Business b2b ideas

Introduction What is bb?

B2B means organizing a business in any business. In b2b business, the main client is not an ordinary person, but an entire organization or firm.

A lot of b2b business ideas are known nowadays. These are mainly business ideas related to e-commerce, with any services and equipment provided to other organizations.

BB Objectives

In the b2b market system, it is very easy to sell any services, since it will not be difficult for organizations that have monthly turnovers of several million rubles to make scanty expenses in their expenses (in comparison with their expenses), necessary to pay for your services related to website promotion (for example, one thousand dollars).

In addition to promoting the websites of any organizations, you can also engage in consulting services for managers of organizations or simply engage in training staff to communicate with clients (this already depends directly on your experience and skills that you have).

Business idea for bb segment

So, let's look at one business idea, very simple and at the same time quite profitable, namely, how to open your own profitable business in your own city. No initial investment is needed at all. All you need here is to be able to communicate on the phone, and not just talk, but to be able to communicate with business people, something like business negotiations. Well, the second obligatory requirement from you is to have at least the simplest concepts of website promotion. You can learn about this from the Internet, where information is simply in bulk.

These are the most essential skills that will help you directly in the implementation of the described b2b business idea. But beyond that, you must also be willing to do it. If you don't have these skills, it doesn't matter. You only need one month to learn all this.

So, what is the essence of this business. First of all, you will need to get a list of all city enterprises in any way. Notice everyone, not just the biggest and most developed. Next, you should invite these organizations to offer your services to promote their sites to acquire new customers and significantly increase your income.

In cases where the organization does not have its own site, then you can offer the service to create a site for them with subsequent promotion.

Let's see it in practice now. Website promotion is not really difficult. To do this, you just need to write, for example, 25 articles per month to firmly fix in place. Of course, this is only a rough estimate of the articles to be written. This is only in the middle.

It's not for you to write articles by keywords. This can be assigned to a freelancer. Your task is only to make a list of the necessary articles that you give him. And already directly he will write a certain number of articles for you per day. And after checking, you will post them on the website of the organization with which you will have an agreement.

Business Development Director SAP Labs in the CIS

Almost every day, Vyacheslav Gershov, Business Development Director of SAP Labs in the CIS, communicates with young teams who dream of turning the boring corporate world upside down with their ingenious solutions. All of them sooner or later face difficulties and make standard mistakes that can be avoided by knowing the basics of work.

We will turn to the analysis of errors in the following materials, let's start with the base: who, why and for whom it is worth doing a B2B startup, and also why it is probably more difficult than you think.

Startups created by people from large companies often become successful in the B2B market. There is no secret here - they just understand market demands, know customers well, have the necessary contacts and competencies to communicate with business representatives. It is easier for them to open the necessary doors, they don’t rack their brains over the question “where to start”, they understand what needs to be done.

Who should be trying to do something for the B2B market? Often there are young teams with "burning eyes", confident that they are the ones who are doing something that will certainly come in handy, even if the conventional Google, even the Russian Post. I must say that a group of schoolchildren or students is unlikely to be able to create this something. With a probability of 99.99 ...%, they will not be able to break through.

In B2C, maybe they could. We are all consumers, and by understanding ourselves, we can understand at least people who are similar to us or similar to those people whom you know well. You can fill a niche based on personal understanding and intuition. But in order to do something in B2B, you need to understand both the business and the area in which you offer a solution, be it the industrial Internet of things, security systems, IT infrastructure or web design. Although, of course, in every business you need to see the end customer and his needs.

Let me give some basic advice to young teams that are at the idea or early stage of a startup in the field of business products.

Realistically assess your own competencies and capabilities, your connections, sales skills, contacts

If you look at the development of information technology over the past 40 years, you may get the illusion that progress is being driven by the notorious little startups from garages. But this is precisely an illusion. SAP is one example of the birth of an IT giant from a small startup. But “five friends from the institute gathered in the garage and sawed the ERP system out of the idea with a file” - this is not our story at all.

When we tell that five young engineers did not find support for their ideas among managers and colleagues at IBM and founded their own company, we must understand that these were not the last people in their field. They worked at IBM in specific directions, were immersed in a specific information environment, and solved the corresponding problems in their field. And it's not just that they were more advanced than others. To be successful, they needed to “move” a lot.

