B2E-Business to Everyone
The hybrid between B2B and B2C. #MWCWork #MWCWORK
The concepts of B2B are outdated and so are the concepts of B2C — so while we’re changing our views, as this pandemic has changed our lives, let us also take a pause and think about the idea of B2E — Business to Everyone — for we have more in common than we do in difference.
I was sitting in my well-ornamented Covid ‘war room’, also known as my home office, drinking a coffee with a splash of Kahlua while fielding a call with my colleague Steven.
After designing and prototyping the product, we were now tasked with creating a go-to-market plan for it, and there were differing thoughts.
As a preface, I was always somewhat adverse to simply labeling anything as “B2B” or “B2C”.
It was here, working on this go-to-market strategy that I realized we had these marketing puzzle pieces but they weren’t fitting as they likely did before.
The marketing puzzle was broken, and I felt it needed to be rethought.
For years, a decade-plus and counting, the company had relied almost entirely on traditional enterprise ‘B2B’ sales pipelines. A process that involves a point of contact, a statement of work, initial payment by the client, delivery of a tailor-made product to the client, the deployment of some sort of professional services, then continuously ensuring that the licenses recur, (and more) every year.
When they say jump, it feels like we do exactly that.
Something that always bothered me — for we had our own convictions and vision, and often, perhaps naively, I viewed the clients as a deterrent from reaching our own vision and sticking to our internal conviction, which to me would allow us to be limitless while leaning towards subscription-based, powerful, useful products with an elegant interface and a rich UX.
Not restricting myself to subscription-based models, as there are many and this isn’t about the business models — I like products that are easy to use.
Take Stripe Atlas for example, where I can start my own C-Corp and essentially manage the fundamentals of my company from one user-friendly web application.
Or you can simply download an app from the App Store.
Or simply download this zip file and get moving.
Or go to a web app, sign in securely, and start working.
Imagine how you use Adobe Creative Cloud — maybe you’re using it already — and you get hired to a new company, and you have to use it there, so you get your license expensed. At the end of the day, Adobe is still pitching it to you, as a consumer, to unleash your inner creativity.
Adobe has its flaws, but overall — I love it.
I, therefore, wanted our products to emulate what I loved. If I loved this, then I knew there had to be others like me out there that would love this too, because after all, we have more in common than we do indifference.
Despite my bias, even to me, there is a fundamental underlying beauty with the B2B sales pipeline that I would be reminisced not to mention.
My opinion aside, for the company, Boardwalktech, Inc. ($BWLK), this is what we’ve excelled at. And although they sat on many crucial patents that could easily coalesce into a SaaS web, native, or even mobile application, the idea of abandoning that critical Enterprise B2B stream of revenue is unthinkable — until we designed and built Unity Central, which is what the aforementioned go-to-market strategy was for.
Let’s bookmark that for a second because this B2B enterprise stream is also something that is endearing to investors, management, our bottom line, and the nine yards.
The ability to continuously recur enterprise deals, with companies like Coke, Heineken, Levi’s, and 27+ other Fortune 500 companies is no easy task.
I tip my hat.
The sales pipeline might be long. Very long, especially from my POV, as a 30-year-old millennial, born in Boston, raised in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, and have therefore generally gravitated to subscription-based models for quick, easy, and user-rich applications and experiences.
No one ever cold-called, emailed, or pinged me on LinkedIn to get me to start using those products.
I started using those products as a “consumer within an enterprise” if you will.
I do work for a company, whether it’s my own company or otherwise, but I am and I always will be a consumer.
So therefore if there is an application out there that can help me do my job better, I will give it a shot.
If I can spend an hour in the morning investing and researching the stock market instead of two hours because of Robinhood, well that has a positive outcome that affects the rest of my day.
Enter the Slack example.
Slack’s story is well-documented, but for those of you who don’t know, the story roughly goes like this: A couple of engineers built Slack for a video game they were playing, and they used the different ‘channels’ in Slack for separate guilds and different topics within the game.
It eventually got into the hands of someone trying to start or run a business, and the people behind Slack saw an opportunity, and some years later, Slack is listed as $WORK, on the New York Stock Exchange and is competing fiercely with Microsoft Teams and Google Suite.
The three main takeaways from this are:
a.) The developers of Slack had the conviction to build something for themselves. If you build something for yourself, you do it better and there is a high likelihood that someone else will find it valuable.
b.) They never, at least in the beginning, had any B2B sales pipelines. You simply downloaded Slack for free, and as you uploaded more data or invited more users, friends, or colleagues, you’d simply have to pay for the data or seats.
From the get-go, the process was not complicated.
c.) They integrated with enterprise and consumer applications, ranging from GitHub to Salesforce to Email. Depending on how you were using Slack. If it was for a business, you could easily have a channel with integrations to Salesforce, Github, AND email.
