"In the future, Made in China will compete with suppliers from all over the world for orders from all over the world, and it will be necessary to compete for digital capabilities, business capabilities, design capabilities, and product capabilities...... Be sure to spend enough energy in these places instead of overcoming language barriers and researching various foreign trade rules. Xiaoman's goal is to use AI to lower the threshold of foreign trade. ”
This year is the 11th anniversary of the establishment of Xiaoman Technology, and at the AI upgrade conference of its OKKI products, Yang Yuan, CEO of Xiaoman Technology, officially released the OKKI series products after the comprehensive upgrade of AIGC technology, and had an in-depth dialogue with the on-site media for more than an hour.
Founded in 2013, Xiaoman Technology was the first to enter the vertical market segment of foreign trade with email marketing and customer relationship management functions. Different from the local deployment mode of mainstream enterprise software at that time, Xiaoman Technology greatly reduced the cost of CRM products in the SaaS model, and quickly captured its first batch of foreign trade enterprise customers.
In the following years, based on the foreign trade business scenario, Xiaoman Technology successively released the big data products "Xiaoman Discovery" and "Xiaoman Marketing". In 2019, the Xiaoman brand was officially renamed OKKI, and its services were iteratively extended to the full life cycle management of customers.
In 2020, Xiaoman Technology received hundreds of millions of yuan in Series D financing from Alibaba; At the end of 2021, Xiaoman was wholly acquired by Alibaba. The acquisition provided Xiaoman with more resources and channels, and its customers and revenue scale have once again achieved substantial growth.
If you can't change the general environment, you can only "evolve" yourself
Q1. What changes have taken place in the foreign trade industry in the past two years?
Yang Yuan: Sellers are generally more anxious now, because everyone finds that the demand for overseas markets has changed, and the original procurement chain may have changed.
The original buyer group is relatively certain, that is, a group of people who come to OEM and find large orders. In recent years, the supply chain is sufficient, the information flow and infrastructure are becoming more and more perfect, and the development of overseas Internet celebrity economy has led many online retailers to skip the big buyers and come directly to buy. Many foreign trade merchants are accustomed to the way they used to serve large customers, and now they have to adapt to a variety of customers and their diversified needs.
In addition, the supply-side competition is becoming more and more fierce, the technology is developed, and many people who do domestic trade and retail have also joined the foreign trade industry. We judge that starting from 2022, going overseas will enter a concentrated outbreak period in the next five years. A typical feature is that more and more giants are entering the field of foreign trade. Many businesses may achieve great growth in this round of overseas explosion, or they may be left behind because of competition. How to face this round of competition is a common challenge we are facing.
Q2. How will small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises find overseas markets in the future?
Yang Yuan: Today, we have a large number of low-margin industries in China, and as long as they are low-margin industries, they will encounter the problem of difficulty in acquiring customers when competing overseas. We see that China's low-margin products are dominated by clothing, which is also the industry that has been transferred to Southeast Asia and South Asia the most.
This is definitely not just a problem that can be solved with OKKI products, but a systematic project. For example, can he make a product with a premium. One path is to make a premium through the brand; Another path is to expand the category and provide a complete set of solutions to the original customer base, thereby generating a premium.
Some of our tools, including some tools of the international site, can help him analyze the needs of buyers more and better undertake the needs of buyers. But we are a necessary and insufficient condition, and with us we may not be able to solve all of his problems, but without such tools, it may be more difficult to solve them.
Q3. AI has greatly improved the efficiency of the supply side of foreign trade, and the competitiveness of merchants in the future will be more reflected in the demand side?
Yang Yuan: On the demand side, it's hard to say which form of trade is right, for example, TEMU and SHEIN are necessarily right today? Not necessarily. Today there are so many dividends that you can roll them at will, and the last time this happened was in the United States in the 20s of the last century, this is the dividend of the times.
It is uncertain which will be the best marketing method for overseas markets in the future, but a few things are certain:
First, whether you can have enough understanding of overseas buyers;
Second, whether it can fully integrate China's supply chain advantages, there are many people who have this ability;
Third, whether we can fully integrate the marketing and operation infrastructure in the intermediate process, which we Chinese are also very strong.