Complex solutions for the B2B market require special approaches. The idea of ​​how to sell a complex service using marketing tools is often formed by specialists and business owners based on case studies describing stories from B2C. And that's the problem. After all, when companies sell complex products or services with a long decision-making cycle, they often try to find magic pills on the shelves of the motivational marketing mass market.

But this idea is doomed to failure in advance: approaches to B2B and B2C marketing are radically different. With the wrong choice of tools, the consequences for sales and the business as a whole are disastrous. Selling services or products in B2B and B2C are two big differences.

What is BB Differences between BB and BC

B2B stands for business to business. That is, a company or its subdivision sells its product or service to other companies - corporate clients. Other companies can do their business with this product or service.

B2B typically refers to products and services that:

• is used as raw material;
• is used as a means of production, for example, equipment;
• is used in the production process, for example, software for supply logistics;
• is used for the needs of the company, for example, furniture, training programs, etc.;
• is used to promote or delegate part of the functions.

B2B differs from B2C:

• The needs of the target audience. When an ordinary customer buys a product or service for personal consumption, pleasure, benefit and other consumer properties become the key purchase factors. When a product or service is intended for a corporate client, then the purpose of the purchase or the solution of a business problem, or an increase in profit. The main difference between B2B and B2C is the need to focus on the needs of another business.
• Factors influencing the purchase decision. The specificity of B2B sales also includes the influence of many secondary factors on the purchase decision - the comfort of interaction with the supplier, friendly relations, compliance with the estimate, the ability to convey the need for these costs to the accounting department or bosses, and much more. A B2B consumer is more competent and discerning. For B2C selling, emotions are the main decision-making factor.
• The way of making a decision. Whereas in B2C a decision is made by one person based on attitude to the brand, personal conviction, confidence in quality and other emotions, in B2B things are more complicated. Often, the decision is made not by one person, but by several. They are based on what business problem the product solves, whether it will bring profit and whether there are alternative solutions.
• Communication method. For B2C sales, the main communication methods are massive, since the purchase amounts there are an order of magnitude lower, and there are more consumers. We are talking about social networks, blog, mailings, emails and, of course, calls. For B2B, things are a little different: there are fewer customers and higher contract amounts, so individual communication plays a key role. But before the stage of personal negotiations, the client needs to be prepared for the purchase. By the time of contact with the manager, he must know about the existence of your product, understand what problems he solves, how it is useful, the better than competitors. And for this you also need to use similar tools - landing page, website, blog, newsletter, social networks. You need to understand that in the case of B2B, these means are needed to inform about the product, but the final communication should take place directly with the manager.

Which products are complex and what are the specifics of selling them in BB?

Complex products are products that are difficult to sell. Namely:

There is an opinion that the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) and the Google Display Network (CMN) are not the best option for B2B advertising budgets. Why?

Targeting First

Targeting - choose who to show your ad to. For example, when choosing a program where a commercial will be broadcast, an advertiser targets his message to its viewers, implying that the topic of the TV show somehow characterizes the interests of viewers.

You can target by socio-demographic characteristics, by behavior, by interests, personal data or by search queries - all this today is allowed by Yandex advertising systems. Direct and Google AdWords.

By placing ads only in Yandex and Google search results, we often forget about the upper stages of the sales funnel, where demand has not yet been formed, thereby leaving competitors with the “first night's right” with the attention of our potential client. Advertising on Yandex and Google networks (on information sites, news portals, forums and blogs included in them) is a quick way to attract the attention of a huge audience to your product. The audience of YAN exceeds 70 million people, and 90% of Internet users see ads on the Google Display Network. At the same time, the competition for impressions is tens or even hundreds of times lower than on pages with search results.

It is difficult to single out your potential customers or partners among the audience of ad networks, but examples convince that with sufficient motivation, you can achieve success - to cut CTA in half and increase the conversion rate by 60%.

Bad advice

Tip: Refuse posting on networks

In B2B-related topics, YAN and Google Display Network are often not even considered as attraction channels. By completely disabling impressions in them, you cut off up to 70% of customers who are in the process of forming a need for your offer (there is discomfort, but there is still no understanding of how to get rid of it). Focusing only on those who are already looking for your product or brand in order to purchase it is expensive and logical only if everyone already knows about you (for example, you are a monopolist in the region).