Eventually, they just came out with a free version, a startup subscription, a business subscription, and an enterprise version.
Slack is but one of many glory stories that I often think about when thinking about marketing. Where does the pulse of it all truly lie?
I was working for a company, in San Francisco. I had used Slack before at school, and I suggested to a colleague that we use it too, to sync up on thoughts and share files.
Before you know it, our entire team is using Slack. And when the project manager came in to check in and take the credit, which is often what happens with project managers, he realized, to remain relevant, he too needed to download and start using Slack.
Suddenly, the entire engineering squad was using Slack, and eventually the entire company.
In this case, I was the consumer in the enterprise.
Even advertisements are changing, to the point where most of the ADs I see are when I’m scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, or watching YouTube videos. Unless it’s the Superbowl, and with many people switching to Apple TVs, Disney Plus, etc., it’s going to require a lot more thought in regards to where you place those ADs.
I’ll just say it — in my heart of hearts, everything is business to consumer. Sometimes it just takes a more structured form, which we conventionally know as B2B and the prior as B2C. I encourage you to question that convention of thinking — or at least think about what I am posing.
With the prior two “Business to”s being defined — let’s define it as B2E or Business to Everyone.
So back to our go-to-market strategy in the making.
I believe I have established where I would likely be standing in this.
I was the one who advocated that we build this product, with use cases and consumers in mind, but ultimately “let’s build it for the entire population of this Mother Earth.” Yes, it is a software application, but the use cases in my mind could not be limited to our imagination alone. One of the most exciting things to watch is how people use a product in a way the creator could never have imagined.
The people don’t know what they want.
They want what they know. (Steve Jobs)
That applies to the creators of the product, and if we take that into account from a marketing standpoint, then I think we are better for it.
How much is a Twitter interaction worth — it’s terribly hard to quantify. It’s terribly hard to make the case, that hey, give me a budget of x to start promoting tweets.
You’re either of that world or your not.
But if we are talking B2E — and if you are in marketing, or in some form thereof, you must take it upon yourself to immerse yourself in these mediums.
People’s lives are based on quantitative results so unless your CEO is my age — screenshotting Twitter impressions isn’t going to cut it, so it’s a tough battle to win.
A common and traditional metric used to quantify the success of a campaign can be surmised as such: How many emails did you collect, how many emails did you send out, did you send them out the correct people in the right verticals, how many people opened the email, how many people clicked on the action button and proceeded?
That can be quantified.
Twitter, Instagram, even LinkedIn efforts are harder to quantify. Further still, they all have separate metric dashboards — so one would have to consolidate the metrics from each medium, including Medium itself.
So I did some digging. I want B2E to be something we did. Before anyone else could even put it into words. :)
I started trying to correlate the company stock price with the amount of time I spent engaging on social media and the content we were contributing to this ever-growing ecosystem of mediums that in some way or another, rely on each other.
(When I get done writing this, I will likely share it on Twitter!).
My findings were that there definitely was a discernable correlation between our engagement and contribution (via Blog, Video, etc) and the price of the stock.
I fool around with stocks all the time, and you know what will get me thinking about a new stock sometimes? A tweet about a stock that I’ve never heard of, that I then end up researching.
They all have their nuances.
What does a correlation between the stock price and the amount of time we spent engaging and contributing content to the ecosystem of mediums that in some way rely on one another?
Twitter lends itself to the brevity & democracy of people's voices.
Instagram lends itself to visualization and transparency.
LinkedIn lends itself to promoting one's self or a companies professionalism
Medium lends itself to an enclave for the written word. The audience is mostly writers themselves. People who appreciate the value of reading and learning.
So let’s embrace B2E! People in B2B sales frown on B2C, like a big brother frowning on a little brother.
But that is not the case anymore. Little brother has grown up. And the people making the calls in companies are suddenly millennials, not the baby boomers.
Rather than bicker amongst ourselves and have a pissing contest, why not meet in the middle, create a new definition, and embrace the fact that there are more many more people like me, where if you seed and market a product correctly, using the soft marketing tactic, as opposed to the old hard pitch, you can achieve the viral effect that, deep down, we are all looking for, while also ditching the headache that is the long sales cycle.
I’m not entirely sure that the client on the other end of a sales cycle wants to wait a year to receive their solution.
The line between B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) in marketing, and to a lesser extent, sales, is blurring, so get acquainted with Business to EVERYONE.
Give us a shot or two! Whether your poison is Whiskey or simply an old cup of joe!
Cheers,
Roh Krishnan
Product Strategy & Program Manager @Boardwalktech, Inc.
Host @infoloungepod / @genuinedraft_sf
Founder @Blackbird
