B-side, the most effective way to acquire customers

Customer acquisition has always been a top priority in an enterprise. Both ToC and ToB have the need to acquire customers, but the methods of acquiring customers are completely different. The B-side customer acquisition method is relatively simple and effective.

I received questions from a friend about my old company. The questions were that the numbers in the promotional content were picked out and calculated by someone, and I always felt that the numbers were exaggerated. After two years of rapid development at my old company, this number is indeed not a problem for us.

In the process of doing B-side business in the past two years, I applied a lot of C-side operation skills; combined with our current customer acquisition methods, I think this matter can be viewed dialectically.

I have previously written an article about B2B customer acquisition methods, and that article is still useful. However, I now feel more intuitively that the B-side operating methods have many similarities with the C-side, but there are big differences in the conversion process.

Moreover, in the previous customer acquisition logic, especially for small B customers, I applied a lot of customer acquisition skills; today I will review a commonly used and effective customer acquisition method in the ToB field, and sort out the common skills for your reference.

I think the way to acquire B-end customers, the B-end here mainly refers to small B-end customers, and private projects worth millions or tens of millions, are basically impossible to acquire customers through Internet channels.

Let me tell you a joke here. Do you know which product is the biggest competitor of China's CRM? Moutai; So, you can savor it carefully and see why China’s big projects are difficult to obtain through Internet channels.

Currently, the most effective way to acquire customers on the B-side is big search, without a doubt; SEM and SEO in big search are essential channels for companies, and companies with funds generally invest in SEM, while some customers who are unwilling to spend money like to do SEO; from my observation, some technology companies pay more attention to SEM, while some traditional companies pay more attention to SEO; SEO work is hard for many highly educated people, and technology companies prefer people with high education, so the SEO of most technology companies is not effective.

I never recommend that ToB products put information flow in, because the essence of information flow is active push, there is no way to judge the demand intention of users who read the advertisements, and the company's transaction process is very long, this method is difficult to reach the needs of effective users; and users who come in through big search have obvious intentions and can obtain valuable MQLs; as for conversion, it is another routine. There are many SCRMs on the market. Operators can score users according to user behavior and tags. Different operation strategies can be adopted for users with different scores. In essence, it is to solve the user conversion problem; and I think there can be better solutions for user conversion, but they have not been shared yet.

Another effective method besides big search: telemarketing.

Some managers of ToB technology companies feel that their companies are too high-end to adopt this relatively low-level approach. After being verified by countless companies, this is still a relatively effective approach; however, this approach has a prerequisite, that is, the product must be a general enterprise product and can help customers obtain leads or make money. Otherwise, it will be difficult to impress users in a short period of time.

1. Source of clues

1. Cross-industry exchange

Most of the companies that telemarketing can contact are micro-small companies. As for the sources of customer leads for telemarketing, there are many sources. Although the state has expressly prohibited the buying and selling of customer data, the leads brought by cross-industry exchanges are still prevalent in many industries.

The sales team needs to attract the customer's attention within 1 minute. You may think that making phone calls is a sales matter and has nothing to do with operations. Wrong!

Operations need to output valuable benefit points for sales. Relying on the benefit points extracted by sales themselves is always a bit lacking.

In addition, operations staff also need to empower sales staff to use products and solve business problems. It is best to record these contents in the form of internal documents to help new sales staff quickly refine the selling points of the product.

2. Internet access

Obtaining sales leads through Internet channels should be the forte of operations personnel. There are so many channels on the Internet, and the main source of leads is bidding; you can also expand content channels, such as Zhihu, Toutiao, etc. If the company has the resources to invest, you can also publish some news sources.

You can also get some customer leads by sending information in forums, etc.

Adding a download button for high-quality white papers on the website can increase the conversion rate of the official website and thus extract relevant business opportunities.

There are also some customer acquisition software on the Internet that can capture some leads from B2B websites.

No matter where the leads are obtained from, the best way to manage them is to score them based on the leads. During the repeated communication process when calling customers, you can invite them to participate in online salons and offline activities. Through multiple communications, you can convert customers into potential customers and promote transactions.

When I was working for my old company, I mainly relied on two methods of acquiring customers: the first was forums, and the second was cross-industry cooperation. The users acquired in this way cannot be called pure ToB users. Only when the product has the ToC gene can this method of acquiring customers be adopted.

3. Operation

Although telemarketing is a low-cost method, some companies rely on it to achieve an annual transaction volume of more than 20 million yuan; telemarketing leads mostly come from purchases, which is a relatively slow way to obtain them by yourself, and the value is not necessarily higher than leads obtained from others. Companies that survive on telemarketing always have channels to obtain high-value customer leads.

However, my products have no way to obtain effective value clues from the market. Due to the precision of the crowd and the characteristics of the Internet, it is more direct and effective to acquire users through the Internet. So I tried to introduce users to the products through forums and cross-industry cooperation, and through operation manuals and data analysis, I screened out some worthless users and focused more on high-value users.

By posting on forums, we brought in several hundred trial users, and through cross-industry cooperation, we brought in more than 20,000 users, and ultimately paid over ten thousand yuan in fees in the channel.

Cross-industry cooperation should follow the following three characteristics:

1) Similarity of products

Cross-industry cooperation should choose products with similar user groups and operating habits, and integrate the products well based on the problem-solving capabilities of both products.

The learning cost for users is lower when using new products or switching to new products, and the functional integration of products can solve the same type of problems for users and extend the front and back, which is helpful to both parties' products and users.

2) Product universality

If the user group of a product is very narrow, it will be troublesome to find a suitable product, and it is very likely that you will not be able to find a suitable product.

Moreover, niche products have already met the niche needs of users, and it is unlikely that they will be able to extend the front-end and back-end solutions.

3) People’s willingness to try new products

Users of Internet products have a natural liking for new products and are willing to try new products to solve current problems, but the learning cost of new products cannot be too high.

There are also some users of products who are not interested in new products, especially B-side products, the learning cost is relatively high. If the crowd has a certain degree of inertia, it will be difficult to do a good job of migrating the crowd.

There are many ways to acquire B-side users, including conventional Internet channels and traditional online marketing channels. By following the principle of “where the users are, the operations are there”, B-side users can be acquired more efficiently.

Regardless of the method used to acquire customers, the conversion path on the B-side will be very long and the conversion cost will be very high. This is one of the reasons why some SCRM companies are developing rapidly.

Author: Zhang Mu

Source: Operations Officer Zhang Mu