Therefore, as long as these three sections are integrated well, it will have strong competitiveness. The difficulty is that these three elements are often constantly changing. But how each element will change in the future, we can't be sure.
Integrating AI into OKKI isn't about making money with this feature
Q4. Xiaoman has upgraded the OKKI series of products with AI, what functions have been "upgraded"?
Yang Yuan: Since last year, we have put forward a set of digital business methodologies to help small and medium-sized foreign trade merchants increase their traffic, add value to overseas customers, and increase management efficiency. Focusing on this set of methodology, we have done a round of comprehensive combing of all Xiaoman's products. In December last year, we launched the trial version of OKKI, and first launched AI-assisted communication in small languages and AI review salesman communication.
This year, OKKI's products have been further upgraded, from AI single-point applications to full-scenario and multi-role applications, so that all aspects of the entire foreign trade can become more efficient due to AI intelligent upgrades.
Use AI to search for leads and launch marketing across the web
The upgraded OKKI is equipped with an AI-automated marketing system, which can help you find customer personas for business opportunities and launch marketing to these potential buyers based on the categories you operate.
In the past, most salesmen manually wrote development letters, and then sent emails and text messages to introduce products and the strength of merchants to potential buyers. Now we have an AI development letter assistant, which can quickly generate and optimize development letters according to the marketing rules set by the salesman, and the salesman can easily see the messages sent by the AI to all sellers, the number of contacts, and the number of views in the OKKI workbench.
Use AI to automate customer onboarding and facilitate communication
How to turn foreign trade inquiries into truly valuable orders? In response to the pain points in the process of foreign trade operation reception and transformation, OKKI has launched two functions: AI automatic reception and AI-assisted communication. Through AI-powered automatic reception, merchants can quickly respond to buyers' inquiries from any time zone in the world at any time period, and ensure that the replies are professional and in line with foreign trade business requirements. The AI-assisted communication function can proactively identify the stage of each buyer, and give the merchant a more targeted strategy and speech to better reply to the buyer.
Xiaoman Technology has been deeply engaged in the field of foreign trade for 11 years, serving 250,000 foreign trade salesmen and managers, we can split the foreign trade negotiation link into a number of small links, according to the different problems of each link, to give a relatively intelligent solution, which is the precipitation of our past experience.
Today, we provide you with an AI-based panorama of the customer's private domain, as long as you open OKKI, you can see the key progress of each customer, let you focus on following up on your key things to do, and help you sort out your schedule and make a good work arrangement.
Use AI to assist managers in communicating and reviewing salesmen
Foreign trade business managers have a very important responsibility, that is, to assist and improve the performance of salesmen, one of the very important tasks is to do one-to-one business communication review, to help foreign trade salesmen find the optimization space in the process of negotiation.
One of the key functions of OKKI is communication and quality inspection, through AI intelligent analysis, it can help foreign trade managers quickly understand which employees, which links have what problems, what kind of improvements need to be made for this link, and coach these salesmen to improve their performance in a targeted manner. This feature eliminates a large part of the repetitive work of managers.
Use AI data analysis to assist business and decision-making
How a foreign trade enterprise can accurately identify problems from a large amount of daily business data is very painful for every foreign trade boss. And in many non-first- and second-tier cities, it is difficult to recruit a data analytics professional based on business category and store situation. In response to this pain point, we have developed AI-based data analysis capabilities.
For example, in the past, when we wanted to analyze the situation of each sales channel, we first had to find the delivery budget of all channels, and then count the budget delivered through these channels in the CRM, how much performance was brought by them, and if we wanted to analyze the repurchase rate, we also had to find out all the past transaction data and analyze them one by one. Today, through OKKI's AI management analysis function, you only need to input a paragraph of text to get the relevant business data results of the entire store in a few seconds, which greatly liberates the energy of business managers in calculating, statistical, and analyzing these problems. Bosses can understand the business situation anytime and anywhere, and grasp the coping strategy.
