening people by goods

In the past, social e-commerce was about “finding people with goods”, building emotional connections with customers by selling lifestyles or warmth; but later it was discovered that after segmenting the population, as long as trust was established, everything could be sold to users.

• The “service” of P&G Meta Fiber Powder is used as an entry point to increase frequency and repeat purchases: P&G’s products themselves cannot be subsidized, but repeat purchases can be quickly increased through the WeChat group service.
• The popular product "Children's Story Machine" serves as a traffic entrance for mother users: after the children's story machine is sold, the user scans the code to establish a connection, and then pushes educational and family content to these parent users, such as Yuanfudao.
• The popular product "meal replacement/probiotics" serves as a traffic entrance for users: through weight loss meal replacement, young white-collar workers who have the need for body management are screened out, and may also have the need for hair transplantation in the future, and the demand will continue to emerge.

I once talked with a friend who planned out a woman's life needs starting from marriage and having children, and kept selling different things.

Online marketing is essentially the same as arms trading. Wherever there is war, there is profit. The profit from selling a product is only a dozen yuan, and the payment period for logistics and platforms is generally 14 or 30 days.

If you are collecting advertising fees, many educational companies are even willing to pay in advance. If you use this method, you don’t need to wait for the payment to arrive. The payment period can even be reduced from 30 days to 0 days.

Therefore, it is reasonable to "screen people by goods".

2. Circle effect

Develop an SOP for operating the circle of friends, label each friend with different tags, and refine the operation; the reason for doing this is to build trust.

How many posts to post every day, at what time to post, and what to do after posting should all be designed in advance; send a seven-day script to new users, and with the support of brand content, trust can be established faster; the same applies to social networks and video accounts, which are essentially content.

In the past, the content of Moments was all text-based; now, Video Account is Tencent’s most important project, and it can directly distribute products from JD.com and Dangdang.

In fact, it is easier to convey trust in the form of video; the reason why we must use video is because of the evolution of information storage methods; this also includes the details page. The current H5 is a static picture, but it will be dynamic in the future, because this will be able to convey information more richly and efficiently.

The one that has truly taken advertising commercialization to the extreme is TikTok. When people see ads in their friends’ circle, they will quickly scroll past them and they cannot be consumed, which forces the output format of videos. It also has a circle effect, and users' likes can bring very precise circle traffic.

3. Leverage linkage and distribution fission

"Private domain" is the leverage of "public domain" and "fission" is the leverage of "private domain".

There are many cosmetics companies in Longgang that have made hundreds of millions of dollars, and they only work in the private domain and do not do other brands; Perfect Diary, which does both branding and private domain, can make billions of dollars; Haidilao, which does all three, can make tens of billions of dollars.

Therefore, we think that the link from a single point to the entire lever and the entire linkage is more important.

There are various ways to play with fission, including linking the delivery with corporate WeChat. Many people previously thought that the traffic brought by receiving red envelopes was rubbish, but if the red envelopes are received as novice benefits, the effect brought is very good; if fission is added, the advertising cost is 100 yuan per person, and after fission, it is far more cost-effective than paying more advertising fees on the platform.

4. Private Domain Sales Strategy

Regarding different frequencies and who is suitable for private domain, everyone has his or her own answer.

But if I were Party A, no matter what I did, I would have to do private domain and change the user's connection point from offline to online. If I were Party B, I would definitely give priority to products such as food with high gross margins, high penetration rates, and high repurchase rates.

So no matter what you do, this is a trend.

Last year, we changed the name of the "Marketing Department" to the "Content Middle Platform Department"; whether it is Moments, Video Accounts, or content posted on offline summits and airport advertisements, they are all forms of connecting and interacting with users, and we call all of this the "Content Middle Platform."

All our customers are acquired through the operation matrix, not through rebates or other means; therefore, we are a private domain operation company, and we have built ourselves into this type of company by operating our customers using a private domain approach.

We keep thinking, is its essence time?

All the gameplay we do requires constant innovation, and changes almost every month; but WeChat continues to launch new carriers, launching Enterprise WeChat in 2019 and Video Account in 2020, changing every one or two years.

Therefore, everyone has to think about how to study user psychology; whether it is operations or sales, its essence is to study the ability to mobilize user emotions.

Author: Jian Feng

Source: Operational In-depth Selection