Tip: Disable expensive search

If your campaign's goal is to raise brand awareness, networks are the best at doing it. However, the user's journey to conversion goes through the search for the best offer, and if your offer cannot be found, competitors will thank you for the formed buying decision.

Even if you are 100% confident in your SEO and rank first in organic search results for all major queries, it is not a fact that your potential buyer will get to your offer through two ad screens. The user must be very motivated to do so or have a bias towards advertisements.

Results of the year: goods and services for business

Biz360. u always remember his heroes. Summing up the business year, we contacted the founders of outstanding projects, which we wrote about earlier, in order to find out what was new in their lives. We have already summed up the results of the year for companies operating in the food market and in the eco-products industry. We found out how things are going with representatives of catering and projects related to tourism and recreation. We learned how the manufacturers of clothes, furniture and household goods feel. Tortured jewelry manufacturers and sports niche entrepreneurs. They asked those who make money from education. Next in line are companies whose business is to help others do business.

Pavel Belov, co-founder of GetinLine service, Novosibirsk

• Online registration and booking service Get In Line is a project of entrepreneurs Pavel Belov and Yegor Manturov. To automate the registration of customers, the owner of the establishment must place the widget on his website or in social networks. Every client who signs up through Get In Line receives a notification, and the history of his visits is displayed in the CRM system. In addition, the service keeps statistics on customers, employees, revenue, services, etc.

Investments in the project amounted to more than 5 million rubles. This year we reached the break-even point and made our first profit. We work by subscription, users pay for the tariff and additional functions, as for the phone - once a month.

Strategy. At the beginning of the year, the service was free, only a few options were on sale. In October, they launched a paid tariff plan, and in the free one they made a restriction on three services provided and five master executors. In the first month, revenue quadrupled. Seven options are available for a fee. The most popular are sms notifications and the ability to customize the widget: color change, additional fields, etc.

The service has changed a lot over the year. Most importantly, a new widget has appeared that can be individually configured for the goals of any business. We worked on it for a long time, measured conversion to post, analyzed people's behavior. It seems to me that even a grandmother can figure this widget - everything is intuitive.

In addition, we have completely prepared the service for entering foreign markets with more solvent customers and an average check of about $ 75. We have translated the entire service into English - landing page, knowledge bases, letters, SMS, etc. We connected payment aggregators, added the ability to accept dollars and bitcoins, set other prices - for example, SMS abroad are several times more expensive. We will start testing foreign markets from Scandinavia, USA, Australia. Last year we had our first clients from Europe - Russian-speaking users came first, word of mouth worked.

Little by little entrepreneurs accept the fact that the time has passed when it was possible to do business in notebooks and magazines

Difficulties. The most difficult task of 2021 was the search for the “flagship” target audience. We work with many areas in the service market, and it is not so easy to choose the most promising one. Let me give you an example: beauty salons pay a lot and often, but their average check is minimal, at the same time there are few paying photo studios or networkers (signing up for a team, for a consultation), but their checks make 30% of our revenue. No specific choice was made. We need more data on specific segments.

Lessons. If I started this business today, I would find another partner in the team, he would be responsible for sales and swim in this topic like a fish in water. Now the team does not have a person who is engaged in sales, and we share this area of ​​responsibility with a partner, although we understand that this is “not ours”. We have built a system that sells itself, without the participation of people. But in order to reach a new level, it is necessary to connect all effective sales methods. For example, phone calls, etc.

Promotion. The most effective promotion tool turned out to be advertising on Vkontakte. It is the cheapest, gives a good conversion and allows you to make a lot of taps with the user. With the help of parsers, we collect a database with our target audience, launch advertising with pay per impressions on them. We immediately find the right people and do not leave their eyes until they pay attention to our proposal. Yandex was not profitable for us. Irekt ”- they completely abandoned it.

Plans for 2021. For this year, we have planned an active expansion to new countries. Everything is ready, we need funds for a marketing campaign. Last year, we ourselves acted as investors for the project, having invested a little more than 4 million rubles. Attracting an outside investor remains in the plans.