Q5. How does the AI intelligent version of OKKI do market education, and what is the feedback from customers on AI functions?
Yang Yuan: China's cross-border merchants are very hardworking and willing to embrace new things, and they have a very high desire for smarter and more convenient products. So the most difficult thing for us is not how to BD, but how to make the product well.
OKKI had a hellish ramp-up in the early days, and the first version of the AI product looked good and didn't work well. How to ensure that the model understands the knowledge of the foreign trade industry, understands the logic behind the business, and the different laws and regulations of various countries, it is very difficult for salesmen to learn, and it is equally difficult for machines to understand. We want to domesticate AI to do things within the framework of the foreign trade industry, which takes a lot of time and energy.
For AI products, we have two North Star metrics, one is usage and the other is adoption. The usage rate refers to how many people use it, and the adoption rate refers to the answers and suggestions given by the AI, and how many people think it is OK. For example, if the AI writes a development letter, it is useless to write it in a flashy manner, and the customer finally adopts it. At the beginning, the adoption rate of our AI-generated development letters was 30%-40%, which is almost unusable, but now the adoption rate is about 70%-80%, and each letter can be used with a slight change. The usage rate of AI products has basically stabilized at around 80%.
Now that OKKI's AI products have reached the stage of large-scale promotion, about 20% of customers do not use it, but for the 80% who are willing to use it, how to make the products and functions meet their needs is the difficulty.
Q6. Among the several AI application modules that OKKI has upgraded, which one has the greatest potential for commercialization?
Yang Yuan: In fact, the digitization rate of the foreign trade B2B industry is much lower than that of retail e-commerce, and from a commercial point of view, we are not actually trying to make AI tools sell more, but thinking about using AI to let customers who did not use digital tools use our products, which is our biggest dividend. Therefore, we will focus more on how to lower the barrier to entry for using products through AI, so that the more than 800,000 people who don't use digital products can try OKKI. From this point of view, the current lowest barrier to use is AI marketing tools and OKKI products, and website builders may be a little higher.
Q7. What is the pricing trend of Xiaoman products?
Yang Yuan: If we only talk about the AI part, we are a small company, and it is impossible not to think about break-even and returns. So our pricing at the beginning is a price that is not too outrageous, and later according to the decrease in costs, part of the price of AI will slowly go down.
However, the price of OKKI's entire product will not be this trend, because the value provided by the entire product will become more and more abundant as it is iterated and maintained every year. Overseas, an 8% annual increase in SaaS products is a common business practice, and the Chinese market may not have this practice, and we may also adjust prices more modestly.
Plagiarism in AI applications is difficult and may not catch up for a lifetime
Wang Ming, general manager of DingTalk Open Platform, believes that the difficulty of AI plagiarism is far greater than that of product functions, and companies like Xiaoman have achieved the combination of large models to truly generate value.
"Today you want to make a low-illusion, usable application with a huge black box in it, and you probably won't be able to catch up for a lifetime, unless one day, the capabilities of the big model itself have developed to the point where you don't need to combine specific industry experience and some engineering things. As I mentioned earlier, OKKI's AI features have an adoption rate of about 80%, which combines a lot of know-how and various capabilities. ”
Q8. What is the moat for Xiaoman Technology to make AI products?
Yang Yuan: Every one of us who does SaaS is facing the fate of being copied, especially the head, the retail industry, the foreign trade industry, and the enterprise industry, we are all "wind breakers", and the people who rush to the front will inevitably bear greater resistance, as long as it is very difficult to innovate, but it is relatively easy for others to plagiarize you.
What is the moat at our core? From a business point of view, it is a scale effect, and from a customer point of view, it is a brand effect. Xiaoman Technology may be the company with the highest R&D investment in this industry, and it may also be the only company that retains such a large self-operated service team. We have 260 official service personnel all over the country to ensure the quality of delivery, and will not easily let a third party do it.
Q9. Will the industry vertical dataset accumulated by Xiaoman in the previous ten years be a "barrier"?
Yang Yuan: This is experience, which can be accumulated by other companies in ten years, but it is difficult to accumulate scale effect and brand effect.