The forefront | held a ten-year review conference for customers to release a new growth methodology for B2B enterprises

Author | Deng Yongyi

Edit | Su Jianxun

36Kr learned that recently, the 2022 conference was held in Beijing. At the meeting, with the theme of ""Meet Again, New Sharing", the customers reviewed the ten years of entrepreneurship, and also released new brand positioning, image, and new growth methodologies for new B2B enterprises, further upgrading the "connected CRM" strategy.

Luo Xu, founder and CEO of The Company

We are the earliest batch of CRM SaaS startups in China. Since its establishment, We have experienced the evolution from an enterprise social collaboration platform to a connected CRM, and have also undergone several transformations during the period.

At present, The Company mainly targets the medium and large enterprise market, providing a B2B2C omni-channel marketing business platform to connect sales and marketing to the later stage of customer and partner management. Since 2016, the strategic transformation of the sales customer has been positioned in the direction of CRM in the large market in the To B field, and a series of strategic transformation investments have begun since then.

Locate the connected CRM, not Salesforce in China

The digitalization of Chinese enterprises has gone through more than three decades. Since 2010, a new wave of To B entrepreneurship has come, and CRM is the first batch of tracks to develop.

However, although many manufacturers have entered the CRM industry, it is difficult to avoid becoming an outsourcing service provider for large enterprises in the end. This also forces a new generation of SaaS service providers to think about what kind of CRM can meet the needs of current domestic enterprises - SaaS companies in the domestic To B field, starting from the free customer acquisition in the small and medium-sized enterprise market, and then targeting medium and large enterprises, behind which is the exploration of the domestic To B field for a long time.

Luo Xu, founder and CEO of The Company, said that with the continuous deepening of the process of enterprise capabilities and socialization, the company's business has crossed from management-driven to customer-driven, and now it has reached the stage of digital value-driven.

"From the macro trend of the industrial Internet, we found that the marketing management of all walks of life is no longer the internal process management in the narrow sense, but the full-link value management from the production end, the process end to the final retail terminal." Luo Xu said.

At the specific product level, the biggest feature of the "connected CRM" that enjoys customers is to transform the CRM from a traditional closed management tool into an open and connected digital business platform.

Internally, CRM has become the core platform for internal collaboration - R&D, marketing, service and other internal departments and marketing departments collaborate based on this. Externally, enterprises are also based on CRM to connect with partners, customers, services and even hardware to achieve internal and external business and information integration.

In 2016, after determining the strategy of connected CRM, The Company expanded from SaaS downwards and began to build its own PaaS platform.

For the target market of customers - large and medium-sized enterprises, the enterprise volume is large, the business is complex and changeable, the personalized needs are many, and the requirements for heterogeneous system integration are extremely high, and the construction of the PaaS platform lays the foundation for serving these customers.

The establishment of paaS basic capabilities enables the upper saaS to quickly have functions including low-level enterprise user management, role and permission management, etc. In addition, the PaaS layer also allows customers to quickly develop through code-level development, realize complex scenarios, and adapt to a variety of terminals.

New B2B growth flywheel

At the press conference, the company also released the latest "B2B growth flywheel" theory.

The macro and micro environments faced by B2B companies have changed significantly. Gao Yan, CMO of The CMO and President of the B2B New Growth Institute, said: "On the one hand, the consumer-grade Internet has become a thing of the past, and the era of explosive growth is over. On the other hand, the extensive growth of the industry has become a thing of the past, a sign is the disappearance of traffic dividends, the original effect of the good customer acquisition channel to the present, the average customer acquisition cost has risen by at least 20% or even 50%, the traffic is expensive, the high cost of customer acquisition has become normalized. ”

Therefore, in the era of stock management, enterprises will gradually move towards lean growth. The core concept of the B2B growth flywheel, which enjoys customers, is "based on differentiated value, it can act on the end customer and grow towards the whole value chain". These include four key points:

New growth has a very clear underlying logic;

The new growth is lean growth;

The new growth is the growth of digital intelligence;

New growth is sustainable growth.

However, in order to achieve refined operation, there are still many pain points, such as efficiently connecting potential customers and promoting conversion; improving the efficiency of online automated transactions; how to effectively connect manufacturers/service providers/customers.

In this regard, The Company also provides three types of products that are connected to customers - marketing communication, ordering pass and service pass. In addition, the other two products of the various customers, the Visiting Sales Pass and the Agent Pass, are oriented to the channel distribution model and the channel agent model respectively.

Based on this, The Company has established an industrialized strategic core that can solve the problems faced by enterprises in different industries. Take the visit to sales operations, for example, which is one of the core scenarios of the FMCG industry. Many enterprises regard visiting sales as the attendance of staff, and instead of achieving the goal of connecting terminal sales points and pulling up sales, they have brought some secondary management problems.

In the face of this problem, Zhang Rui, vice president of FMCG & Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Division, said, "We have changed our perspective and built the "Visiting Sales" product from the perspective of system landing and business landing. Through performance-driven, "Visiting Sales" can effectively enhance the subjective initiative of front-end sales personnel and further promote sales growth. ”

For multi-organization enterprises, The Company also offers a "1+N" solution. 1+N is divided into two levels, one is the group's multi-organization 1+N solution - to help the group headquarters and its subordinate multiple subsidiaries, multiple business units for digital connection, as well as upstream and downstream business collaboration and management. The second category focuses on the industrial chain, helping enterprises and downstream industrial chain partners to digitally connect.

In different scenarios, the improvement of technology on efficiency is obvious. Taking AI image intelligent recognition technology as an example, in the FMCG industry, in the industrial chain of a large FMCG enterprise customer, more than 20,000 employees are responsible for terminal store work every day. Through the application of AI technology, each day can reduce the working time of 30 minutes to 1 hour for each person, which is equivalent to saving 20,000 hours a day for the entire industry chain of the enterprise.

At present, in the regional layout, there are branches in 12 cities, and the ecology, marketing, sales and channel cooperation in the region are implemented in an integrated strategy. In the near future, The 8.0 product will also be released, and it will continue to invest in the product and market thereafter.